(Darren Aronofsky, 2014)
This is the Old Testament by way of a 1970s Prog Rock double album. More post-apocalyptic than Before Christ, Aronofsky's vision is dark and emotional, visceral and soulful, his film occasionally engrossing, often silly, always interesting.
It tells the story of Noah from his childhood to the time when his sons are set upon repopulating the world, after the flood. The most compelling and resonant passages all come in the lead up to that cataclysm. Aronofsky paints a picture of a barren, ruined world, where Noah (Russell Crowe, one of the few leading men with the right presence for a biblical epic) and his small family struggle to survive in the wilderness, never eating meat, only taking what they need, avoiding the violent men from the industrial cities who are descendants of Cain. Then Noah has a vision from "the Creator" (the word God is never uttered in this film) of the world destroyed by water. He travels to see his ancient Grandfather Metuselah (Anthony Hopkins) for advice, and realises he must build an ark to protect all of the animals once the waters come.
In this he and his family (Jennifer Connolly as his wife, Logan Lerman as the sulky Ham, Emma Watson as the incest-avoiding Ila) will be aided by the Watchers, rock giants who were once Angels, now imprisoned inside their rocky forms. They need help and protection, for Warlord Tubal-Cain (Ray Winstone) and his forces are bent on entering and claiming the ark when the rains come.
All of this is involving, with some impressively epic imagery by Aronofsky and cinematographer Matthew Libatique, working well alongside Clint Mansell's magisterial, mighty score.
The flood, when it comes, is awesome, preceded by a big battle scene involving men and Watchers and...
Its just all such nonsense, more sword and sorcery than Bible in tone and visual design, and though there are many good things (Crowe remains a magnetic presence throughout, Iceland looks magnificent, there are some vivid and visceral textures) it rarely, for all its modern psychology, feels all that much more interesting than the Biblical epics of the 1950s. Oh, there is a "relevant"ecological theme, and Aronofsky pulls off one stunning scene (Noah recounts creation as Aronofsky somehow melds the theory of evolution with Christian orthodoxy) but once the film settles down in its third act to everybody on the Ark as Noah goes off his rocker because of what he's had to do and still may need to do, it loses most of what made it different and even slightly distinctive. Is there any profundity here, presumably Aronofsky's chief aim? It is too bombastic, too ambitious in conception - here are angels returning to heaven, here is the serpent in the garden, etc - to really allow for any consideration of profundity in the real world. The closest it comes are the moments when you can feel the influence of Terrence Malick most vividly, when Aronofsky doesn't seem bent beneath the weight of all that Bible he's bearing. It is still somewhat impressive, but then so were those 1970s Prog Rock albums...in their way.
Showing posts with label Russell Crowe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Russell Crowe. Show all posts
Tuesday, 8 April 2014
Saturday, 15 June 2013
MAN OF STEEL
(Zack Snyder, 2013)
I could make a solid argument that Alan Moore's Miracleman is the most influential Superhero story of the last 40 years or so. Every "revisionist" story that followed - including Moore's own Watchmen and Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns - was influenced by the approach Moore took in Miracleman, where he explores what it would be really like if an actual superhuman being existed in the real world. Moore is an intelligent writer, and he investigates this idea quite thoroughly in the series, especially the incredible final issue. But he is also a great writer of genre stories, and Miracleman includes Nazi scientists and alien races, and incredible battles between superheroes. This is perhaps the aspect of the series which has permeated the comics mainstream most in the decades since Moore wrote his stories in the 1980s. He creates one particular issue in which two beings with superstrength brawl in the streets of and skies above London. They punch each other through walls, as superheroes had been doing in the Marvel and DC universes for decades. But Moore thinks about the consequences. Here, they destroy half of the city. Thousands are killed as buildings crumble and concrete shatters. The story, while tremendously exciting, even exhilarating, is also sickening in the scale of its violence.
Watching the third act of Man of Steel, that Miracleman story was the first thing that came to mind.
Critics generally dislike superhero movies. The genre is seen, and not without reason, as catering to the lowest common denominator of summer audiences, following formulas and overusing cgi in pursuit of overly familiar story arcs and character stereotypes. Critics certainly don't take superhero movies seriously, and when a filmmaker does - like Christopher Nolan, in his Batman trilogy - he gets slammed for his presumption and ambition.
