All posts by James Humphreys

The Director's Chair

The Director’s Chair – Martin Scorsese

When we think of the quintessential film director persona, a few faces certainly come to mind.  Usually it’s a larger than life individual who wields a strong commanding presence, with a touch of god-like will that strives to make everything on camera perfect.  While there are some directors that shy away from the spotlight, a few do step forward and not only give a face to the directing profession as a whole, but also become celebrities in their own right.  Cecil B. DeMille and Alfred Hitchcock were certainly the first of many film directors to become familiar faces to the average audience members, but their ability to put themselves forward also accomplished something even more than just extra publicity.  It made the director more accessible, and showed that this was a profession that was more than just work, but also a way of cementing authorship for the films they make.  The idea of the auteur filmmaker rose out of this time, and audiences began to take note that there was value in the collective works of each selective director and that it sparked interest in many wannabe filmmakers to follow in their footsteps.  But, even more important than the celebrity status that a film director achieves is what they choose to do with it.  Certainly most successful filmmakers today want to tell stories that have meaning and can inspire something in the viewer, but there are also a few that like to step back and view the medium of film-making as a whole and show the worth that it has in itself, and how it’s a gift that needs to be cultivated and preserved.  And certainly no filmmaker today has championed film history and preservation as passionately as Martin Scorsese.

Scorsese came out of an era of film-making that was decidedly separated from the Hollywood glitz and glamour of the past.  This was an era of rebel film-making, putting emphasis on darker story-lines and far less polished and grittier imagery.  Scorsese, who grew up in a impoverished immigrant community in Queens, New York, certainly brought the roughness of life on the streets with him as he began his film-making career, but he also brought with him a sense of the magical escapism that Hollywood also instilled into him, as he has been a lover of all cinema from childhood.  He was of a class of filmmakers during this time who had been reared up with cinema and were keenly aware of concept of auteurship in film-making.  That’s why today when you watch a Scorsese picture, even in some of the earlier ones, you see an assuredness of style that is un-mistakenly tied to the person that he is.  And it helps that he has a distinctive personality too.  The fast talking, hyperactive director is such a great ambassador of the film director profession, because he so perfectly articulates his process of film-making and convinces us the absolute power that cinema can have.  What I love best about Martin Scorsese is how he’s not just a great filmmaker, but also a champion of the art, casting the spotlight on cinema from all around the world that normally might fall through the cracks, and also advocating strongly for the preservation of cinematic treasures.  With his latest and very ambitious new film, Silence, about to be released nationwide, I thought it would be fitting to examine his body of work as a whole, and spotlight the things that define what makes up a Martin Scorsese picture.

1.

THE CRIMINAL UNDERWORLD

Scorsese has worked within a number of genres, but if there was ever one that made up the vast majority of his body of work, it would be the crime genre.  In many ways, the first thing you think about when you think of a Scorsese movie is that it has gangsters and mafioso in it.  Scorsese may not have set out to become the go to guy for crime thrillers, but it’s something that he has certainly embraced over the years.  And it’s easy to see why; he’s just so good at it.  Certainly being raised in Queens may have given him some insight into this world.  Though his family largely spared him from gang violence, it’s probably very likely that he had run across a few members of the mafia in his youth.  And this insight helps to give him a different perspective on the genre.  Instead of just portraying violence for it’s own sake in his gangster pictures, Scorsese looks deeper into the culture of organized crime, and shows it as this fascinating world of different personalities, some more extreme than others, who approach the American dream in their own way.  Indeed, it’s the characters that really define a Scorsese gangster picture.  Just look at all the character dynamics at play in Goodfellas (1990); with Ray Liotta’a even tempered Henry Hill clashing so vividly with Joe Pesci’s Tommy DeVito in the famous “do I look funny to you” scene; a role that won Pesci an Oscar.   Scorsese also looks at criminal behavior outside of the New York crime world of his youth and gave us an interesting history of the mafia in Vegas with Casino (1995), and also the sometimes too often blurred lines between the crime world and the law with his Oscar-winning The Departed (2006).  He also used his unique style to spotlight the blue collar crime world with The Wolf of Wall Street (2013).  But, the great thing about his mark on this genre is that he doesn’t resort to making them action movies.  He instead attempts to tell the story of American crime in our modern age, and vividly portray all the different characters that inhabit it.

2.

PERFORMANCES OF CHARACTER

Like the worlds that he portrays on screen, the other thing that Martin Scorsese meticulously cultivates in his films are the characters.  What particularly interests him however are characters that feel like they are fully part of the world he is creating; characters who live, breathe and completely exist in the story.  For these characters to work as well as they do, it means that Scorsese needs to have actors that he can have complete confidence in.  That’s why I think he’s a director that likes to work with the same set of actors over and over again.  You certainly see this in his crime films, which usually has the same character actors like Pesci or Frank Vincent playing the same kinds of roles, usually because they are so good at fitting that type of character.  But even outside of the crime genre, you see a love of Scorsese’s for actors who disappear into their role.  It’s something that I’m sure he valued in the two time he’s worked with the master of method acting, Daniel Day-Lewis, who starred in The Age of Innocence (1993) and Gangs of New York (2002) respectively.  But there are two actors in particular that have especially defined his films over the years, and have been his two muses as it were.  They of course are Robert DeNiro and Leonardo DiCaprio.  DeNiro was the face of Martin Scorsese’s early career, which focused more on the gritty underworld, with incredible raw performances as Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976) and as Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull (1980).  Both films in particular show the commitment to the role that DeNiro labored for, even to the point of transforming his physical appearance.  DiCaprio on the other hand is the perfect star for Scorsese’s newer era of more polished, matured era of film-making.  And in their work together, we see performance ranging from the reserved (Billy Costigan in The Departed), to the unhinged (Howard Hughes in The Aviator) to the completely bonkers (Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street) and all perfectly matched to Scorsese’s vision.  Keeping familial company with the same actors could become problematic for some filmmakers, but for Scorsese, it’s better to work with who you trust.

3.

THELMA SCHOONMAKER

Often times when you look at the closest collaborator that a director has, who’s the indispensable part of their team that makes the director’s style come through, it often comes down to either the writer or the cinematographer, because they shape the language and the look of any movie.  For Scorsese, his most essential collaborator has been his editor.  Mrs. Thelma Schoonmaker has edited nearly every single film that Scorsese has made, with Taxi Driver being the most notable exception.  Her influence can not be understated because her input into the movies is felt so strongly.  In particular, she is a master at with montage editing.  You see that in her work on Goodfellas and Casino, which have to convey time passage without losing the narrative flow.  The death montage from Goodfellas, which is set to the melody of Eric Clapton’s “Layla,” is a particularly great example of her work.  But her editing also provides some great insights into character, like the delirious moments of isolation seen in The Aviator (2004) or Shutter Island (2010), which perfectly underline the mental breakdowns of their protagonists.  She’s also a master of making the violence in the movies carry greater impact.  When a character dies in one of Scorsese’s movies, you feel the loss of life, because it often comes without warning.  It takes a keen eye for pacing to know when to shock an audience and when to hold off.  The shootings at the end of The Departed in particular are perfect illustrations of this, because Thelma does such a great job of making all the moments that come before the gunshots feel so relaxed.  Her slow motion stretching out of the boxing match in Raging Bull also carries that same impact, but in the opposite way.  That’s why every great Scorsese film is marked by the incredible work by Thelma Schoonmaker, who really stands as one of the greatest film editors of all time.  They complement each other perfectly and have been essential to bringing out the best in each other, as all the best film collaborators have done.

4.

 

CINEMATIC LITERACY

While not the first nor last filmmaker to emphasize the influence of cinema as a whole in his work, Scorsese nevertheless has been one of the most vocal in the field.  He has shown through both his movies and his advocacy that movies are his driving force.  He references other movies in his films all the time, either overtly or suddenly, and many times he will try to emulate another filmmaker’s style as a gesture to their impact on his own style.  I particularly noticed this after watching his new film Silence, which is thankfully playing early here where I live in Los Angeles.  The Japan set feature has many moments that feel very much inspired by the work of Akira Kurosawa, and it wouldn’t surprise me if that was intentional on Scorsese’s part.  He’s been a fan of Kurosawa’s work for many years and even got to act in one of the Japanese master’s last films (1990’s Dreams, where he played Vincent Van Gogh), so it’s not inconceivable that he looked to Kurosawa’s films for inspiration when making Silence.  There are other clever ways that Scorsese has worked his knowledge of film history into some of his own movies.  In The Aviator, there’s a subtle but noticeable trick he does with the cinematography that helps to convey the time period.  For the first hour or so of the film, the color is graded in a way to make it look like the two strip color processing of the early 1930’s, which made everything look awash in sick greens and tan-ish reds.  Only a student of film history, like myself, would notice the difference and I’m glad that he put in the effort to include it there.  Scorsese also made a film that more acutely spotlighted his passion for film in 2011’s Hugo, a surprisingly family-friendly effort for the director.  In Hugo, we see the growth of a young boy who discovers the magic of cinema and helps a long forgotten master of the art, Georges Melies, believe in himself again.  I have no doubt that Hugo was a personal statement for the director and it’s really encouraging to see him share that with a movie that can speak to audiences of all ages.

5.

 

RELIGION

If there is also another common theme that runs throughout his movies alongside violence and cinematic influences, it would be religion.  Scorsese himself has even stated, “My whole life has been movies and religion.  That’s it.  Nothing else.”  Naturally coming from an Italian immigrant family, the Catholic Church was a strong influence in his upbringing.  He even strongly considered joining the seminary to become a priest before a career in the cinematic arts came calling.  Even still, his Catholic faith remains a strong point of inspiration in his movies, sometimes focused on in surprising ways.  Though devout, Scorsese is not one to use his films to proselytize or preach.  Instead, he looks at religion from a very introspective angle, looking at the many good and negative things that faith brings to the world.  You see characters who deal with the conflicts of faith and real life in his crime movies like Mean Streets (1973) and The Departed (2006).  There are also films that very directly address man’s relationship with God in this world.  His first real statement on this was The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), which was widely panned by religious organizations because of it’s perceived flawed and too human portrayal of Jesus Christ, which is a misreading of the film’s intentions entirely.  He also examined faith of a different kind with Kundun (1997), a movie about the early life of the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism.  And his new film, Silence, also focuses on religion, this time telling the story of two Jesuit priests trying to spread the faith in a part of the world that might never be able to accept it.  In all of these, you see Scorsese finding meaning in the complicated notions of religion and presenting an interesting voice that represents his own level of faith; one that is aware of it’s limits and interested in reaching for a deeper understanding.   His religious themed movies have a better grasp on religion overall than most other faith based films, so that is something that alone makes him a god send in the film community.

Even in these latter years of his amazing career, Scorsese is still a filmmaker that takes chances, which is itself something remarkable.  Just looking at something like The Wolf of Wall Street, you would think that it’s a movie made by some up and coming energetic hotshot and not from a seasoned veteran.  But, at the age of 74 as of this writing, Scorsese is not only slowing down, he’s revving up.  The Wolf of Wall Street is a manic, full of life cinematic wonder that perfectly resembles the energy of the man himself and the way he tells a story.  And it’s this kind of personal drive that he’s brought into every film he makes.  Scorsese is the kind of filmmaker that makes film-making look like the greatest job in the world.  It’s his love for trying new things and for being unashamedly in love with the medium of film itself that opened the door for other voices like Quentin Tarantino and Edgar Wright, and a whole host of other self-reflexive filmmakers.  His passion for keeping the history of film preserved is something that has also earned him due praise and you can’t help but wonder what treasures we may have lost over the years had people like Scorsese not worked hard to save them.  In addition, his personality alone makes one want to keep up with his body of work and follow in his footsteps to making films themselves.  It just shows that if you want to make films that have a great sense of character to them, it helps to be a character yourself, at least one that everybody can end up loving in the end.  Whether he’s sharing his love for cinema, or showing the gritty reality of life in the criminal underworld, or giving a personal introspection into faith, Scorsese is without a doubt a master storyteller and one of the greatest filmmakers of our time or any time.

Editorials

It’s a Wonderful Life – 70 years of the Quintessential American Christmas Tale

On this Christmas Eve, many of you I’m sure are spending the holidays with loved ones, cherishing the warm feelings of Christmases of old.  Whether it’s the joys of opening gifts Christmas morining, or preparing the delicious Christmas dinners, or sharing the day with a loved one or a whole family, we all have our ideal Christmas experience that we want to relive each year.  For many like myself, the experience of the season is almost always tied with a love of cinema, and like so many years before, I am spending the holidays revisiting some of the classic standards of the season.  There are many Christmas movies out there that bring a different sensation out of me depending on what I’m looking for.  If I’m feeling nostalgic for Christmases of my childhood, I watch some of the Rankin Bass specials, or A Charlie Brown Christmas, or the original How the Grinch Stole Christmas.  If I’m looking for a good laugh, I watch National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989).  And if I’m looking for a mixture of both nostalgia and laughs, I put on Home Alone (1990).  There really is an endless supply of Christmas movies to appeal to any mood we have during the holidays.  But, while Christmas is a time filled with great joy, it can also be a time when we tend to reflect too much on the things wrong in the world.  And for a troubled year like 2016, when it looked as if the whole world was falling apart around us, silly things like Christmas movies just don’t seem to do enough to raise up our spirits again.  And yet, Christmas films also have the special ability to inspire, and make us see through the glitz and commercialism of the season to what Christmas is really all about in the end; hope.  And there has never been a Christmas movie that illustrated that better than Frank Capra’s masterpiece, It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

It’s amazing to think that It’s a Wonderful Life is celebrating it’s 70th Anniversary this year.  Even more amazing is the fact that it was once considered one of Hollywood’s biggest failures.  Now, we can’t even imagine a world without it in our lives.  It plays every year on television, it’s a highly influential movie that is referenced constantly and not just at Christmas time, and it is frequently held up as one of the greatest movies ever made.  The American Film Institute even placed it as high as #11 on their list of the Top 100.  But, it was a long road for this little film to become the classic that it is today.  In many ways, what turned it into a classic was the changing shift in our modern culture.  It’s a Wonderful Life told the story of a changing nation, where the America of old was being pulled towards a new identity, where life’s answers were no longer going to be so easily explained through the magic of cinema.  And yet, at the same time, It’s a Wonderful Life unashamedly delivers on all the same traditional Hollywood tricks to deliver a message that is considerably more modern.  And that message is specifically intended to say “you mean a lot to this world.”  You have to remember, 1946 was America’s first year out of a World War.  Soldiers who had been abroad for many Christmases were now asked to return to a sense of normalcy during the holidays that I think some of them thought would never come again.  It was an uncertain time for many Americans, and It’s a Wonderful Life spoke to that period.  I think that is why the movie has endured all these years; because it speaks to the worries of all Americans during times of uncertainty, renews their belief in the hope of the holiday season, and shows that through celebration and charity, the best of humanity can endure.