Well, Christopher Nolan produced Zack Snyder's Man of Steel, and it somewhat resembles his Batman films in its tone of brooding moral seriousness, and in the massive scale of its action. The aim here is to make a Superman film for a modern audience, which means losing some of the joy and wonder which are undeniably a part of the Superman mythos; this is Superman stripped of some of the apple pie sweetness crucial to the appeal of the classic reading of the character.
But then, as a character, Superman is great enough to withstand multiple readings and variations. Snyder and writer David Goyer - also familiar from Nolan's Batman films, and the Blade trilogy in addition - streamline and excise in order to find the character best suited to the tone they are working in. They also work extremely hard to avoid the problems that so many superhero films encounter - lets call it origin story syndrome. Oh, this is an origin story, but they get Clark into the red and blue outfit relatively early on, then follow a non-linear path through their story.
There are roughly three different sections. It starts off, as Richard Donner's Superman The Movie did, on Krypton, where Superman's biological father Jor-El (Russell Crowe) is desperate to get his newborn son Kal- El off the planet before it is destroyed. At the same time, General Zod (Michael Shannon) is organising a coup, and we see the clash of wills and philosophies between the two. Zod kills Jor-El and is imprisoned, but not before promising to find Kal El, escaped across the stars. Krypton is visualised as a prog rock sci-fi rock planet, studied with ornate metal skyscrapers, roamed by lizard creatures on foot and by wing, and both Crowe and Shannon do solid work in this section, the strength of which establishes Man of Steel as more of a science fiction film than a superhero one.
When it gets to earth, Snyder skips around. Borrowing some tone and imagery from Terrence Malick, we see Clark as a little boy in Kansas and as a lone drifter across North America as an adult, and the best scenes in the film are mostly in this section, many of them focusing on his relationship with the human parents who found and raised him, Jonathan and Martha Kent (Kevin Costner and Diane Lane). Costner is especially good here, those old Gary Cooper comparisons making sense again for the first time in years as he presents a father filled with fear for his son the God, and what his powers might mean for him as a person. What they mean for him as a child is pain; unable to handle the sensory overload created by x-ray vision and super-hearing, unable ever to use or even hint at his immense strength against the bullies who torment him, young Clark is a mess.
Henry Cavill does a good job with the adult version of that character, presenting him as conflicted about himself and his place in the world and yet as essentially good. He is the product of the Kents, utterly American; modest, serious, full of integrity. Cavill is brilliantly cast - Superman should have the sort of square-jawed but bland handsomeness he possesses, he should project strength but never seem all that interesting, he should carry a hint of melancholy at the immense burden his isolation forces him to bear. Cavill does all this, and he makes the emotional scenes work. We sympathise with his god, because his problems are so human.
Those problems arrive with the coming of Zod and his followers to Earth, ushering in the third - and worst - section of the film. Thats not to say it's bad, exactly. There are a few early thrills once Clark is in the familiar costume. The first time he flies and finds himself rocketing, whooping, above the earth.
The moment after his first battle with the Kryptonians when a squad of soldiers lower their guns in a sort of quiet awe. The way Snyder defiantly has him assume a Christ pose as he floats momentarily in space. But most of that final section is devoted to destruction. Snyder embraces post-9/11 disaster porn imagery with an enthusiasm that would embarrass Michael Bay. He does it very well, orchestrating some really impressive visuals and a few fun genre moments amidst all the numbing chaos. But it is hard to forget that while Superman is punching villains in the face - this film has more punching in it than most boxing films manage - thousands of innocents are probably dying as cities topple and explode around them. This is where Miracleman is relevant.
It also raises the issue of the essential characterisation of Superman. It is one thing to dispose of some of the mythology - and by the end, it is clear that that has only been tweaked - but another to change what is quintessential to how the character works. Superman helps others. He saves people. He does not kill, he does not let them die. That is an issue I can see troubling many fans of the character, and explanations about how this is a story of him as a rookie don't really suffice as an explanation.
It seems odd to criticise this film for having too much action when the worst thing about the Christopher Reeve Superman films is that they don't have enough - though they have not aged all that well in other ways - but it isn't the quantity of the action here, its the repetitive nature of much of it. Snyder makes some smart choices with the shooting. He mainly sticks to a single camera, keeps the editing quick and only lets it slip into incoherence to suggest the figures are moving too fast and hitting too hard for the human eye to follow. But he omits some of his better known stylistic tics like speed ramping and hyper slo-mo when they would have worked beautifully with this material, and the result is a movie that feels a little like he is trying to be somebody else; a little bit Christopher Nolan, a little Terrence Malick, a bit Michael Bay.
That is the thing with Snyder - he is one of those modern directors with such a confident, dazzling sense of his own talent that you do feel as if he could so almost anything. He gets so much so right - he textures scenes brilliantly, his pacing is faultless, and he has a painterly sense of colour and composition, all of it edited to within an inch of its life. Yet there is something frustratingly off about his sensibility, for me, something almost ineffable. It all seems entirely obvious, artificial, perhaps even soulless.
So Man of Steel ends as a massive cgi slugfest, and after that rather dazzling - and surprisingly emotionally effecting - first hour that comes as a bit of a disappointment. But it is still mostly satisfying, brilliantly made and nicely acted, and finds a way to make Superman work in the modern world. Credit for that must go to Snyder, Goyer and the cast, but also to Hans Zimmer, whose bombastic score is rousing enough that I never missed the singular genius of John Williams work for the character.
I could make a solid argument that Alan Moore's Miracleman is the most influential Superhero story of the last 40 years or so. Every "revisionist" story that followed - including Moore's own Watchmen and Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns - was influenced by the approach Moore took in Miracleman, where he explores what it would be really like if an actual superhuman being existed in the real world. Moore is an intelligent writer, and he investigates this idea quite thoroughly in the series, especially the incredible final issue. But he is also a great writer of genre stories, and Miracleman includes Nazi scientists and alien races, and incredible battles between superheroes. This is perhaps the aspect of the series which has permeated the comics mainstream most in the decades since Moore wrote his stories in the 1980s. He creates one particular issue in which two beings with superstrength brawl in the streets of and skies above London. They punch each other through walls, as superheroes had been doing in the Marvel and DC universes for decades. But Moore thinks about the consequences. Here, they destroy half of the city. Thousands are killed as buildings crumble and concrete shatters. The story, while tremendously exciting, even exhilarating, is also sickening in the scale of its violence.
Watching the third act of Man of Steel, that Miracleman story was the first thing that came to mind.
Critics generally dislike superhero movies. The genre is seen, and not without reason, as catering to the lowest common denominator of summer audiences, following formulas and overusing cgi in pursuit of overly familiar story arcs and character stereotypes. Critics certainly don't take superhero movies seriously, and when a filmmaker does - like Christopher Nolan, in his Batman trilogy - he gets slammed for his presumption and ambition.
Well, Christopher Nolan produced Zack Snyder's Man of Steel, and it somewhat resembles his Batman films in its tone of brooding moral seriousness, and in the massive scale of its action. The aim here is to make a Superman film for a modern audience, which means losing some of the joy and wonder which are undeniably a part of the Superman mythos; this is Superman stripped of some of the apple pie sweetness crucial to the appeal of the classic reading of the character.
But then, as a character, Superman is great enough to withstand multiple readings and variations. Snyder and writer David Goyer - also familiar from Nolan's Batman films, and the Blade trilogy in addition - streamline and excise in order to find the character best suited to the tone they are working in. They also work extremely hard to avoid the problems that so many superhero films encounter - lets call it origin story syndrome. Oh, this is an origin story, but they get Clark into the red and blue outfit relatively early on, then follow a non-linear path through their story.
There are roughly three different sections. It starts off, as Richard Donner's Superman The Movie did, on Krypton, where Superman's biological father Jor-El (Russell Crowe) is desperate to get his newborn son Kal- El off the planet before it is destroyed. At the same time, General Zod (Michael Shannon) is organising a coup, and we see the clash of wills and philosophies between the two. Zod kills Jor-El and is imprisoned, but not before promising to find Kal El, escaped across the stars. Krypton is visualised as a prog rock sci-fi rock planet, studied with ornate metal skyscrapers, roamed by lizard creatures on foot and by wing, and both Crowe and Shannon do solid work in this section, the strength of which establishes Man of Steel as more of a science fiction film than a superhero one.