The wartime atmosphere had a lot to do with the making of this movie too.  In particular, it shaped what would become the quintessential American hero of George Bailey, who is brought to life in a career-defining performance by the incomparable Jimmy Stewart.  George Bailey is a man so driven by his kindness to others, but none of that same kindness is ever redirected his way.  Bad luck seems to follow him wherever he goes, and yet he never lets hardship turn him bitter.  It’s that basic sense of giving up oneself that defines him, and yet the movie has us believe that such men are unjustly punished by the world.  When he saves his brother from drowning in a frozen river, it causes hearing loss in one of his ears.  He finds the ideal woman to become his wife (played wonderfully by Donna Reed), and yet doesn’t have the means to give her everything she deserves.  He saves his hometown from financial ruin, but does so by sacrificing his nestegg for a vacation that he’s always wanted to take.  By being so nice, he has created a self-imposed prison.  It’s not the kind of narrative that you would expect for such a heroic character, but that’s what Capra and Stewart were trying to show us in the end.  We as a society tend to undervalue the kindness of the average individual and in many cases we only recognize their value once it is too late.  By the third act of this movie, George Bailey himself feels there is nothing he can do to set things right, and only taking his life will bring some sort of release from the pressure that’s on him.  That’s when the the Hollywood magic of a deus ex machina comes into the story, pulling him out of his despair, with the visit of an angel named Clarence (played by Henry Travers).  What follows is a considerably different tale than before, but it’s also what makes this movie the holiday classic that it is.

For a lot of postwar Americans, this movie must have been a bitter pill to swallow, with George continually losing out to others and driven so close to suicide.  The supernatural element of an angel coming to his rescue and showing him an alternate reality where he was never born, thereby showing his worth, must have seemed pretty naive as well.  And yet, this is exactly what ended up speaking to an entire new generation soon after.  We don’t see the value of the good works that we do in other peoples lives, but they do, and that goodwill manifests itself in the love they extend out to us in return.  We, like George Bailey, may think that what we do is foolish and unrewarding in the moment, but a lifetime of kindness gives us the right kind of rewards in the end, and that’s the distinction of being honorable.  That’s why this works so well as a holiday film, because it reminds us of the benefits of goodwill towards others.  In the years since it’s release, people have looked at the concluding act of this movie as a plea for generosity in our society, as many people who make our lives better often go unrewarded.  In the wake of World War II, a few American veterans were unsure if all their sacrifices were worth it in the end.  Sure there was peace, but they were returning home to families that they no longer recognized and with scars both physical and mental that would never heal.  But, in the years since, they would learn that George Bailey had more in common with them than they realized and that the message of generosity was not meant for them, but for everyone else.  It’s a Wonderful Life was a movie meant to make a changed American society remember that it is indeed virtuous to reward sacrifice for the greater good, especially during the holidays.

Is the movie a tad too sentimental at times; of course.  But, using the traditional Hollywood routines of old actually helps the narrative out a great bit.  George Bailey may seem like the quintessential Hollywood hero, but what we realize after watching the movie is that he’s not the typical Hollywood character at all.  He is a man on the periphery of society; the everyman whose small contributions make a little difference but more commonly go unnoticed.  He’s a community hero whose influence and recognition will probably never be recognized outside of the city limits of his hometown.  The ones who do gain national recognition tend to be the ones who make big, sweeping gestures that often come at the cost of disenfranchising people like George Bailey.  And that type of character is personified vividly in the form of Mr. Potter (played to perfection by the legendary Lionel Barrymore).  In It’s a Wonderful Life, George’s struggles often come as a result of Mr. Potter’s manipulations, as the shrewd old businessman is trying to force his will on the town of Bedford Falls as a whole.  Mr. Potter in this sense is a quintessential Hollywood baddie, but also one that is sadly all too recognizable in American society.  We see too many of his type in the world of business, in public discourse, and unfortunately far too often in the realm of politics (this election year clearly illustrating that point).  That’s what makes the story of George Bailey such a potent one for audiences, because it is the typical Hollywood underdog story, but given to the ordinary American servant doing what’s best for his community.  It’s a movie that inspires as much as it comforts, and reminds us that one of the important things to remember in life is to not let the Mr. Potters of the world make us feel worthless.

The common man struggle was always a favorite motif for director Frank Capra.  You can see it throughout his work in the 1930’s, especially with his Oscar-winning Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and You Can’t Take it With You (1938).  But in all his earlier films, it was always the underdog that had a clear sense of purpose in life, and who set out to change the minds of others.  It’s a Wonderful Life flips that narrative around and shows us that the underdog can sometimes be the one who’s lost and is in need of a new direction.  Capra understood the mind of a wayward soul because both he and Jimmy Stewart served in the war, and no doubt had come across many George Baileys during that time who probably had lost all faith in themselves and humanity.  Capra intended this to be a movie that spoke for those broken men, and show everyone else that more than ever before, this was the time to reach out to them.  That message may not have been received right away, and it’s probably only because of the fact that movies at the time were still dismissed as lighthearted fluff.  But, thanks to television, which sought to fill airtime during the holiday season with anything that fit the theme, this movie found new life and it spoke to an entire new generation that finally could understand the pain that so many of their elders were going through.  It’s because of this movie that a tradition of charity prospers during the holiday season.  It’s great to receive during the holidays, but it’s even more rewarding to make one poor person feel like the “richest man in town” just for one day, and help them realize that they matter.  Could such a tradition exist without this movie?  Absolutely, but It’s a Wonderful Life made such an outpouring of charity feel magical and it gave us an ideal to live up to for every holiday season.

On top of everything else, the movie just makes the holiday season feel even brighter.  The interesting thing about the movie is that very little of it actually takes place during the holidays.  It’s only once we get to the dire third act of the movie that a theme of Christmas begins to take center stage.  In many ways, the movie takes inspiration from Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol, which also focused on a man’s redemption through the intervention of heavenly spirits on Christmas Eve.  It’s a comparison that’s not unusual, because both Dickens and Capra were deeply humanist artists, usually casting their spotlights on the average forgotten citizen.  But, unlike Dickens, the story renews a man’s faith in himself, instead of showing him the error of his ways.  George Bailey’s fault is his own low self esteem, and thinking that he’d be better off dead.  As we learn from this movie, loneliness is the worst mood to have during the holidays.  Loneliness turns good men bitter, and seeing the eternally optimistic George fall into a void of isolation becomes the story’s most tragic element. As the final act proves to us, George’s sense of duty and honor closed him off and that all he needed to do was to not be ashamed to ask for a little help in return.  Wishing to never be born  and seeing the consequences of that illustrates to him that every good deed he makes reciprocates in the love and well-being of those around him, creating an atmosphere of normalcy that may not be apparent right away.  Seeing all of this, he becomes thankful for the greatest gift of all; life.  It’s that joy of understanding that every day of life is precious and that being a good person matters that makes George’s redemption so memorable.  Joyfulness for what we have in life is one of the great pleasures of this holiday season, and I don’t think there has ever been a better illustration of joy put on film than George Bailey running through the snow covered streets of Bedford Falls yelling, “Merry Christmas.”

It’s really hard to believe that a movie that was a box office failure in it’s time, and responsible for bankrupting the company that made it as well as halting the once prosperous career of it’s director, is today celebrating it’s 70th Anniversary as one of the most popular American films ever made.  Virtually every person in America has seen it, and that’s partly due to it’s inescapable presence on television during the holiday season.  But, despite it’s widespread exposure, audiences still adore it and hold it up as probably the greatest Christmas movie ever made.  I think that’s largely due to the universal themes within it.  It is a uniquely American tale, about a common man who through hard work and good deeds achieves some semblance of the American dream, and becomes an essential part of his community.  At the same time, the message of the movie speaks to all of us no matter where we come from.  It teaches us that charity is a fundamental tradition for the holiday season and that we should all help those in need feel welcome and appreciated, not just at Christmas time, but year round as well.  It also teaches us that giving back and being grateful are essential feelings to share with others during the holidays.  In a time right now when we as a country and as a world feel so helplessly fractured, the message of this movie becomes all the more timely.  I hope that It’s a Wonderful Life continues to live on for many more generations, because the happiness that is felt by George Bailey at the end of the movie should be one that is shared with every human being from this Christmas on.  So, please make another person feel special, give assistance and kind acknowledgement to a complete stranger, show unexpected kindness towards an enemy, and enjoy the festivities like they mean everything in the world to you, and your holidays will feel all the more worthwhile and life-fulfilling.  And maybe, even in these turbulent times, we can help a million angels earn their wings.

Movie Reviews

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story – Review

A year ago, the whole world was deeply anticipating the long awaited return of the Star Wars franchise to the big screen with the release of the seventh film in the saga; The Force Awakens.  This was the first film in a new era for the series; unencumbered by it’s complete control under it’s creator George Lucas.  With the Disney company taking the reins, the Star Wars series was ready for the change it desperately needed.  And that change came in record-shattering fashion with The Force Awakens.  Though the story behind it wasn’t as fresh as people liked (basically it was a rehash of A New Hope for most people), the spirit behind it felt authentic, and it pleased a whole legion of fans young and old.  I for one included it on my best of the year list for 2015, more than anything just for the sheer entertainment value.  And while continuing the main saga of the Star Wars franchise is a pleasing mission to see realized in cinemas today, what Disney also had planned for this property actually is the thing that gives me the most excitement about the future.  What we are going to see from Disney and Star Wars is an endless series of standalone features dedicated to expanding the storyline outside of the main saga.  In other words, the sky is the limit to what can be turned into a feature with the Star Wars universe as it’s backdrop.  Primarily, we will be seeing backstories fleshed out, explore subplots in full length treatments, and experience other worlds that had until now been unseen.  Already Disney has been gearing up an origin story for one of Star Wars most beloved heroes, Hans Solo, which should be in theaters in 2018.  There are also standalone features rumored to feature Boba Fett and Obi-wan Kenobi in the near future.  But, this ambitious plan for an expanded universe must have a solid beginning, and this year, we have that foundation set by the first ever Star Wars Story; Rogue One.

The idea to make this the first in the expanded universe tales seems like a sound one.  It’s taking a subplot from the original trilogy, about the Rebel spies who stole the Death Star plans from the Empire, and finally showing us how it was done and by whom.  If there is one thing that the Star Wars universe hasn’t devoted a lot of time to, it would be the lives and trial of the many people who make up the resistance.  Oh sure, we know about Leia and Han and of course Luke Skywalker, but what about all those nameless heroes who fight alongside them.  Rogue One finally lets us hear their story and learn about the sacrifices and hardships they face in the shadow of the evil Galactic Empire.  The movie also gives us another interesting side story to explore which is the creation of the ultimate weapon; the dreaded Death Star.  The Death Star of course is one of the most iconic pieces of the Star Wars universe, so seeing it again brought to life on the big screen is another thing that I’m sure will please fans.  Also, and more importantly, this movie’s strong sense of nostalgia is going to make it appealing to fans.  It takes place in the same time period as the original trilogy, and borrow strongly from that era’s visual aesthetic.  Because of that, many are hoping that this will be the first true Star Wars movie since the originals, and not the glossy retread that was The Force Awakens, or the garishly over-produced betrayals that were the prequels.  But, straying into the open world of an expanded universe can have it’s own troubling consequences if the stories are not strong enough to support the legacy behind them.  So, does Rogue One fall short of it’s astounding pedigree, or is it a hopeful indicator of the great things to come in the Star Wars universe.

Rogue One’s narrative begins in-between Episodes III and IV of the main saga; Revenge of the Sith (2005) and A New Hope (1977) to be specific.  In fact, it leads right up to the beginning of IV, in a very effective way.  The story introduces us to Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), the daughter of a leading engineer for the Imperial Forces named Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen), who as we learn is the chief architect of the Death Star.  Jyn has spent years living as an outlaw trying to reconnect with her father and her misdeeds against both the Empire and the Resistence forces eventually gets her caught by a band of rebels led by Captain Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and his re-programmed Imperial droid K-2SO (Alan Tudyk).  They bring her before the Resistence leaders, including Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) and Senator Bail Organa (Jimmy Smits), who enlist her to help them retrieve a message from an Imperial pilot (Riz Ahmed) who had just defected and is in the custody of a rogue Rebel warlord named Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker); a former acquaintance of Jyn’s.  They find Saw’s base on the Imperial occupied planet of Jedah, a once holy center for the Jedi Order.  There they encounter Imperial Stormtroopers all around, but are assisted by two resourceful rogue warriors; the sharpshooting Baze Malbus (Wen Jiang) and the blind daredevil monk Chirrut Imwe (Donnie Yen).  But, while this small band tries their best to discreetly complete their mission, final preparations are being made on the Death Star, with it’s overseeing Commading Director Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) eager to test out it’s planet destroying power.  Krennic’s ambitions drive him to even more drastic methods than many of the other Imperial commanders; which makes him especially threatening to the Rebels, and a nuisance to some of his superiors in the Imperial force including Grand Moff Tarkin (Guy Henry) and Darth Vader himself (voiced again by James Earl Jones).

As you can tell, this is a heavily packed film with quite a lot of characters and plot threads.  In fact, it may be the most ensemble heavy Star Wars film we’ve ever seen.  So, is that a good thing or a bad thing?  How does this stack up against the other Star Wars.  Well, judging this movie is challenging, mainly because it is part of this legendary legacy.  The Star Wars grading curve is a peculiar one, mainly because the high points of the series are almost insurmountable, and we all know by watching the prequels how low the series can get as well.  My rating of the movie is like this; if it weren’t for the fact that this was another Star Wars movie, I would say that Rogue One is one of the greatest sci-fi adventure movies ever made.  But, because it is a Star Wars , it inevitably has to be judged with the other movies in the series, and that unfortunately brings an unfortunate burden on the film as a whole.  It doesn’t quite have the same kind of flawless spirit that Star Wars  had at it’s height with A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back  (1980), or even the nostalgic heart that elevated The Force Awakens, but at the same time it is still an enormously enjoyable adventure in it’s own right.  The best way to judge this movie is to look at it as a war film instead as a part the Star Wars narrative, and in that regard, it is an exceptional piece of work.  The movie does an excellent job of giving a face to the Rebellion fighters, showing them as more than just screen filler standing around the franchises’ main stars.  They are all vulnerable beings fighting for something they believe in and are willing to accept the cost of even their lives.  There are no Jedis in this movie and only one character wields a lightsaber late in the film (in a truly spectacular moment).  This is instead a battle fought through wits, determination, and blasters and in a way that’s the refreshing thing about this movie that sets it apart from it’s predecessors.

If the film has a major flaw in it, it would probably be with the characters.   None of the cast of characters in this movie are terrible per say, it’s just that very few of them are memorable.  This is one thing that made The Force Awakens a better film; it endeared us to the new characters of Rey and Finn and Kylo Ren with a lot more focus than there was on the story.  Here, characterizations are minimal, mainly because there is so little time to fit all of them in.  The one’s who suffer the most are the two leads; Jyn and Cassian.  The actors playing them do a fine job, but the characters are so underdeveloped that they come off as a little boring.  Jyn in particular is the biggest disappointment as a character, especially considering Star Wars history with strong heroines from Princess Leia to Rey.  The supporting players fare a little better.  I particularly liked the droid K-2SO.  He’s got all the resourcefulness of C-3PO, but with none of the cowardice, and he’s even got a sly sense of humor as well.  Some other great characters are Baze and Chirrut, the two exiled guards of a Jedi temple.  Chirrut is the one character in the movie that mentions the concept of the Force, and he in turn becomes the movie’s spiritual center.  It’s especially fun to see Donnie Yen’s martial arts skills put to good work with the character, especially knowing that the character is also supposed to be blind.  And Jiang’s Baze is just a great bad ass with a really big gun.  I also want to spotlight Ben Mendelsohn as the villain Krennic.  What could have easily turned into a whiny, unlikable villain instead becomes a richly textured character through Mendelsohn intimidating performance.  He even holds his own in scenes with Darth Vader, which is no easy task.

But while the cast of characters is a mixed bag, the visual presentation is beyond exceptional.  This is a spectacular looking film.  The epic scale is on par with Star Wars at it’s very best, and maybe even a little more.  Thankfully Disney and Director Gareth Edwards did not treat this side story any less important than the films in the main Star Wars saga.  In fact, the scale of production feels even greater here than it did in The Force Awakens.  In this movie, we are treated to incredible locals that we’ve surprisingly have yet to see in a Star Wars flick.  A tropical beach becomes a battleground for example, complete with all the classic Star Wars machinery that we’ve come to love over the years, including the mighty Imperial Walkers.  But, the visual give a lot more to the story than to show off, which is something that plagued most of the prequels.  I also commend the filmmakers for trying their hardest to recreate the texture and feel of classic Star Wars.  The movie has a definite lived in feel like the original films, with all the dirt and crime intact.  Some locals from the original trilogy even make a return appearance like the Yavin 4 moonbase of the Rebellion and of course the Death Star itself.  Speaking of the Death Star, this movie allows us to experience something that even the original trilogy was never able to show before, and that’s the true destructive force of it’s power.  In the original Star Wars, we saw the destruction of Alderaan from a wide shot, mainly because that was the only way 1970’s visual effects could portray a planet’s destruction on screen.  Here, we see the Death Star’s power demonstrated from the surface of the planet itself, and it is chilling.  I don’t think we’ve ever seen this kind of apocalyptic imagery shown in a Star Wars film before, and it really helps to elevate the true menace of the Death Star more than ever.

And that’s another thing that I like about this movie is that it does a great job of adding more lore to the Star Wars universe as a whole.  It actually helps to fill in some of the gaps in the overall Star Wars narrative and set things in motion in a very effective way.  Some of the classic characters are also used very well, although there is one distracting element about them that I have to point out.  Some characters who have aged too much over the years or whose actors have deceased since the original film’s release are digitally recreated in a very distracting way.  The CGI used for their faces are not the worst that I’ve seen, but it still falls into that uncanny valley where it just doesn’t look right and it takes you right out of the movie every time it happens.  Think of the de-aging effects they used on Jeff Bridges in Tron Legacy (2010), and you’ll get the idea.  It might of been better if they used make-up effects to do the same thing, or even cast someone who looks exactly like the original, like what they did for the character Mon Mothma.  Darth Vader fares much better as a revitalized character in this film.  He’s not in the movie a whole lot, but the few moments he has are spectacular.  You really get the sense of how much he was neutered as a character in the prequels, and this movie finally allows him to be the frightening force of nature that the original trilogy had made him to be.  Also, hearing James Earl Jones voice once again with the character is a true delight.  It all helps to make this film feel like it rightfully stands with the main saga, and best of all, by filling in the gaps in the story, it actually enhances the original film itself.

So, Rogue One may not live up to the stellar heights of the series at it’s very best, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not a lot of fun to watch either.  What it lacks in characterizations it makes up for with thrilling action.  Some of the action moments here are among the best that I’ve seen in the series as a whole, including the final battle at the end which may even exceed the dogfight in space from Return of the Jedi (1983).  I commend this movie for it’s sense of scale, and for not pulling any punches either.  This is a dark and sometimes brutal film, and it really gives you a sense of the amount of sacrifice that the Rebels in the Star Wars universe go through in order to stop the Empire.  I think that this is the movie’s greatest contribution to the Star Wars lore; that it gives a face to the faceless rebels that we’ve only seen on the periphery of the main saga before.  These are not special people with special powers; they are merely survivors fighting against the odds and with only their skills and wits to help see them through.  That in itself makes Rogue One a triumph.  It may be rough around the edges and lacks the steady entertainment factor that elevated The Force Awakens, but it still is one hell of a ride, and it especially gives us a lot to look forward to in the future for this series.  Indeed, I’m happy this movie works as well as it does, because it shows us that any story outside of the main saga can hold it’s own on the big screen.  It makes me eager to see the planned Han Solo origin story, and especially excited to watch next year’s continuation of the saga with Episode VIII.   As for now, the force is still strong with Rogue One and it’s absolutely worth the journey to that galaxy far, far away once again for all audiences.

Rating: 8.5/10

Editorials

Past, Present, and Future – An Evolution of Christmas in Cinema

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As the days get shorter and the nights get colder, we all know that the most festive time of year is upon us.  The Holiday season can mean many things to different people, but essentially it’s a time of the year about reflection of the things that matter most to us, and how we hope to make the new year a better one than before.  Several celebrations make up this season from all cultural backgrounds, but the one that certainly defines the winter season most of all is Christmas.  Christmas truly has become the universal holiday marking the ending of each year, as it’s iconography and influence is found the whole world over.  In many ways, it has moved beyond it’s traditional Christian origin to become something more homogenized and inclusive of other cultural influences.  Though not celebrated by everyone, it nevertheless is a part of everyone’s holiday experience.  After all, why do people busy themselves with holiday shopping or attend Christmas themed parties even though it’s not a holiday that’s a part of their select religion or background. That’s because we as a culture have made Christmas a holiday about community rather than a religious institution, and whether it’s your co-workers or your acquaintances or a certain loved one involved, everyone becomes involved in the celebration.  And one of the things that has helped to turn Christmas into a communal holiday over the years is the influence of cinema.  Christmas has become a popular point of interest for filmmakers, because how we spend the holidays reveals so much about us as a culture, and likewise, movies also have a lasting effect on the same culture that helps to shape how we view the holiday season.

It’s interesting to look at the ever changing image we have of the Christmas season, and how so much of it comes from the movies we watch.  How many of you out there are able to pinpoint exactly what your favorite holiday film is within an instant?  Or how about the many times you’ve tried to make your holiday plans feel closer to what you’ve seen in the movies?  There are many non-Christians in our society today who don’t wake up on Christmas morning ready to open up presents under a tree, but will still spend the entire day watching A Christmas Story (1983), or It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), or even Elf (2003) just to feel some of the seasonal spirit.  Thankfully our culture accommodates for other cultural influences during this time too; I hear the “Dreidel Song” included in a lot more Holiday playlists nowadays.  But, the best thing about a tradition of Holiday themed films is that like all other movies, the main goal is have them appeal to all audiences.  There is universal appeal in all the best loved Holiday movies.  They make us laugh, cry, and more importantly, fill us with the hope that defines this time of year.  But, what is also interesting is that as our culture has changed, so have our Christmas movies.  The values espoused in some of the older Christmas movies aren’t the same as those of today, and it tells us a lot about how our own values have changed, even when the institutional foundation of the holiday has remained the same.   It more has to do with how the traditions are looked at from every proceeding decade, and how the definition of a Christmas movie has evolved.  Sometimes a movie will delve deep into the nostalgia of the holiday to remind us about tradition, while others will deconstruct it to reveal more about the world around us outside of the iconography of the season.  There is a lot that we can learn from examining the sub genre of Christmas movies as a whole, because all together it reveals a culture that is in constant change.

A lot of our foundation for what the Christmas season is all about comes from the earliest representations of the holiday in cinema.  Just like how Coca-Cola’s marketing was responsible for crafting the modern image of Santa Claus for our culture (with the white fur trimmed red coat ensemble and the rosy-cheeked jolly smile through his furry white beard), Christmas movies in the early days of cinema crafted the modern ideals of how the holiday should be celebrated.  In movies like Christmas in Connecticut (1945), Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), The Bishop’s Wife (1947), and Holiday Inn (1942), we see an influence of Hollywood glitz and glamour presenting to us the idea of a perfect Christmas.  During this time, Christmas celebrations moved away from the deep spiritual reflection that it once had been, and instead presented to us an image of how the every-man celebrates the holiday; with family, friends and even perfect strangers coming together to feast and play.  The sense of Christmas being a communal festivity is strongly felt in these earlier films.  It also perpetuated the ideal of a white Christmas, with the stark winter weather providing a nice counterpoint to warmth of a Christmas gathering.  It’s also no surprise that the Hollywood movie machine also provided us with many of the most beloved holiday standards that are now a part of every Christmas playlist.  Songs like Meet Me in St. Louis’ “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” and Holiday Inn’s “White Christmas” are as synonymous with the holiday today as Santa Claus.  But, the reason why these movies resonate as much as they do is because of the time they were created.  In the 30’s and 40’s, America was pulling itself out of a Depression and were about to delve into a World War, so for most people, Christmas could only be ideally seen within the movies.  Our holiday foundations are found deeply in this era of escapist entertainment, but despite how naive they might seem today, they are still the ideals we hold dear to our hearts and still aspire to.

The post-war years however changed the idea of what a Christmas movie could be and it shows us the first sign of how a holiday film can very clearly reflect the changes in our culture over time.  America post-war was very different than it had been before and even during the conflict.  Many soldiers returned home changed men, and the idea of Christmas became something rather distant now to many of them, as most veterans had spent too many holidays away from home and from loved ones.  The movies of this era became less about indulging in holiday traditions but instead were about trying to rediscover them.  It was Hollywood’s attempt at healing a broken nation whose people had suffered through too much and were not so easily persuaded by escapist entertainment anymore.  A perfect example of this kind of feeling represented in a Christmas film would be Frank Capra’s immortal It’s a Wonderful Life.  Here’s a movie all about the healing aspect of the holiday season.  When we see Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey driven to the edge of despair, his life is saved by a Christmas miracle, which enables him to see beyond the hardship and view how his life is valuable to others.  And it’s through an act of Christmas charity that we see his life redeemed, showing a new kind of ideal for others to follow in the season, which is the idea of giving to those less fortunate.  Like George Bailey, many disenfranchised veterans were in need of charity, and because of films like this, Christmas reminded us as a nation that it was essential to give back.  But, the idea of having to reinvigorate the Holiday spirit wasn’t always present as bleak as in It’s a Wonderful Life.  We saw in the classic Miracle on 34th Street (1947) how a personal visit from Mr. Kringle could move a cynical nation away from selfish interests towards a more optimistic holiday spirit.  Post war America and the World in general needed lessons like these to help center itself again around something pure and ideal, and Hollywood provided that in the Christmas spirit.

Since the pre and post-War years, Christmas movies tended to become more of a niche market.  We no longer had films that used Christmas as their primary theme or backdrop, but rather as smaller parts of a bigger picture.  Television picked up the slack though, with Christmas specials and variety shows becoming annual institutions.  In this time, Hollywood not only presented their ideals of what the Christmas season was all about, but did so with unencumbered glitz and glamour.  What we also got from television at this time were the animated specials from people like Rankin Bass and Chuck Jones.  These Christmas themed animated specials like Rudolph, the Red Nosed Reindeer (1964) and How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966) became the standards for another generation of fans, presenting Christmas stories that moved even further away from the original spiritual traditions towards a more universally appealing vision of the holiday.  In these movies we also saw how universal lessons that were important to people in that time, like the need for tolerance and understanding, became the focus rather than living up to the ideals of the holiday’s traditions.  Another holiday special, A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965), even addressed the growing disparity between the traditional spiritual base of the holiday and the increasingly homogenized festivity it had become because of the influence of pop culture.  It’s an identity crisis that is exceptionally well explored and given a very enlightened explanation by the end, when Charlie Brown finally understands that tradition and changing values are all what makes Christmas so special.  The fundamental origin of Christ’s birth is always a part of the season, and our cultural traditions that we’ve added to the holiday have not buried that aspect, but instead embody the ideals that Christ represented.  As Charlie Brown struggles to find meaning through directing a Nativity play, he comes to understand this as what Christmas means to him; the joy of giving a part of himself to improve someone else’s holiday.