When it gets to earth, Snyder skips around. Borrowing some tone and imagery from Terrence Malick, we see Clark as a little boy in Kansas and as a lone drifter across North America as an adult, and the best scenes in the film are mostly in this section, many of them focusing on his relationship with the human parents who found and raised him, Jonathan and Martha Kent (Kevin Costner and Diane Lane). Costner is especially good here, those old Gary Cooper comparisons making sense again for the first time in years as he presents a father filled with fear for his son the God, and what his powers might mean for him as a person. What they mean for him as a child is pain; unable to handle the sensory overload created by x-ray vision and super-hearing, unable ever to use or even hint at his immense strength against the bullies who torment him, young Clark is a mess.
Henry Cavill does a good job with the adult version of that character, presenting him as conflicted about himself and his place in the world and yet as essentially good. He is the product of the Kents, utterly American; modest, serious, full of integrity. Cavill is brilliantly cast - Superman should have the sort of square-jawed but bland handsomeness he possesses, he should project strength but never seem all that interesting, he should carry a hint of melancholy at the immense burden his isolation forces him to bear. Cavill does all this, and he makes the emotional scenes work. We sympathise with his god, because his problems are so human.
Those problems arrive with the coming of Zod and his followers to Earth, ushering in the third - and worst - section of the film. Thats not to say it's bad, exactly. There are a few early thrills once Clark is in the familiar costume. The first time he flies and finds himself rocketing, whooping, above the earth.
The moment after his first battle with the Kryptonians when a squad of soldiers lower their guns in a sort of quiet awe. The way Snyder defiantly has him assume a Christ pose as he floats momentarily in space. But most of that final section is devoted to destruction. Snyder embraces post-9/11 disaster porn imagery with an enthusiasm that would embarrass Michael Bay. He does it very well, orchestrating some really impressive visuals and a few fun genre moments amidst all the numbing chaos. But it is hard to forget that while Superman is punching villains in the face - this film has more punching in it than most boxing films manage - thousands of innocents are probably dying as cities topple and explode around them. This is where Miracleman is relevant.
It also raises the issue of the essential characterisation of Superman. It is one thing to dispose of some of the mythology - and by the end, it is clear that that has only been tweaked - but another to change what is quintessential to how the character works. Superman helps others. He saves people. He does not kill, he does not let them die. That is an issue I can see troubling many fans of the character, and explanations about how this is a story of him as a rookie don't really suffice as an explanation.
It seems odd to criticise this film for having too much action when the worst thing about the Christopher Reeve Superman films is that they don't have enough - though they have not aged all that well in other ways - but it isn't the quantity of the action here, its the repetitive nature of much of it. Snyder makes some smart choices with the shooting. He mainly sticks to a single camera, keeps the editing quick and only lets it slip into incoherence to suggest the figures are moving too fast and hitting too hard for the human eye to follow. But he omits some of his better known stylistic tics like speed ramping and hyper slo-mo when they would have worked beautifully with this material, and the result is a movie that feels a little like he is trying to be somebody else; a little bit Christopher Nolan, a little Terrence Malick, a bit Michael Bay.
That is the thing with Snyder - he is one of those modern directors with such a confident, dazzling sense of his own talent that you do feel as if he could so almost anything. He gets so much so right - he textures scenes brilliantly, his pacing is faultless, and he has a painterly sense of colour and composition, all of it edited to within an inch of its life. Yet there is something frustratingly off about his sensibility, for me, something almost ineffable. It all seems entirely obvious, artificial, perhaps even soulless.
So Man of Steel ends as a massive cgi slugfest, and after that rather dazzling - and surprisingly emotionally effecting - first hour that comes as a bit of a disappointment. But it is still mostly satisfying, brilliantly made and nicely acted, and finds a way to make Superman work in the modern world. Credit for that must go to Snyder, Goyer and the cast, but also to Hans Zimmer, whose bombastic score is rousing enough that I never missed the singular genius of John Williams work for the character.
Tuesday, 1 January 2013
ROBIN HOOD
(Ridley Scott, 2010)
While there is an unmistakeable whiff of something very much like contractual obligation about Robin Hood, that does not mean it is without its pleasures. It is that rare beast, a Summer Blockbuster aimed mostly at grown-ups. As such its extremely wordy - the machinations detailed in the opening act in order to set up the plot are nothing if not torturous, as Dukes plot with Kings who betray Barons and double-cross cousins against the backdrop of Anglo-French tension, political infighting and taxation disputes. All this happens while we are still getting to know the principals, Robin Longstride, a Northern Archer campaigning in France with King Richard the Lionheart (Danny Huston, tearing lumps of ham off with his bare hands) , and Marion Locksley (Cate Blanchett), an independent war widow who runs the lands owned by her infirm father-in-law (Max Von Sydow). They eventually meet after much complication, and finally Robin learns who he is and what his destiny must be. Strangely, considering its title, this is not really a "Robin Hood" film.
It ends just as Robin and his Merry (more bawdy, in this case) Men become outlaws, pursued by the Sheriff of Nottingham (an underused Matthew MacFadyen) and enemy to King John (Oscar Isaac, terrifically loathsome throughout) and living at one with nature in Sherwood Forest.
Before that it feels almost as if Scott and screenwriter Brian Helgeland had in mind a different story altogether, and decided to link it with the Robin Hood legend just because they could.
The Robin Hood film it most resembles is Robin and Marian, Richard Lester's superb 1976 elegy for youth, love and heroism lost. That comparison does this film no favours, but it does borrow some of the gritty textures and much of the material with Richard Lionheart in France. Bizarrely it yokes all that to a plot centred around the Magna carta, recasting Robin as a more outright freedom fighter than most narratives do, and throwing in a massive battle on a beach for its climax.
Despite being about 45 minutes too long, it just about works. Scott understands this sort of Epic filmmaking, and nobody visualises it quite like him - this is a film full of casually beautiful shots and sequences, and cinematographer John Mathieson does some staggering work. There are battles and banquets, hissable villains aplenty and dashing heroism, and an incredibly classy cast in even the smallest roles, from Mark Strong as the main villain to William Hurt as a sympathetic court advisor.
But this sort of thing really rests upon the leads; and Crowe and Blanchett make an extremely convincing and likeable couple. Crowe can do this sort of macho hero role in his sleep, and though his accent is all over the British Isles, he is one of the only movie stars we have who has true star quality and actual acting ability, and he combines them here. He and Blanchett - that rarity, a leading lady around his age - have significant chemistry, and she is just as powerful and commanding as he is.
Even when all the mayhem around them is clattering awkwardly along, an obviously impersonal corporate product and something of a mess from a director capable of so much more, the leads keep the focus intimate and real, and the film benefits massively from that.
While there is an unmistakeable whiff of something very much like contractual obligation about Robin Hood, that does not mean it is without its pleasures. It is that rare beast, a Summer Blockbuster aimed mostly at grown-ups. As such its extremely wordy - the machinations detailed in the opening act in order to set up the plot are nothing if not torturous, as Dukes plot with Kings who betray Barons and double-cross cousins against the backdrop of Anglo-French tension, political infighting and taxation disputes. All this happens while we are still getting to know the principals, Robin Longstride, a Northern Archer campaigning in France with King Richard the Lionheart (Danny Huston, tearing lumps of ham off with his bare hands) , and Marion Locksley (Cate Blanchett), an independent war widow who runs the lands owned by her infirm father-in-law (Max Von Sydow). They eventually meet after much complication, and finally Robin learns who he is and what his destiny must be. Strangely, considering its title, this is not really a "Robin Hood" film.
It ends just as Robin and his Merry (more bawdy, in this case) Men become outlaws, pursued by the Sheriff of Nottingham (an underused Matthew MacFadyen) and enemy to King John (Oscar Isaac, terrifically loathsome throughout) and living at one with nature in Sherwood Forest.
Before that it feels almost as if Scott and screenwriter Brian Helgeland had in mind a different story altogether, and decided to link it with the Robin Hood legend just because they could.