After a long run on television, holiday films did find new life in the cinema during the 80’s and 90’s.  What is interesting about this era though is how the definition of Christmas movies changed.  Sure there were films that were unmistakably centered around Christmas themes, like A Christmas Story, Scrooged (1988), and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989), but there were other movies made at this time that used Christmas as a backdrop, but were not necessarily about Christmas.  This has led to many speculations in recent years whether or not some of these actually qualify as Christmas movies at all.  One film for example would be Joe Dante’s Gremlins (1984).  It’s set during Christmas, and uses a lot of the season’s iconography as part of it’s story, but the narrative centered around mischievous grotesque monsters could also find a home within the Halloween season as well.  Within another genre, there is also the classic thriller Die Hard, which some fans will defiantly proclaim is absolutely a Christmas movie.  Is there a reason why Die Hard needs to take place during Christmas?  Not really.  But screenwriter Steven deSouza still makes good use of holiday tropes to add some flavor to the story, including one point where the hero John McClane jokingly sends a message to the villains that says, “Now I have a machine gun.  Ho, Ho, Ho.”  Other films from this period use more overt representations of the holiday, but could have been set during any time of the year.  Home Alone (1990) is one such case.  The concept of a child left all alone at home could work without the Christmas setting, but it makes a lot of sense that it would serve that purpose for this particular story.  Through movies like these, we get a changing attitude towards the holidays in movies, where Christmas is no longer an institution that is reinforced by the culture but instead is reflective of the culture.  Hollywood no longer needed to hold up the ideal, but instead could draw from it to add a little extra to something totally unrelated.

While some of these films continue to perpetuate the ideals of the holidays, we also have seen other films take a more critical eye towards Christmas films as well.  These are reflective of even more change that we’ve witnessed in our culture, as negative aspects of tradition and spirituality have affected people in many ways.  That’s why movies that intend to deconstruct the Christmas Holiday have become more prevalent in recent years.  Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) for example took an idea of looking at the Christmas season from an outsiders point of view and questioned whether the holiday traditions were exclusive to only one thing, or was it open to other influences, like say the ideas of icons from the Halloween season.   There was also the film Bad Santa (2002) which deconstructed the image of Santa himself, putting a foul-mouthed conman played by Billy Bob Thornton in the suit and beard and taking presenting seasonal icons in the most perverse way possible.  And strangely enough, these films which break down some of the traditional ideals of the holiday have also become themselves new seasonal classics for a modern audience.  And that’s because despite their unorthodox presentations, they still hold up the spirit of the Holiday, which is one of community and tolerance to others.  But, by poking fun at some of the more outdated aspects of the holiday, it has unfortunately opened these films up to some criticism.  There is a narrow-minded segment of the audience out there who misinterpret some of these irreverent films as part of a “War on Christmas,” and that is not the case.  Christmas movies bring the spirit of the holiday to people of all kinds, and tailoring them to contemporary audiences of diverse backgrounds is essential to keeping Christmas alive and relevant, even if it means presenting them a little cruder in the process.  To say that Christmas movies should just be one way and cater to one certain set of people is in itself an attack on Christmas.  We need diversity in our Christmas films, because it gives us the window into our culture that helps us to understand each other and why we should all value each other during the holidays.

That’s essentially what makes Christmas movies so fascinating as a part of cinematic history, and that’s the ever-changing nature of them.  Every generation adds it’s own voice to the cultural touchstones of the season, and looking back on them, we see the ever changing face of who we are.  Early Hollywood set the base stones of what our idea of the holiday can be, but subsequent generations after have taught us what Christmas should be, and that’s a holiday experience that should be inclusive of everyone.  I for one have like how Hollywood has not forgotten that Christmastime should be about reflection and understanding the value in ourselves and our fellow men.  Of course, there are the obvious films that forget that and instead indulge in the selfish commercialism of the holiday, like Jingle all the Way (1996) and the awful 2000 remake of The Grinch.  Can some modern Christmas movies be a little too cynical; of course (see Ben Affleck’s Surviving Christmas from 2004, or rather, don’t).  But, Hollywood has done well by the holiday and we have them to thank for perpetuating the best aspects of the holiday year after year.  Christmas is ever-changing, and that’s why the movies are helpful to us to understand the meaning of our changing culture.  There’s no need to have it saved, and certainly the last person I’d want to see save it would be Kirk Cameron.  We cherish the nostalgia of Christmases past through the perennial classics like It’s a Wonderful Life, but we also celebrate what the holiday means to us today on the big screen, and more recently it’s a reflection of our desire to party with our fellow man, like in last year’s The Night Before and this year’s Office Christmas Party.  The spirits of Past, Present and Future all come together in the movies to enrich our end of the year celebration, and it’s up to us to live up to that Christmas spirit year round.

What the Hell Was That?

What the Hell Was That? – Australia (2008)

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If there is one genre that I would consider a favorite out of all the ones to rise out of Hollywood, it would be the historical epic.  Nowhere else will you see the Hollywood machine at its finest than when it presents to us a grandiose, ambitious historically inspired melodrama on the big screen.  It’s the foundation that most of Hollywood is built upon to be fair.  Since D.W. Griffith’s epic silent pictures of the nineteen teens, every era of Hollywood film-making has aspired to bring history alive with all the spectacle that you would expect out of Tinseltown.  The 1950’s in particular became a Golden Era for these types of pictures, as new Widescreen processes allowed for movies to feel even more larger than life than they had before.  I for one have a soft spot for this era, as some of my favorite movies of all time emerged out of Hollywood in this time.  My favorite above all else, Lawrence of Arabia (1962), represented the quintessential Hollywood epic, devoting a operatic scale to a moment in history, and not even ancient history like Biblical epics but rather the Arabian theater of the World War I conflict, showing just how effective Hollywood prestige can be on any story.  Lawrence became a high water mark in Hollywood for many years to come, and many filmmakers raised on David Lean’s masterpiece have sought to recapture some of it’s power in their own work.  Films like Apocalypse Now (1979), The Last Emperor (1987), and Braveheart (1995) again proved to us the unending appeal of the great Hollywood historical epic, and that would again hit another peak with James Cameron’s Titanic (1997).  But, afterwards, the historical epic has since seemed to struggle, as epic scale has been more devoted to Fantasy and Comic Book films instead.  Any new entries are more likely to draw more on Hollywood nostalgia for their presentations, and not always for the better.

My feeling is that the success of Titanic was so big, that it made it nearly impossible for a movie of it’s ilk to every achieve that level of popularity ever again.  It was a genre high-point and a genre killer at the same time.  Historical films are still made today, but just not at that same epic level anymore.  The only way you can get audiences to sit down for three hours in a movie theater today is if it’s got wizards and dragons in it.  Try to sell them a history lesson through the same experience and they’ll stay away in droves.  In the nearly twenty years since Titanic, we’ve seen very few epic historical dramas, and the ones that have made it to the big screen recently are not very good at all.  Two notable failures pop out to me, both of which try to emulate a nostalgic Hollywood feel, but fail in very different ways.  The first failed epic is Pearl Harbor, which was itself a direct answer to Titanic, bringing a tragic love story into a different historical human tragedy utilizing many of the same big budget movie tricks.  Directed by Michael Bay, the movie fails to make us care about it’s central characters, trivializes the actual historical account of the Pearl Harbor attack for it’s own purposes, and just flat out represents all the horrible excess that we’ve come to expect from Michael Bay.  But, that’s not the epic failure that I want to focus on (I’ll save that for another day).  The other failed epic I wish to talk about it Aussie director Baz Luhrmann’s nostalgia laden ode to his home country, titled simply Australia (2008).  It’s failure I find more problematic than those of Pearl Harbor, because it goes far beyond just excessive cinematic style, and more into the themes and story behind it, which results in an infuriating experience.  To me, Australia is the textbook example of how not to make a historical epic.

Of course, to understand the disappointment of this movie, I have to address the person behind it, because it is first and foremost a director driven film.  Baz Luhrmann is not what you would call the quintessential Australian director, but his excessive artistic style does fall in line with some of the country’s colorful character.  Starting off in the theater, he moved on to directing films starting off with 1992’s Strictly Ballroom, followed up with his Shakespearean adaptation Romeo+Juliet (1996), and then his big award winner Moulin Rouge (2001), a movie many claim as the one that revived the long dormant Hollywood musical.  With that string of rising success, Luhrmann finally had the clout in the industry to make the film that he’s always wanted to make, which was a defining epic throwback melodramatic ode to the nation that reared him.  That in itself is a noble goal.  I’m sure that like myself, Luhrmann loves the grand Hollywood epics of yesteryear, and this was his opportunity to give Australia it’s own epic worthy of that bygone era.  One thing that I can’t fault Luhrmann for is ambition.  It’s a trademark of his style.  Just watching anything he makes, you can see the workings of a director who wants to make every frame a visual treat.  Australia certainly has scale and production values on it’s side, but what it lacks is focus and narrative drive.  It’s a movie that unfortunately falls into the same faults that many other passion projects have, in that it succumbs to the director’s inability to move beyond their love of the concept in service of the story they want to have told.  It’s a movie built on love, but Luhrmann cannot quite find the best way to share that with us.

Truth be told, I really wanted this movie to work.  Ever since seeing Lawrence of Arabia on the big screen in my teens, I have wanted the great Hollywood historical epic to come back in a big way.  When it was announced that Baz Luhrmann had this film lined up as his next picture, I was genuinely excited.  I wasn’t entirely enthralled with Moulin Rouge when it first came out, but I recognized the artistry behind it and was excited with what it could look like in a genre that I’m more interested in.  Not only that, but the setting itself brings out so many possibilities for epic adventures.  With it’s wide open, untouched natural beauty, Australia is tailor-made for epic treatment.  Plus, a nearly three hour epic run-time told me that this story could not only be epic, but far-reaching as well, giving us a Gone With the Wind (1939) sized story of all the people, places, and history of Australia.  Sadly, what I saw in the movie theater presented none of that.  We get a ham-fisted, melodramatic romance with a historical backdrop that was neither insightful nor endearing.  This epic has annoyed me like no other in the genre, and it’s largely due to just how poorly it is presented.  I cared about none of the characters, felt the story was hackneyed and unoriginal, and more importantly of all, felt that some of the themes and messages were so badly delivered that it ended up having the opposite effect and became more offensive than enlightening.  And it all falls on the director, who seemed too wrapped up in the things he adores about the genre that he couldn’t observe the glaring problems that were right there in front of him.  A glossy shine cannot distract from the ugly, over-long mire that this movie going experience was for me.

First of all, so little development is given to the characters that it really becomes a joke at times.  Every person here is fully formed by the time they are introduced, and apart from some backstory revelations here or there, we don’t really know any more about them than what they go through in the film’s running time.  I do give Luhrmann credit for giving the movie an all-Australian cast.  Even the lead character who is given an English background is played by noted Aussie actress Nicole Kidman.  Sadly, none of the spark of her Oscar-nominated work in her last collaboration with Luhrmann is found here.  Kidman merely is there to be a place holder for the type of ideal heroine of old Hollywood, like Grace Kelley or Janet Leigh.  Unfortunately, her character emulates these ideals, but offers nothing more.  She’s a symbol rather than an individual, there simply to conform to her new surrounding, rather than leave an impression on it.  It’s a waste of Ms. Kidman’s talent, because I know she can do better.  Here, her character is less Scarlett O’Hara and more Marilyn Monroe; less active and more reactive.  There’s a moment where she attempts to sing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” from The Wizard of Oz which may be one of the most cringe-inducing moments I’ve ever seen an actress required to do in a movie ever; and it made me feel so bad for her.  She’s not alone though as a faulty character in the movie.  Everyone seems to be shorthanded.  Hugh Jackman’s character is so undefined that he’s not even given a name; he’s solely referred to as the Drover (an Aussie term for Cattle Rustler).  It’s so clear that this character was more a concept than an actual, tennable personality, and Jackman (really this generation’s defining Australian performer) is given nothing to work with.  His Drover merely just comes across as a poor man’s Crocodile Dundee.  Only the villain, played by David Wenham, stands out, and even he’s a thinly drawn character.  He makes Billy Zane’s over the top baddie in Titanic look subtle, but I credit Wenham for at least finding something to work with.  It shows even a talented cast can’t save lackluster material.

Another huge problem is that Luhrmann doesn’t know what his grand epic story wants to be.  Australia has a rich history to draw from, and it’s setting alone can inspire so many stories on it’s own.  But, with the movie Australia, Luhrmann has all of these ideas and pinpoints of interest, but noting to anchor it down.  We have the melodrama of the central romance, but because the characters are so thinly drawn, there’s not a lot to mine there.  So, Luhrmann looks at some of the defining elements of Australian history to focus on, but even here the execution is weak.  We are shown the troubled, and often brutal relations between the white Australians and the native Aboriginals whom they had oppressed for many years, as well as the hypocrisy of those in power, who often exploited the natives while at the same time keeping them down.  This issue alone is worthy of a movie of it’s own to explore, and the problem here is that it’s not focused on enough.  We learn about the dehumanizing programs that were in place in Australia in the early 20th century that took mixed race children away from their families and trained them for life as servants in White households, as a means that one horrible character describes in the movie to “breed the black out of them.”  I credit Luhrmann for not glancing over this horrible stain on his nation’s history, but sadly he undermines it later on in the movie by indulging in another historical touchstone of Australian history.  Just as the racial element gains traction in the story, suddenly World War II comes to Australia, and the completely unnecessary inclusion of the Japanese bombing of Northern Australia happens.  This whiplash change of focus for the story ruins what otherwise could have been a valuable historical lesson.  For Luhrmann, it proved that he got too greedy and that he spoiled the meal by adding one ingredient too many.

But, even without the unnecessary historical intrusion, the movie also undermines it’s well-intentioned message about race relations by again misusing old Hollywood tricks.  At the film’s center is a relationship between Kidman’s Sarah Ashley and a young mixed race boy named Nullah.  Nullah, as a character, is the film’s most troublesome element, because I think Luhrmann made the mistake of making a character that was so pure that he ends up becoming unrealistic.  Luhrmann, probably feeling ashamed of his own country’s history towards the Aboriginal people, wanted to portray them in the best possible light as possible, but in doing so, he robs them of any real depth.  Nullah is sadly nothing more than a prop to focus the movie’s message onto.  Young Brandon Walters is fine in the role, but the character is just an empty vessel for the story to reflect around.  Not only that, but they give him this annoying mystical quirk to his character, with awkward singing that supposedly puts him in tune with nature.  I know there’s some cultural basis for this among the aboriginal people, but it doesn’t translate on film.  Maybe the movie would’ve made this work better if he was more of a focus in the story.  Instead, and I hate to say this, he falls into that painful Hollywood cliche of the “magical Negro.”  Coined by Spike Lee, this trope is one referring to a minority character in a movie (most often Black) whose only purpose in the story is to impart wisdom and understanding on the sympathetic white protagonists, sometimes even through actual magic.  Nullah, fills that trope to a “t” and that ends up making Baz Luhrmann’s film feel very backwards and insulting, even with it’s good intentions.  Better movies have been made about the plights of the aboriginal people in Australia; director Phillip Noyce’s grittier Rabbit Proof Fence (2002) for example.   For Baz Luhrmann to not follow through with it here makes the end result feel more exploitative than informative, and it ultimately makes this a very loathsome movie as a result.

There are few other movie epics that stand out to me as such a crushing disappointment as Australia was.  I really want historical epic dramas to be a big part of Hollywood once again, but I feel that Baz Luhrmann’s film only dug the genre deeper into a too self-important hole.  More seriously, I feel that the movie missed the point of telling the true story of Australia by trying to be too much all at the same time.  Baz Luhrmann clearly loves his country and old Hollywood epics, but he can’t quite make the two come together.  Tapping into the nostalgia of the style undermines the importance of the film’s ultimate message, and I feel that this movie ends up telling us less about the people and places of Australia than it should have done.  The aboriginal people in particular seemed to be short-changed, and this is in a movie meant to shed light on their tortured history.  I understand Baz’s passion for this project, but I feel that he was ultimately the wrong fit for this kind of sweeping epic tale.  His greatest strength is taking usually dryer material, and giving it his own unexpected visual flair, like with Romeo+Juliet and his more recent The Great Gatsby (2013), a movie that I liked a whole lot more than this one.   Perhaps sticking too close to home was not a smart move for the director.  There was rumors that he was going to make another epic project centered around Alexander the Great, and that’s a subject that I think he could’ve done very well with.  Australian cinema is not without it’s exceptional pieces that adequately tell it’s story.  Peter Weir gave us interesting epic stories like Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and Gallipoli (1981) in his early career, and of course one cannot forget the work of George Miller and his Mad Max series.  Also, check of John Hillcoat’s The Proposition (2005), a haunting, gritty film with an outback setting similar to the one in Australia.  But, for a true Australian epic to stand above all others, Baz Luhrmann’s attempt rose high and fell hard, and in the end, became one of my least favorite epic films of all time.

 

Movie Reviews

Moana – Review

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Disney’s success in the film medium has come from a lot of factors, but one of the chief ones is their ability to fully reinvent themselves, even while still having a foothold in the past.  When you look over the whole of their film library, primarily among their animated canon, you see a lot of highs and lows in their history, with the high points standing out as the defining elements of their studio character.  While varied degrees of success have come their way, their primary expertise has always been fairy tales and legends.  It would make sense, since that’s how the Disney company started out in features, with the release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves in 1937.  Since then, any era of advancement in the Disney company usually is marked by the release of another fairy tale classic, like Cinderella (1950) and Sleeping Beauty (1959) in the Golden Era of the 50’s, or The Little Mermaid (1989) and Beauty and the Beast (1991) in the Disney Renaissance, or even in the Digital Era with Frozen (2013).  Each of these successful fairy tale features also built up a lucrative brand for the company dedicated to the Disney Princesses.  The Princess line has allowed itself to be flexible, so that it could include characters outside of fairy tales to fall under the same branding, especially if they are representative of other cultures.  That’s why you see Pocahontas included as a Disney Princess as well as Mulan, despite the fact that neither are royalty in their selective films.  Even Pixar’s Merida from Brave (2012) gets lumped in.  Whatever the reasoning behind each one’s inclusion, Disney’s Princess brand is a powerful one and they are eager to keep it growing, and with the release of their new film Moana, they have added a rather unique newcomer to their club.

Moana tells an original story derived from various legends told in various Pacific Island cultures.  It’s not the first time the company has chosen a setting like this for a movie, or used Oceanic people for their main characters.  However, that earlier film was Lilo & Stitch (2002), a contemporary story about native Hawaiians encountering a rambunctious alien creature.  It was a movie respectful of Pacific Island culture and people, but it only looked briefly into the cultural heritage of it’s characters and instead firmly put them in a modern, homogenized setting.  Moana, on the other hand, puts the culture and legends of it’s setting front and center.  And one thing that is reassuring about Disney’s track record with depicting other world cultures is that they do their research thoroughly in order to capture some authenticity with their depiction.  Sure, Disney does soften cultural traits in order to suit their corporate image (a process dubbed Disney-fication), but they do make their best effort to try to give each cultural group or race a fair place in their overall community.  Moana allows for the many cultures of the Pacific Islands to have their story presented to the world in the spirited Disney way, and the project comes from some top tier talent at the company.  The directors are long time veterans John Musker and Ron Clements, a successful duo at Disney for over 30 years whose credits include hits like The Little Mermaid, Aladdin (1992), Treasure Planet (2002) and The Princess and the Frog (2009).  Moana marks their first CGI feature, as well as their first in the Cinemascope format.  In addition to their legendary directors, Disney also tapped songwriter Lin-Manuel Miranda to pen several new songs for the film, coming off recently from his mega hit Broadway show, Hamilton.  With strong names like these attached, you would expect that there are high hopes surrounding Moana.  But, is it another Disney classic, or not?

Moana sets itself on no specific island found in the Pacific Ocean, but instead portrays a portrait of traditional Islander life in a more classical age.  We meet Moana (voiced by Auli’l Cravalho) who is being prepped by her father, Chief Tui (voiced by Temuera Morrison), to be the next chieftain of their island village.  At the same time, Moana’s free-spirited grandmother Tala (voiced by Rachel House) indulges the girl’s desires to see what is beyond her island and gives her the knowledge of the histories and legends of her people.  Moana learns from her granny that many years ago, the Goddess of creation named Te Fiti had her heart stolen by a Demi God named Maui (voiced by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson).  Upon escaping the island home of Te Fiti, Maui encountered a demon formed out of lava named Te Ka, who fiercly attacks him and causes Maui to drop both the Heart of Te Fiti and his magical fish hook, the source of all his power.  Without her heart, Te Fiti drains the life out of Islands throughout the ocean, and the web of decay has now reached Moana’s Island, causing the crops to die.  Despite her father’s stern warnings, Moana sets off alone to find Maui and force him return the heart stone to it’s rightful place.  By her side is the rooster Hei Hei (voiced by Alan Tudyk), and the ocean itself, which has a mind of it’s own, helping Moana along the way after it has chosen her specifically for the task.  Once Maui is found, the two set off on the journey which includes encounters with the Kakamora (coconut bodied pirates) and a gluttonous giant crab named Tamatoa (voiced by Flight of the Conchord’s Jemaine Clement).  Though she has the ocean as her ally, Moana still has to learn to navigate across the vastness of it, and it’s a quest that will test every ounce of her being, as well as show her exactly the person she needs to be.

Moana is a very pleasurable adventure from Disney, and feels right at home with all of their other animated features.  It is beautiful to behold, and is entertaining from beginning to end.  The only thing that I would say that keeps it from achieving all time classic status as a Disney feature is the fact that the movie more or less is a tad too familiar.  It’s not poorly told, nor does it do anything out of line that sours a good narrative; it’s just that I feel that it could have been just a little better if it took some more unexpected routes in the story.  I think this movie has the disadvantage of following in the wake of Zootopia, Disney’s early Spring release, which was a much more risk-taking film, making it one of the studio’s best efforts in years.  Moana by comparison just plays to more of what you would expect from Disney, and while that’s acceptable, it’s not really revolutionary either.  And, it seems to me that the filmmakers knew that going in too.  There are several jabs at Disney Princess cliches thrown at us within the movie, and they can be quite refreshing.  A particularly funny one comes from Maui halfway through where he points out how Princesses always carry around an animal sidekick with them.  But, even though the movie pokes fun at the cliches, it only reinforces your awareness that they are there, and the movie isn’t daring enough to try to avoid them.  But, even still, this movie is a thoroughly enjoyable experience.  I would even say among the Princess focused films, it’s the best we’ve seen from Disney since the Renaissance; yes even better than Frozen (which was just okay to me).  Cliched or no, you are not going to come away from this movie feeling like it’s a waste of your time.

Perhaps the film’s greatest strength is it’s characters.  In particular, Moana herself.  She is one of the best written and performed heroines to be found in the whole Disney canon, and it’s her journey that makes the whole film worthwhile.  While the journey itself can sometimes be cliched, the growth of Moana’s character is not.  I love the fact that the story foregoes the necessity of making her gender a factor in this story.  Moana is not trying to prove her worth as a girl in society nor is she trying to prove herself as a leader.  Those things are already established for her at the start.  She’s already taking her place as the ruler of her people before her journey begins.  Her growth as a character is more of a personal one of enlightenment, allowing her to discover the person she really is  and help her lose all self doubt that could prevent her from becoming a better leader.  This personal journey is what makes Moana far more interesting than the usual Disney Princess, who tend to not have internal conflicts define their characters.  Auli’l Cravalho does a fantastic job of voicing the character, capturing the spunkiness of youth, but also the depth of a girl burdened by the responsibility that she holds for her people as well as for herself.  Like most other culturally based films in the Disney canon, I applaud them for filling the voice roles with actors representative of those cultures, and Moana is no different.  Multiple Pacific Island ethnicities are represented in the cast, including Cravalho who is Polynesian, Dwayne Johnson who is half-Samoan, and both Temuera Morrison and Jemaine Clement who have New Zealander Maori ancestry.  It all brings a nice authenticity to the voices of these characters.  And the cast is universally strong throughout the movie.  Dwayne Johnson’s on-screen charisma translates surprisingly well into the character of Maui too.  And I especially loved the tender quirkiness of Rachel House as Moana’s grandmother.  Overall, each helps to make this another great addition of characters to the ever growing Disney family.

One thing that I’m sure a lot of people are going to take away from this film more than anything is the music.  Disney of course has left a huge mark on the classic Hollywood musical tradition, and Moana hopes to add it’s own contribution to the great Disney Songbook.  In order to capture the sounds of the Pacific Islander cultures, it seems unusual that they would select a Puerto Rican-American for the job, but it’s understandable when that person is the award-winning Lin-Manuel Miranda.  After completing one of the biggest Broadway blockbusters in recent memory with Hamilton, the timing couldn’t be much better for Disney to have new songs written for their film by this superstar.  And the songs he has co-written with Samoan musician Opetaia Foa’i have that nice mix of contemporary pop and authentic Oceanic cultural influence.  Thankfully, none of the songs here are going to be omnipresent earworms like Frozen’s “Let it Go,” but a few still stand out as catchy and memorable.  I think the real standout is “We Know the Way,” an epic centerpiece song about the history of the Oceanic wayfinders who founded so many of the cultures on the Islands of the Pacific, including Moana’s own.  It’s a song that evokes the same grandeur of a melody like The Lion King’s “Circle of Life,” and more than any other becomes the theme of the movie itself.  I also have a soft spot for the song “Shiny,” which is sung by Jemaine Clement’s Tamatoa.  It would have been a waste to not take advantage of combining the voice of the Flight of the Conchords with the writer of Hamilton, and thankfully Disney did not miss this opportunity.  It’s a great, gaudy tune that sounds like something Tim Curry would’ve performed in his Rocky Horror heyday, and it’s probably my favorite Disney Villain song in quite a long time.  Surprisingly enough, they managed to get Dwayne Johnson to sing in the movie, and while he’s a bit out of his league, I still give him credit for at least trying.  He’s more brave than I would’ve been.  Accompanied by a beautiful epic score by Mark Mancina, Moana‘s music does the Disney Songbook proud.

But apart from the cast and the music, the movie also has the benefit of looking absolutely gorgeous as well.  It’s a good thing this movie is being released in the wintertime, because audiences will feel like they’ve taken a refreshing summer vacation to the South Pacific after watching this film.  The movie puts so much rich detail into every shot of the movie, from the lush greens of Moana’s island, to the bright blues of the sun-drenched skies.  Character details are also pleasing to the eye.  I’m sure that many people are going to have fun examining all the different designs of Maui’s tattoos which cover his whole body, and which come to life through traditional hand drawn animation.  And while the recreation of life on the islands is richly detailed in itself, the movie also indulges in some eye-poppingly imaginative magical sights as well.  The Kakamoura pirates for example are a great, inspired creation; being both adorable and intimidating at the same time.  I also feel that their scene owes a lot of inspiration to George Miller’s Mad Max series; you’ll see why.  Also, the location of Tamatoa’s lair in Lalotai, the realm of monsters, gives the movie a nice surreal experience, where the production designers and animators clearly had a lot of fun coming up with a lot of out there visual ideas.  Apart from the visual design, the animation of the characters is also phenomenal, and shows just how comfortable Disney has gotten with the CGI medium.  Moana herself is elegantly designed, and full-figured which is a nice departure from the Barbie doll look of past Disney princesses.  There’s also some spectacular animation done on the demon Te Ka, making her feel like she’s authentically made out of molten lava.  Audiences will also be stunned by the beautiful way that the Ocean itself is brought to life, especially in an awe-inspiring introduction scene early in the movie, where a baby Moana walks among  ocean walls that have parted for her.  It’s a visual tour de force that lives up to the high Disney standard.

So, is Moana worth checking out this Thanksgiving weekend?  For any Disney fan or animation fan out there, it is absolutely worth seeing, and for the casual viewer, it will certainly be one of the best options out there too.  I do have minor misgivings about the overall story, but maybe it’s just my abnormally high standards with regards to Disney Animation.  It’s definitely on the higher end of the Disney canon, but just a hair short of being one of the all-time masterpieces.  Oddly enough, I think that Zootopia may have been the better Disney effort of the year, despite it’s less epic presentation.  It has to do more with how well the sum of every part works for each movie, and Zootopia just hit the mark more than Moana.  But, that’s not to say that Moana is a disappointment.  I had a good time watching the movie and was absorbed into the rich setting of it’s narrative.  It is spectacularly animated and full of rich characters.  I love the main heroes of Moana and Maui, both of whom will become favorite Disney characters for many fans young and old for years to come.  The songs in particular are what I consider the movie’s triumph; supportive of the story, but not overwhelming either.  I’ve had both “We Know the Way,” and “Shiny” stuck in my head for days now, so that’s a good indicator of how much an impression they’ll leave behind.  They also live up to the high standards of both Disney’s reputation and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s.  Anyone who is a fan of Hamilton owes it to themselves to hear Miranda’s work here as well.  This is also another strong addition to the legendary work of Musker and Clements, who have solidified their reputation as the Disney Studio’s most heralded film-making duo.  Hopefully it’s not their last collaboration, but if it is, then it’s a strong way to go out.  Despite feeling at times a tad too familiar, Moana is still a worthwhile animated feature and you’ll be well served finding your way to your local theater to see it.