The Robin Hood film it most resembles is Robin and Marian, Richard Lester's superb 1976 elegy for youth, love and heroism lost. That comparison does this film no favours, but it does borrow some of the gritty textures and much of the material with Richard Lionheart in France. Bizarrely it yokes all that to a plot centred around the Magna carta, recasting Robin as a more outright freedom fighter than most narratives do, and throwing in a massive battle on a beach for its climax.
Despite being about 45 minutes too long, it just about works. Scott understands this sort of Epic filmmaking, and nobody visualises it quite like him - this is a film full of casually beautiful shots and sequences, and cinematographer John Mathieson does some staggering work. There are battles and banquets, hissable villains aplenty and dashing heroism, and an incredibly classy cast in even the smallest roles, from Mark Strong as the main villain to William Hurt as a sympathetic court advisor.
But this sort of thing really rests upon the leads; and Crowe and Blanchett make an extremely convincing and likeable couple. Crowe can do this sort of macho hero role in his sleep, and though his accent is all over the British Isles, he is one of the only movie stars we have who has true star quality and actual acting ability, and he combines them here. He and Blanchett - that rarity, a leading lady around his age - have significant chemistry, and she is just as powerful and commanding as he is.
Even when all the mayhem around them is clattering awkwardly along, an obviously impersonal corporate product and something of a mess from a director capable of so much more, the leads keep the focus intimate and real, and the film benefits massively from that.
Saturday, 21 May 2011
CINDERELLA MAN
(Ron Howard, 2005)
Ron Howard is less a bland filmmaker - a frequent accusation - and more an incredibly old-fashioned one. He seems like a stock contract director who worked for Fox in the 1950s across a variety of genres, turning out comedies and Westerns and thrillers, none of them brilliant, none of them terrible (setting aside the aberrative Dan Brown adaptations, which even Hitchcock couldn't have saved), none of them evincing much particular directorial personality or style. Hes a Pro, in other words. And Cinderella Man may be his most purely old-fashioned film, with its triumph of the spirit, its cookie-cutter three act structure, its mean villain and it's big stars in the leads. Based on the incredible story of Jim Braddock and his rise from poverty to World Champion during the Great Depression, it is incredibly manipulative and, dammit, it works. There are good things: Russell Crowe is convincing both as last-chance fighter and desperate family man, Paul Giamatti is brilliant - moving, hilarious - as his trainer, Salvatore Totino's cinematography is lovely, and the fight scenes steal from more or less every boxing film ever made to solid, occasionally stylish effect. Less impressive are the vague shapes towards poliical meaning the film throws, personified by Paddy Considine's ill-conceived Union agitator. Indeed the entire storyline involving Considine could be excised and the film would benefit. But it does what it intends to do nevertheless - by the climax, you want Crowe to win that fight, you need Crowe to win that fight. A vivid expression of the power of the sports movie and a handsome, well-crafted piece of old fashioned entertainment.
Ron Howard is less a bland filmmaker - a frequent accusation - and more an incredibly old-fashioned one. He seems like a stock contract director who worked for Fox in the 1950s across a variety of genres, turning out comedies and Westerns and thrillers, none of them brilliant, none of them terrible (setting aside the aberrative Dan Brown adaptations, which even Hitchcock couldn't have saved), none of them evincing much particular directorial personality or style. Hes a Pro, in other words. And Cinderella Man may be his most purely old-fashioned film, with its triumph of the spirit, its cookie-cutter three act structure, its mean villain and it's big stars in the leads. Based on the incredible story of Jim Braddock and his rise from poverty to World Champion during the Great Depression, it is incredibly manipulative and, dammit, it works. There are good things: Russell Crowe is convincing both as last-chance fighter and desperate family man, Paul Giamatti is brilliant - moving, hilarious - as his trainer, Salvatore Totino's cinematography is lovely, and the fight scenes steal from more or less every boxing film ever made to solid, occasionally stylish effect. Less impressive are the vague shapes towards poliical meaning the film throws, personified by Paddy Considine's ill-conceived Union agitator. Indeed the entire storyline involving Considine could be excised and the film would benefit. But it does what it intends to do nevertheless - by the climax, you want Crowe to win that fight, you need Crowe to win that fight. A vivid expression of the power of the sports movie and a handsome, well-crafted piece of old fashioned entertainment.