Rating: 8/10

 

Focus on a Franchise

Focus on a Franchise – Harry Potter: Part Two

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The one thing that most readers of the J.K. Rowling novels observed as the series went along was how the latter books took a considerable dark turn in the narrative.  Whatever the reason, Rowling’s novels dealt with heavier and heavier themes as it headed towards the homestretch, finding the titular boy hero in ever more dire situations.  The notion that this was children’s literature seemed to not apply anymore, and I’m sure that if you asked Rowling herself, she would probably say that she never intended these stories to be just for kids, and these later novels are proof of that.  Death, and the inevitability of it, became the overarching theme of the last four novels of the series, as well as the effect it has on Harry as a whole.  In the story, Harry has to face the deaths of loved ones, put himself and his friends in harms way, and come to the realization that in order to defeat his mortal enemy, Voldemort, he will have to either kill, or be killed (or perhaps both).  Safe to say, things get pretty dark on this side of the Potter franchise.  Gone is the joyful wonderment of the earlier stories, but it’s a maturity that needed to happen for the series to reach it’s full potential.  What many fans and critics all agree with is that Rowling concluded her epic series in a very satisfying fashion.  Harry’s journey does come full circle and little is left unresolved.  And while many of the more shocking moments from these latter novels did leave fans upset, I’m sure that no one would want to see the story done any other way.  Knowing how effective Rowling completed her epic story must have been a relief to those trusted with bringing the books to the big screen, but doing them justice, with all the darker themes involved proved to be a challenge in it’s own right.

The Harry Potter franchise went through something of a makeover in the third and fourth entries, Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) and Goblet of Fire (2005), and those two films would lay the groundwork for everything that followed after.  Just as I had in my first part of this retrospective (which you can read here), I will be examining the Potter franchise film by film, this time focusing on the final four.  Like before, I will avoid giving plot summaries and instead focus on the different highlights of each film, and how the series progressed with regards to it’s storytelling, the performances, and it’s realization of the wizarding world itself.  I will be discussing some spoilers as well, so be forewarned.  The interesting thing about the last half of the Potter franchise is that unlike the first four, which had a shifting number of directors at the helm, all of the remaining films were directed by one man; British filmmaker David Yates.  Yates was given the daunting task of steering this massive franchise home, and for someone with few credits outside of television at the time, he proved to be a surprisingly effective choice.  In fact, not only did he manage to close out the Potter franchise in a grand way, but he’s now the man in charge of shepherding J.K. Rowling’s new big screen franchise, the Potter spin-off Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them; having signed on to direct all five planned films in that series.  So, now that were ready, let us delve into the final four movies of this franchise and conclude this two part retrospective of the Harry Potter franchise.

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HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX (2007)

After the shocking revelation of Voldemort’s rebirth, and the death of one of Hogwart’s students (Cedric Diggory) at the hands of the dark wizard in the previous film, the Wizarding World would never be the same afterwards.  Order of the Phoenix deals with the immediate aftermath of those events, putting Harry and his friends in a far more uncertain and paranoid time.  The titular Order, we learn, is an organization devoted to stopping the Dark Lord’s return, and it’s made up of the adult figures in Harry’s life, including his beloved godfather Sirius Black (with Gary Oldman returning for the role).  What is interesting about this particular film in the franchise is that it was an adaptation of the longest novel in Rowling’s series (a whopping 870 pages), and yet of the single book adaptations, it had the shortest run-time; about 139 minutes.  To do that, you can imagine that a lot of the book was cut down, but overall, I think it was something that had to be done.  Not to disparage Rowling as writer, but Order of the Phoenix was the book that suffered the most from unnecessary filler, and I commend the filmmakers for actually cutting the story down to it’s most essential elements.  And they did this mostly by finding the core of the story and focusing just on that, itself being Harry coming to terms with growing older and knowing that loss and suffering will be following him on his journey going forward.  In the books, Harry becomes a lot more moody and aggressive, which does come out a little bit in Daniel Radcliffe’s performance, but in a more subtle way.  The film does also deals with Harry’s maturity in an effective way, showing his talents as a teacher when he helps his fellow students learn essential spells for fighting the Dark Arts in secret, congregating in the Room of Requirement, which sees it’s first appearance in this movie.

Some new important characters get introduced in Order as well.  My favorite would have to be Luna Lovegood (played to absolute perfection by newcomer Evanna Lynch).  Perhaps of all the students at Hogwarts, Luna is the one I most identify with, just because I was also an oddball kid whose head was in the clouds most of the time, so I guess that’s what makes her one of my absolute favorite characters in the series, and it made me very happy to see her so perfectly realized here.  Also introduced were two of the most loathsome characters in the series overall.  The first is the unhinged and sadistic Bellatrix Lestrange, a witch with strong ties to Voldemort.  She’s played by Helena Bonham Carter, which seemed like appropriate casting considering Carter’s affinity for the gothic and bizarre, which has found it’s way into many of her performances, including this one, and she is very good in the role.  The other addition however probably stands as the most hated character in the series overall, that being Professor Dolores Umbridge.  Umbridge is a thoroughly unpleasant character, pretending to be wholesome and gentile, while at the same time taking delight in suppressing other people’s rights and even subjecting them to torture, like having students write with an ink quill that drains the writer of their own blood.  She is played by actress Imelda Staunton in a phenomenal performance.  You’ve got to give her credit for bringing so much into a character that’s so despised.  The movie also delivers an amazing set piece in the Ministry of Magic, the wizarding world’s center of government.  It’s also the setting for one of the series greatest moments, the showdown between Voldemort and Dumbledore, which does not disappoint in the movie.  Overall, Order of the Phoenix is the Potter franchise at it’s most efficient, knowing what to cut out and what to leave in, creating a well rounded movie in the process.

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HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE (2009)

Released two years after Order of the Phoenix, the longest gap between any of the films in the franchise, we were treated with the sixth film in the franchise.  The Half-blood Prince picks up right after the events of Order, showing the aftermath of Voldemort’s attack on the Ministry, and Harry dealing with the loss of Sirius Black in the confrontation.  Like the previous film, this story is focused on one crucial thing, and that’s the relationship between Harry and Dumbledore, who spend far more time together here than in all the previous films.  This is a movie that focuses far more on filling out the gaps in the narrative, in particular regarding the backstory of Voldemort himself, as Harry and Dumbledore try to piece together exactly how the Dark Lord was able to cheat death.  We learn for the first time about Horcruxes, which we learn is what Voldemort has used to keep himself alive, having split his soul into seven different objects, all of which Harry will have to destroy in order to defeat him.  The film does an effective job of filling us in on how everything in the story now ties together and showing us what Harry must do to finally vanquish the enemy.  Unfortunately for the film, this is what also makes the story feel kind of weak here.  Of all the latter Harry Potter films, this one is sadly the weakest, and that’s mainly because it feels like the story has stalled a bit, in order to fill us in on all the details.  The presentation also feels a little more muted than usual, choosing a more languid pace than previous films, along with a sickly muted color palette (though beautifully shot by acclaimed cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel).  After the brisk pacing of Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix, this movie really felt like the franchise slamming on the breaks, and it suffers as a result.

That’s not to say that everything in this movie is terrible.  There are some welcome highlights.  One is the addition of Oscar-winner Jim Broadbent to the cast as the delightful Professor Horace Slughorn.  The character is absent-minded and self-serving, but Broadbent brings a nice bit of congeniality to the character that helps to make him endearing.  There’s also a graciously hilarious sequence when Harry takes the “Liquid Luck” potion in order to effectively coax out information he needs from Professor Slughorn.  It’s a much need light moment in an otherwise dour film, and it also lets Daniel Radcliffe show off his comedic chops for once as Harry, something I’m sure that he’s wanted to do for a long time in the role.  Also, the relationship with Dumbledore is well developed here, and Radcliffe and Michael Gambon are superb in their scenes together, especially in the climatic and sometimes hard to watch scene where Harry has to force feed a poisonous potion to Dumbledore in order to find a Horcrux.  The backstory scenes are also incredibly moody too, especially one where Dumbledore meets Voldemort as a child (played by Ralph Finnes own nephew, Hero Finnes-Tiffin, who is excellent).  But, all the good elements can’t seem to help the movie as whole, which just feels off in it’s pacing.  Jokes that should have been hilarious fall flat and a lot of the joyfulness of previous films feels missing here.   Also, the film sadly misses the opportunity to go more in depth with the mystery of the title itself, the identity of the Half-Blood Prince.  Spoilers, it’s Professor Snape, who is absent for most of the movie, which seems like a waste.  I do however want to give some praise to actor Tom Felton here, who has played the sometimes one note Draco Malfoy throughout the series.  Here, he’s finally able to show some depth in the character and he at last gives a memorable performance, showing effectively the weight of his conflicting morals when he’s called upon to do the most evil of acts.  Half-Blood Prince is not the series worst, but it is an unfortunate bump in the road towards a satisfying conclusion.

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HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS: PART I (2010)

Warner Brothers made the controversial decision with the last book in the series in choosing to split it up into two films.  The benefit is that they would gain another film for the series, extending it to eight instead of seven, but the downside was that the story might be stretched too thin in each film, making it less impactful than it should.  Still, for some, it’s a decision that makes sense, considering that The Deathly Hollows is a substantial book (at 759 pages) and that unlike Order of the Phoenix, you couldn’t cut a lot of it out without losing something valuable.  So, what we got was two movies devoted to depicting the final chapter of the Potter franchise, and for the most part, it’s a decision that works.  Sadly, this precident has become popular in Hollywood in general, and now it’s commonplace for major franchises to split their final chapters into two-parters, like the Twilight and Hunger Games series, and not all of them managed to do it as well as Potter did.  One thing that helps Harry’s final chapter is that it has a stronger break-off point to split the story up, giving each film a nice full narrative.  The first film, while maligned by some fans for having the same languid pacing as Half-Blood Prince, actually benefits the most from the split narrative.  Part 1 in fact may be my favorite of the latter Potter films, and third overall behind Goblet  and Azkaban.  I just found it a fascinating watch as an experiment.  Could you really make a Harry Potter film without Hogwarts in it.  This movie proves that you can, with Harry, Ron, and Hermione living on the run as fugitives, escaping Voldemort’s disciples The Death Eaters, who have taken over the Ministry and are hunting them down.  It’s that feeling of a world flipped upside down that really drives the narrative along and makes this movie a captivating watch.

What I particularly like about this movie is the way it delves deeper into the relationship between our three main heroes.  Ron and Hermione in particular are given much more depth here, and the growth of their characters is touching and heartbreaking as the story goes along.  Both Rupert Grint and Emma Watson deliver standout performances, and like with Daniel Radcliffe, it’s amazing to see how far they’ve matured as actors since they first showed up in The Sorcerers Stone nearly a decade earlier.  It’s clear in this film that they are no longer children, but full-fledged adults, who now have a sense of pain and loss weighing on their shoulders.  There is a fantastic scene halfway through the movie that really encompasses the growth these characters has gone through, and it’s after Ron has abandoned his friends after a fight.  Harry cheers up the grieving Hermione by leading her in a dance, which doesn’t seem all that important, but in the movie it is a brilliant character moment, and one that was not in the books.  There are other key elements introduced in the story, namely the titular Deathly Hallows.  In an amazing and beautiful animated sequence, we learn that the Hallows are three objects that are capable of cheating death, those being the all powerful Elder Wand, the Resurrection Stone which brings life back to the dead, and as Harry soon realizes, the Cloak of Invisibility which he’s long had in his possession.  The film also brings back a long absent character, house elf Dobby, who is very much improved as a character here, both in terms of his construction as a CGI character as well as his personality.  His return is short-lived however, as he is slain while helping Harry and his friends escape the clutches of Bellatrix Lestrange at Malfoy Manor, giving this movie a poignant moment to close on.  All these elements make Part 1 of The Deathly Hallows one of the series best.

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HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS: PART II (2011)

It all comes down to this.  After a decade of build-up, with seven previous movies rounding out the story, we finally come to the final confrontation between good and evil in the Wizarding World.  Picking up right where Part 1 left off, Part 2 finds Harry and his friends at a bleak breaking point, and Voldemort in possession of the Elder Wand, which it turns out was being used by Dumbledore up until his death at the end of Half-Blood Prince.  After finding one more Horcrux in the vaults of Gringott’s Bank in London, Harry and his friends soon learn where they will find the remaining hidden Horcrux; in a room somewhere inside Hogwarts.  At that’s where the final battle commences.  Harry and his friends quickly dispose of Voldemort’s cronies at the school, which includes Snape, and those loyal to Harry including Professor McGonagall and the remaining Order of the Phoenix members help to prepare the castle for attack.  The movie on a whole is one big giant climatic battle, which is both the film’s strength and it’s weakness.  While it is a spectacular, epic showdown that is well-paced and captivating, it also has the disadvantage of making this singular film feel very one-note.  The movie feels less like a complete movie, and more like an extended final act; which to be fair, it does very well.  But even still, it makes it less watchable on it’s own than any previous Potter film, because it feels the most like part of a story rather than it’s own thing.  It’s the same problem that plagued the final Hobbit movie, where everything was more or less tied to wrapping things up rather than delivering a complete standalone narrative.  Even Part 1 felt more complete.  Still, despite it’s shortcomings, Part 2 is a satisfying conclusion to this series.

The final battle within Hogwarts is massive and full of eye-catching moments.  The film really shows how comfortable director David Yates had gotten with directing on a massive scale.  The performances are universally strong, especially Daniel Radcliffe and Ralph Finnes in their iconic roles.  To see these two facing off against each other finally is very satisfying, especially in seeing how much more confident Harry has become over the years, becoming fearless in the face of evil and certain death.  We also get to finally see the long awaited moment when Ron and Hermione kiss for the first time, bringing closure to this long developing romantic subplot.  But, the movie’s greatest triumph belongs to the absolutely brilliant segment in which we learn about Severus Snape’s full backstory.  Heavy spoilers ahead.  Harry is given Snape’s memories as the professor is dying from his wounds, and Harry is able to view them through the Pensieve dish in Dumbledore’s office, a plot device introduced in Goblet of Fire and featured heavily in Half-Blood Prince.  In those memories, both we and Harry learn that Snape and Harry’s mother Lily were childhood friends and that Snape was indeed protecting Harry out of his love for Lily, even beyond her death.  The scene is an emotional one, and proves once and for all that Snape was a true hero in the end.  Alan Rickman delivers some of his best work in this sequence, especially the moment when he’s clutching Lily’s body after her murder by Voldemort, utterly devastated.  And Rickman forever endeared himself to a whole generation of fans with one simple, perfectly delivered line; “always.”  The actor’s recent passing earlier this year only made this moment and line more poignant, and he deserves all of the praise he’s been given.  All of this makes Deathly Hallows Part 2 a very satisfactory end.

So, there you have it.  What seemed like a long shot at first ended up proving to be a masterstroke in the end.  In ten years and eight films, we managed to see J.K. Rowling’s grand vision come to life, and it became one of cinema’s greatest journeys as a result.  While not perfect all the way through, the series nevertheless feels very complete as a whole.  It’s especially fun watching it the whole way through and seeing the children grow up before your very eyes.  Considering the scale of the whole undertaking, it’s miraculous that they ever managed to make it through the entire series in one piece overall.  The franchise launched quite a few careers, as well as gave us some career defining work from some beloved veterans.  But, more than anything, it made Hogwarts and the wizarding world around it feel real.  All of us who watch the movies or read the books wishes that a place like that could exist in real life.  It’s probably why J.K. Rowling has expanded the lore of her novels and created things like the Pottermore website, which allows for the fan community to come together online, find out which house they belong to at Hogwarts, and feel like they are a part of this grand fantasy themselves.  Even today, five years after the conclusion of the series, do we still see the impact of the movies in pop culture and elsewhere.  Universal Studios theme parks have their own sections devoted to recreating landmarks from the films, including Hogwarts itself, which immerses the fan-base even further in the world.  But, what I think is the series greatest contribution is the near perfect way it captures the essence of what it’s like to grow up in school; as the innocence and optimism of youth shifts into a deeper understanding of the hardships that await us in adulthood.  Harry was the perfect surrogate for this kind of journey, and it’s great to see a movie franchise that brought his story so perfectly to life.  It cast it’s spell on us and we couldn’t have asked for anything better.

Editorials

Finding the Good in the Bad – The Making of Great Movie Villains

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They say that a hero is only as good as the challenges he faces, and every challenge in a great adventure usually has some form of antagonist behind it.  In storytelling, the conflict between a character and an adversary is universal for every type of story told.  And sometimes that adversary becomes a compelling character within their own right, maybe even more so than the hero they face.  The villain, while not essential for every story, is the unique character that embodies the struggle that every character must overcome, and depending on the struggle, that villainous character can be representative of many different things.  Sometimes the villain is a brute making trouble for the hero, or sometimes he is a mastermind that the hero must outsmart in order to save the day.  One popular trope in storytelling is to have the villain be the hero’s exact opposite in every way and in turn, makes him or her a competitor challenging the entire purpose of the hero’s existence.  Regardless of how they function in the story, the villain is the character that motivates everything else within the story, so it is a character that must be carefully developed.  And as we’ve seen, some villains have withstood the test of time and have become icons in their own right.  Whether they are monsters, murderers, schemers, or just the average bully, they all stand out and if developed well enough they’ll become the ones we love to hate.  Many great villains stand out in literature, but some of the most popular as of late have been the ones that have emerged out of Hollywood, which has developed it’s own way of popularizing the image of the villain in modern pop culture.

More so than any other form of entertainment, Hollywood is heavily reliant upon the presence of a villainous character in their stories.  Going all the way back to the silent era, Hollywood has developed it’s art-form around the basic conflict of a hero taking on a villain; whether it was cowboys hunting bandits, gangsters battling police, or a knight fighting a dragon, clear-cut good vs. evil storylines were the easiest to translate for a general audience during the medium’s infancy.  But, as the art-form advanced, and the stories became more complex, so did the characters themselves.  In the years since, we’ve seen many villains arrive on the big screen that were not only compelling, but relatable in many ways, allowing the audience to see just how fine a line between good and evil there is.  But, just as well as Hollywood can create a memorable and compelling villain, they are also very much susceptible to creating a boring, forgettable villain.  And usually, the weaker the villain, the weaker the story.  This is often a complaint that I hear leveled at comic book movies, which is an industry built around creating iconic heroes and villains.  The recent slate of Marvel movies in the last few years have seen this complaint in particular, as the complex universe they have created has been growing larger with so many expanded franchises.  And to keep these multiple franchises going, Marvel has had to dig deeper into their catalog to find new adversaries for their heroes, and not all of them are all that great.  Some work better than others, but when you’ve exhausted the cream of the crop, you are eventually having your hero face someone that the audience will remark, “who is that?”  Marvel is not alone when facing this problem and it leads us to wonder what indeed is the formula for creating the most memorable of villains.

The formula of a hero villain dynamic in movies is always dominated by certain factors.  For the most part, villains in movies have a distinction about them that sets them apart from other characters.  Using the visual medium for storytelling effect, a lot of movies are able to identify the villain in a story purely by the way they look, usually through color coding.  That’s why you have the sometimes overused trope of the villain being dressed all in black.  Secondly, the villain must always have a clear cut motive from the very beginning; something that immediately puts them in opposition with the rest of the characters.  A villain with no rhyme or reason for what they are doing will only make the overall story pointless, because the hero’s quest will prove pointless as a result.  It doesn’t matter if the villain’s plan is proven foolish or insane, as long as they drive the conflict, it will motivate the story.  Then there are the other factors that contribute to a villain’s purpose in a story, like how their personality drives their evil ends, and how it clashes with the hero.  Hollywood usually follows these factors, and for most of it’s history, they have developed some notable baddies for the cinema.  The one thing that helps with the formula is that easy distinction between good vs. evil.  For many early films, moral distinctions were very clear; with the hero always a pure individual and the villain a un-redeemable rogue.  The war years in particular gave Hollywood such a distinction, because the world itself was caught up in a conflict with such a definable line between good and evil.  You see it in films like Casablanca (1943), which gave the mantle of villainy not just to an individual but to an entire grouping of characters; namely the Nazi Army.  And because of this distinction, it also defined the quintessential Hollywood hero, like Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine, who defines the ideal of undeterred resolve in the face of tyranny.

But, with the war years over, Hollywood’s definition of heroism and villainy began to change as well.  Looking inward, Hollywood began to examine more domestic ideas of good and evil in society, and villainy began to take a new face.  Sometime a system itself would be the villainous obstacle for the hero; like Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch standing up to institutional racism in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962).  Also, villains with grand schemes were no longer the only types you would see on the big screen.  Sometimes it would be the average guy next door committing an unfathomable crime that would leave a mark in the audiences’ memory.  A perfect example of this would be Norman Bates from Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Psycho (1960).  While seemingly normal on the outside, we learn over the course of the movie that this sweet boy next door is in fact a serial killer by the end.  Moral ambiguity suddenly became the norm in cinema, as gray areas between good and evil in society began to form.  With politicians becoming less trustworthy, and institutions were propping up evil actions rather than taking them down, the old Hollywood formula began to change, with villains becoming the very institutions that would have been seen as heroic in earlier days.  And with establishments and people within the system filling the villainous roles, we began to see the rise of the anti-hero in cinema.  The Anti-hero was someone who usually would commit villainous acts, but towards a greater good.  You see these types of characters in many action films like Dirty Harry (1971), Cool Hand Luke (1967), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), and Mad Max (1979); characters who in any other story would be the bad guy or a trouble maker, but end up looking heroic because they fight against a far more evil system.  It’s through these anti-heroes and the shift in morality that we see a whole different type of villain today than what was normal many decades earlier.

So, how do we get a great villain in film’s today.  For the most part it all comes down to personality.  A great villain needs to be either charismatic and hypnotic in their appeal, or loathsome beyond any redemption in order to stand out.  And, for the most part, the best villains come of the strength of the talents of the people that create them.  In recent years, I think that the filmmaker who has churned out consistently the most memorable screen villains is Quentin Tarantino.  Not only do his villainous characters stand out in easily definable ways, but they are always the most alluring characters in his movies as well.  Whether it is Death Proof‘s Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell), Django Unchained‘s Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), or The Hateful Eight’s Dorothy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), he always manages to create that villain that we all love to hate.  But, I think his masterpiece would be Colonel Hans Landa from Inglorious Basterds (Christoph Waltz), just because of how well the villain adheres to the formula, and subverts it at the same time.  Being a Nazi is bad enough, but what makes Landa so scary is that his personality is so genial and pleasant, making his villainous acts all the more vile.  Finding the right actor for these roles is also a major factor in making the villain memorable in a movie.  Other great examples of memorable villains defined by their actors would be Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), or Angela Lansbury as Eleanor Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), or Alan Rickman as Hans Gruber in Die Hard (1989).  It’s hard to imagine anyone else portraying these select villains more vividly than them.  And it all comes down to giving a villain an amazing personality, one on which the audience will instantly latch on to.

But, not every villain leaves a mark, and it is sometimes the fault of Hollywood sticking too close to formula.  We know the villains that we love to hate, but who are the ones that are just hateable, and nothing else. One thing that I’ve noticed about the least successful villains is that they fall into certain types; namely authority figures, and it’s a trope that is often overused in movies.  How many movies do you know of where the villain is just a stubborn general who won’t stray from his battle plan, or a religious figure entrenched in his or her ways, or a corporate hot shot that keeps our hero down.  These characters are very overused in movies and often signify to me lazy writing.  A villain shouldn’t be an afterthought, but instead the greatest obstacle that the hero must have to face.  Even if your story is centered around these types of adversaries, try to find a new spin to make the villain more than just an archetype.  This is why some of the superhero movie villains tend to be a little weak, because more and more of them are mostly formulaic, or are never given a clear motivation the same way that the hero is.  This is primarily what made the movie Iron Man 3 (2013) a failure for me.  The movie pulled a bait and switch on us by making us think that this larger than life adversary called The Mandarin (played by Ben Kingsley) was after our hero, but instead we learn that it was a shady corporate scientist overlord named Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) that was really pulling the strings.  It was a lame trick because we were denied an iconic villain in favor of a generic one.  What I saw with this was Marvel trying to play it safe because they might of thought a villain called the Mandarin would be politically incorrect.  But, casting an actor like Kingsley would’ve remedied that, so I have no idea why they changed it.  Being politically incorrect with your villain may be risky, but not always unrewarding.  It all depends on how well the execution is.  A perfect example would be Amy Dunne from Gone Girl (2014), played vividly by Rosamund Pike.  A vindictive woman taking extreme measures to punish her sometimes abusive husband may not be a portrayal that would make feminists happy, but the extreme lengths she takes in the movie, including outright murder, turns her into one of the most memorable villains in recent memory.

I think that this is what usually defines a memorable villain in films today; their extreme natures.  Because the lines between good and evil are blurred, with perspective from the audience coming into play, the villain is much more defined not by just committing an evil act, but by how extreme they take their villainy to the next level.  This is true in stories where moral relativism comes into play.  Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) is the villain of the Godfather movies, but he lives in a world completely full or gangsters, crooks, and corrupt politicians.  It’s because he takes such extremes in securing his power that his actions make him more of a villain than the others.   Going to great extremes is also why larger than life villains leave such a mark.  No one has better defined the larger than life villain than Disney has.  For most of us, we are introduced to the concept of good vs. evil from Disney movies, and their villains are so ingrained in our childhood psyche, that they become the archetypes of evil that we see in everything else.  How many times have you heard the names of Cruella DeVil, Jafar, Ursula, Captain Hook, or Judge Frollo brought up when discussing a villain from another movie or even some real world figures in the news.  That’s the power of having a compelling villain at the forefront of your story.  In some cases, Disney villains become more popular than the movies they originated from, like Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty (1959) or Hades from Hercules (1997).  This is something that you should see more often from comic book movies, because like Disney films, they have a strong rogues gallery to pull from.  Surprisingly, only Loki (played by Tom Hiddleston) has seemed to generate a following outside of the films he’s in within the Marvel universe.  What Disney and other iconic films have shown is that audiences will embrace the more extreme villains out there, so Marvel has no other excuse to indulge the dark side just a little more.

A great hero is always defined by a great villain, so if cinema wants to have heroes worth rooting for, they must not be afraid of making their villains compelling as well.  Sometimes playing by formula gives you the adversary you need, but as we’ve seen, the greater the threat, the grander the adventure.  Strangely enough, I see the perfect formula for finding great villains in a story through video games of all places.  What drives us to play a game and battle through the same kinds of obstacles over and over again?  It’s because of the allure of what waits for us at the end, when we come face to face with the “Final Boss.”  The greater the final showdown is, the more rewarding the experience.  Of course, not every movie needs to play out like a video game, but it gives us a good idea about how do we build up the threat of each villain in the hero’s story.  You don’t want to face the same obstacle as you have before; you want to face the worst of them all so that you can find out if your journey was worth it and that you’ve learned something through it all.  And of course, it helps if the villain is a compelling character in their own right.  The best thing to hope for is that the actors and filmmakers share the same kind of love and care for portraying their most loathsome creations as they would for the heroes.  The best villains in movie history are always carefully constructed and in many cases, are examples of where the filmmakers took chances and were unafraid of going to extremes.  Going outside of one’s comfort zone, whether it’s within the performance or in the writing, is the best way to make a memorable villain.  Tarantino has often said the best thing he’s ever written is the vile introduction speech by Hans Landa, where he discusses the method of hunting down Jews.  Sometimes a writer may hate every word they give to their villain, but done with enough panache, and you’ve got a villain that you can be proud of creating.  Evil is a powerful concept in the world, and the more compelling and vivid the villain who embodies it, the more eager we are to see it vanquished.  That’s the key role a villain must always fill.

Movie Reviews

Doctor Strange – Review

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The fall movie season is well under way, but so far, the last few weeks have been pretty bare.  With only Clint Eastwood’s Sully being the one breakout hit since summer, movie audiences have been craving something big from Hollywood.  With Snowden, The Birth of a Nation, Inferno, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, and The Girl on the Train all receiving tepid to outright terrible receptions, you have to wonder if it’s even worth it to release anything in the first couple months of Fall anymore.  At this point last year, we had already seen The Martian and Hotel Transylvania 2 hit big numbers, so you would think that now is a point this year that Hollywood is beginning to see some problems.  Thankfully, the second half of the Fall season is here and what better way to kick it off than a new film from the ever reliable Marvel Studios.  Marvel returns to the fall season for the first time since Thor: The Dark World (2013) with yet another film that seems like a big gamble for the studio.  After showcasing dynamic earthbound heroes with Captain America and Iron Man, as well as celestial heroes with Thor and Guardians of the Galaxy, Marvel now brings us a different kind of flavor to their many interesting worlds, and that’s the realm of the mystical with their new movie, Doctor Strange.  Doctor Strange finally brings to the big screen a long time fan favorite in the comic book world and helps to place him within the larger Marvel stable that keeps growing larger every year.