Monday, 14 February 2011
L.A. CONFIDENTIAL
(Curtis Hanson, 1997)
An object lesson in how to alter the narrative details of a complex literary source in order to preserve its feel and tone, Curtis Hanson's 1950s-set adaptation of James Ellroy's epic novel is one of the finest Hollywood films of the 1990s.
Grand and ambitious in every particular, from the multi-stranded plotting which thrillingly converges in the final reel, through the stately, classical shooting style and lush palette from cinematographer Dante Spinotti to the mix of noir brass and orchestral melodrama in Jerry Goldsmith's superb score, the film is chiefly an exceptional entertainment.
Its pacing is expertly marshalled by Hanson, leisurely in the early stages and then tightening around the plot turns until the last act, in which everything comes together and falls apart in an unhurried blur. The characters are true to Ellroy's iconic archetypes, partly down to Brian Helgeland's terrific script, which is stuffed with sharp lines and indelible moments of quietly telling observation, and partly to the casting. All three leads are perfect, but Russell Crowe first served notice here that he was a movie star, and he stands out as the brute with a heart an a brain, Bud White. Kevin Spacey delivers a quietly mournful faded golden boy with just a few key glances, while Guy Pearce's finds his characters journey to an understanding of justice in a series of minute calibrations of his jutting jaw and strained cheek muscles; he can't afford to relax, ever, until his climactic buddy movie bonding with Crowe frees him finally to laugh. Then there are the likes of Kim Basinger, David Strathairn and James Cromwell, vividly creating characters around the principals.
If the influence of Roman Polanski's Chinatown is obvious, then Hanson's film is much slighter thematically than that dark masterpiece, and far more optimistic in it's outlook, hard though it works to address political corruption and law enforcement. It carries too much of Ellroy's pulp attitude for any high seriousness to stick.
But Hanson comes up with some memorable scenes of his own, including a couple of excellent action scenes and one immortal moment, which Steven Spielberg stole only a few years later for Minority Report, and which anybody who has seen it will recall instantly at the mention of a name: Rolo Tommassi.
An object lesson in how to alter the narrative details of a complex literary source in order to preserve its feel and tone, Curtis Hanson's 1950s-set adaptation of James Ellroy's epic novel is one of the finest Hollywood films of the 1990s.
Grand and ambitious in every particular, from the multi-stranded plotting which thrillingly converges in the final reel, through the stately, classical shooting style and lush palette from cinematographer Dante Spinotti to the mix of noir brass and orchestral melodrama in Jerry Goldsmith's superb score, the film is chiefly an exceptional entertainment.
Its pacing is expertly marshalled by Hanson, leisurely in the early stages and then tightening around the plot turns until the last act, in which everything comes together and falls apart in an unhurried blur. The characters are true to Ellroy's iconic archetypes, partly down to Brian Helgeland's terrific script, which is stuffed with sharp lines and indelible moments of quietly telling observation, and partly to the casting. All three leads are perfect, but Russell Crowe first served notice here that he was a movie star, and he stands out as the brute with a heart an a brain, Bud White. Kevin Spacey delivers a quietly mournful faded golden boy with just a few key glances, while Guy Pearce's finds his characters journey to an understanding of justice in a series of minute calibrations of his jutting jaw and strained cheek muscles; he can't afford to relax, ever, until his climactic buddy movie bonding with Crowe frees him finally to laugh. Then there are the likes of Kim Basinger, David Strathairn and James Cromwell, vividly creating characters around the principals.
If the influence of Roman Polanski's Chinatown is obvious, then Hanson's film is much slighter thematically than that dark masterpiece, and far more optimistic in it's outlook, hard though it works to address political corruption and law enforcement. It carries too much of Ellroy's pulp attitude for any high seriousness to stick.
But Hanson comes up with some memorable scenes of his own, including a couple of excellent action scenes and one immortal moment, which Steven Spielberg stole only a few years later for Minority Report, and which anybody who has seen it will recall instantly at the mention of a name: Rolo Tommassi.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)