Created by Steve Ditko in the 1960’s, Strange was definitely a product of his era.  Strange’s mastery of magic and the manipulation of the physical and metaphysical worlds fit well with the psychedelia of the time and made him an instant hit among comic book readers.  But, in the years since, Doctor Strange has been a hard character to sell to the public.  Because of his background in mystical arts, he didn’t quite fit in as a superhero worth investing in on the big screen, like say Superman or Batman, who better fit the action hero mold.  But fans of the comics long championed the character, and he has enjoyed a long history of popularity on the page, becoming a key member of Marvel’s Avengers line in the process.  With the creation of Marvel’s Cinematic Universe (MCU) in the last decade, it finally seemed like the right time to give Strange his time in the sun, but it would have to wait until Marvel’s Phase 3 to actually happen.  But, it’s here and now fans of the comics and casual viewers as well now have the opportunity to see if Doctor Strange is able to work on the big screen as well as his fellow heroes and if he’s another jewel in Marvel’s cinematic crown, or a serious misstep.  It all comes down to whether the character works off of the page and that largely is up to how well the character is cast and if the movie manages to convey the trippier aspects of his mystical realm; neither of which is an easy thing to pull off.  So, is Doctor Strange one more hit for the MCU or have they tampered with powers out of their control and fallen into a metaphysical spiral of their own making.

The movie introduces us to Doctor Steven Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) a talented and successful surgeon from New York City, renowned for his steady hands that makes him exceptionally skilled with complex surgeries.  A car accident one night leaves him severely scarred and unable to use his hands the same way as before.  Seeing his livelihood disappearing before him, he seeks more experimental and unorthodox treatments to help restore his abilities and his search eventually brings him to a temple in Nepal where he has heard of miraculous healings being made.  There he meets a mysterious and powerful woman named The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton), who persuades the cynical Strange that the answers he seeks are not in traditional science, but in the art of the mystical.  Strange trains at the temple and learns how to use trans-dimensional magic to conjure up weapons for combat, open portals across great distances at will, and even manipulate the physical world around him.  He’s also given guidance by the loyal monk Mordo (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and the resourceful librarian Wong (Benedict Wong).  But, as his training goes on, he discovers that dark zealots of the same mystical arts are seeking to destroy the Ancient One’s protective temples, hoping to open up a gate to a dark realm where they’ll find immortality.  Led by the sinister Kaecilius (Mads Mikkelsen), the zealots seek to destroy the Sanctums; sanctuaries built in great cities around the world to protect it from encroachment of the Dark Realm and it’s master Dormammu.  Strange soon learns that he is charged with protecting this realm and many others from total annihilation, and with powerful artifacts like the Cloak of Levitation and the time altering Eye of Agamotto, he soon learns that he just might have what it takes to become the Sorcerer Supreme.

The success of this film is by no means a certainty.  After many easy to comprehend heroes like Iron Man, Captain America, the Hulk, and Spider-Man, turning a Sorcerer who practices magic into a viable inclusion to this pantheon seems a little, well strange.  Luckily, Marvel has built up enough confidence through all of their big screen adaptations to try everything they can and thankfully it works spectacularly well here.  Doctor Strange is yet another solid effort by Marvel Studios, extending their winning streak even further.  What could have easily been a mismanaged translation from the page to the screen instead feels right in line with the rest of Marvel’s body of work.  And really, the biggest strength of the film is how well it introduces it’s concepts to the viewer.  Strange feels very fresh in the comic book genre of movies, because we have yet to see this kind of hero specifically carry his own film.  Instead of following the traditional urban action thrillers of the Avengers crew, or the space based adventures of the Guardians of the Galaxy, we learn about magic spells and inter-dimensional travel and the different possibilities found within the universe itself, and we watch as our hero goes from ordinary to extraordinary in ways we’d never expect.  It’s more complex a world than what we’re used to in comic book movies, and yet, the movie never bogs itself down in the details.  Instead, it builds it’s world carefully, revealing itself through the eyes of Strange, as he goes from amateur to expert.  And while we’ve seen much of this hero-building before, it’s never been presented in this kind of fashion, with mysticism at the forefront.  It indeed shows that magic has it’s rightful place within the MCU, along with mutant powers, super suits, and mythological Gods.

Speaking of which, if this movie has a like-minded companion in the collection of Marvel films, it would be the equally fanciful Thor.  And like Thor, a large part of what helps to make the more mystical elements of the film more digestible for the casual viewer is the relatable-ness and likability of the characters.  The casting of Chris Hemsworth as Thor helped to make his film a success, because of how well he was a match for the character, and Benedict Cumberbatch is exactly the same in the role of Steven Strange.  In some ways, the casting seems unusual for Marvel.  Before, they seemed more intent on casting unknowns or unexpected choices in their roles, helping the actors get the boost they need for their careers and cementing their image as the character.  With Cumberbatch, he’s already had a successful career, both in popular franchises and elsewhere, so joining Marvel’s stable was not really anything he needed.  Also, gaining such a familiar face might hurt the chances of him effectively leaving an impression on the character for years to come.  And yet, I can think of no one who could have played the part better.  His performance is what really grounds this movie, making him incredibly magnetic and yet sympathetic throughout.  He starts off as a smartass (much like Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark), but it never feels out of character, and it helps to humanize him too.  I also have to commend the make-up and costume departments for doing such a great job of recreating the iconic look of the character, even with such a distinctive face as Cumberbatch’s behind it all.  The other cast members such as Ejiofor, Swinton, and Mikkelsen are also great in the movie, and continue Marvel’s solid run of great casting choices.  The only one that gets short ended is Rachel McAdams as the, I guess love interest Christine.  She may have been pushed to the side for story purposes, and hopefully it’s something that is rectified in future sequels.  Also, the Cloak of Levitation itself becomes a character in the movie, and it amazes me how well Marvel can find personality in even a piece of clothing like it.

If the movie has any flaw, it would be in the story itself, which is more a less a bi-product of the unfortunate fact that this is yet another origin film.  We all know the routine by now; our hero is broken (either physically or mentally) and finds themselves at a crossroads, until they are suddenly granted new powers that enable them to extraordinary things, but are soon confronted by evil forces that challenge their strength and help our hero to learn that they must use their powers responsibly and for the good of the world.  I’ve just described for you pretty much the plot of 90% of all the Super hero origin films that have ever existed, and Doctor Strange is no different.  While it does do a fine job presenting the formula, it doesn’t add anything new to it either, and that unfortunately makes it feel all too familiar.  I could anticipate plot points in this movie before they even happened, like Strange’s crisis of faith towards the end of the second act, or the breakthrough moment he reaches at the end of the first.  The only subversion of the formula comes from the final act, when Strange is called upon to save the day.  I anticipated that he was going to win in the end, I just didn’t know how, and the way the movie resolved was blessfully surprising.  That’s not to say that you won’t be engaged in the story either.  The film is well paced and offers up plenty of clever plot threads here and there; the best coming from some of the clever action sequences.  But, because it plays it more safe with the formula, it becomes less interesting in the long run and prevents this from being one of Marvel’s absolute best, like the rule-breaking Guardians of the Galaxy.  But, it’s a flaw that doesn’t ruin the movie entirely and you’ll still enjoy it for the most part.  My hope is that with the origin out of the way, they can take more chances in the sequel.

One thing that I will praise highly of the film is the amazing visuals.  This may just well be the most visually impressive Marvel film to date, and that is saying something.  The magical spells are neat to look at enough, but it’s whenever the sorcerers begin to alter the physical realm around them, and turn the world itself on it’s head, that the movie really leave you with a sense of wonderment.  Think the movie Inception (2010), but done on a much more spectacular level.  The movie establishes the idea of a Mirror dimension, where the sorcerers can manipulate world physically without repercussion to the actual world, and that enables them to break the laws of physics in all sorts of ways.  There is a spectacular sequence halfway through the movie when Doctor Strange and Mordo are on the run from Kaecilius in the Mirror dimension, and the dark wizard hunts them down by warping the city of New York all around them, making skyscrapers bend and twist in all sorts of unnatural ways, creating a colossal kaleidoscope of the cityscape.  It’s a sequence that utilizes visual effects better than anything else I’ve seen this year, and really in a long while.  If this movie doesn’t walk away with an Oscar for it’s visual effects next year, I don’t know what will.  And yet, with all the trippy visuals on display, the movie never loses sight of the action.  There’s no Michael Bay level of chaos on display here; the action is as easy to follow as anything else, even with all the eye candy on display.  This is some of the best film-making I have seen from Marvel, and it shows that they still have some new tricks up their sleeve.  A lot of credit goes to director Scott Derrickson for managing such a complex presentation without losing focus on the characters and the story.  Believe me, a less assured director would have turned this into a complete mess.  Doctor Strange thankfully is neither a mess nor a failure.

So, it’s safe to say that Marvel has yet another solid effort to their credit, and Doctor Strange has earned a rightful place alongside his more well known peers on the big screen.  While the story feels a little too overly familiar, the movie does open up so many wonderful possibilities for the future.  An inevitable sequel will help solve some of the first film’s shortcomings, and I honestly can’t wait until Strange plays a larger part in the MCU going forward (by the way, stay during the credits for some extra scenes that tie into that).  It’s especially good to see someone of Benedict Cumberbatch’s talent and charisma within the role (and how well that could play out in the future with the character) and the amazing sense of scale that the filmmakers put into the film.  Visually, this is Marvel at it’s best, even if the plot itself is them on auto-pilot.  I also can’t ignore the complaints that this movie has garnered for the perceived white-washing of the character of the Ancient One.  While it’s a serious issue in Hollywood in general, I don’t think that this movie intentionally tried to change the character for that purpose.  While it’s an excuse that might not please every, the movie does address why the Ancient One is who she is, and it’s an explanation that, at least made sense to me.  Also, Tilda Swinton is such a great actress in the role, that it really doesn’t make you care too hard in the end.  I may not see the controversy in the same way, but it’s there nonetheless.  Hopefully, people will accept the choice for what it is and this controversy will not affect the movie in the long run.  Overall, it’s another great Marvel film, and a blockbuster that Hollywood desperately needs to get this Fall season back on the right foot.  It may not be perfect, but it does enough good stuff amazingly well, that it will leave your movie going experience quite magical in the end.

Rating: 8/10

Evolution of Character

Evolution of Character – The Devil

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Halloween’s iconic band of monsters and ghoulish rogues consists of many different types.  From ghosts, to vampires, to abnormal beasts, and more commonly nowadays the rising dead, there are plenty of creatures that inspire everything from costumes to movies found around this time of year.  But, while most of these monsters are diabolical in their own right, there is no greater monster spread throughout pop culture and literature than the “man in black” himself; The Devil.  Whatever name he goes by (Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub), the Devil is certainly an iconic monster without rival.  He is the antithesis to everything good, and the source of all evil in the world, which would make him the commander of all the other icons of Halloween given that description.  Though the origins of the Devil are varied in many different cultures over several millennia, the image we most commonly associate him with today comes from the Christian conception of the demon.  The Biblical devil would go on to influence the creation of Dante’s Inferno in the 13th Century; an epic poem that helped to build our modern day conception of Hell, the devil’s domain.  These two sources are what Hollywood usually draws their image of the devil from, though his purpose in many of his screen appearances is surprisingly varied.  Unlike other characters from the Bible, and from other cultural conceptions of the Devil, there is no set rules for the right or wrong way to depict him.  For the most part, he shows up in movies, books, and other forms of entertainment, purely to represent evil in it’s purest form.

Because of the open-endedness of how best to bring the Devil into one’s story, there are so many different and varied depictions of “old Nick” in movies throughout the years.  And it’s interesting how versatile a character he can be.  He can serve as an impartial judge of your sins in Ernest Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait (1943); a granter of wishes in Bedazzled (1967); a client for a private eye in Angel Heart  (1987); a lovelorn cartoon character in South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut (1999); on the search for a mate in End of Days (1999); a seedy gangster in Constantine (2005); or even the source of a super hero’s power in Ghost Rider (2007).  And yet, even in all these different purposes in a variety of different movies, they all mostly fall back on the traditional image of the devil that we are all familiar with; clothed in black or red (or both), dark beard (usually pointy), and usually with horns on his head.  But, in rare occasions, movies will deviate from this image and hide the identity of the devil into someone or something unexpected.  In Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), they even went as far as to depict the Devil as a compassionate little girl, leading that film’s Jesus Christ into the titular temptation, while he’s being crucified on the cross.  For this article, I have picked out some of the most notable versions of the Devil on film, both to show how his use on film has changed or not changed over the years, and to show the many variances we have seen of the character on the big screen.  So, delve down into the depths of Hollywood’s Hell and see the Devil in his most dastardly forms.

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CHERNABOG from FANTASIA (1940)

Funny how one of the most vivid and compelling depictions ever of the Devil on the big screen comes from a film by Disney.  Found in the Night on Bald Mountain segment of Disney’s Fantasia, this Devil is as close to a traditional, Dante-esque version of the character you’ll ever see in any movie.  But, why does Disney give him the name Chernabog.  It’s not an attempt by the animation powerhouse to distance their character from a biblical source.  The credit for naming the creature was Disney animator Vladimir “Bill” Tytla, the man responsible for animating the character in the film.  Tytla drew from his Ukrainian heritage to produce what he needed for this segment, and in the folklore of his native country, there is a demon spirit known as the Chernabog, which is very equivalent to the Christian concept of the Devil, so he married the two into one unforgettable creation.  Tytla’s final animation of Chernabog is nothing short of amazing (something that animation experts still hold in high regard today).  Gargantuan and all powerful, you really get a sense that Chernabog is the master of all evil in the world from this sequence.  Though the segment has him do nothing more than rise ghosts and ghouls from their graves and make them perform dances in front of him, his menace is still palpable.  Whether he is the truest sense of the Devil or not, he certainly fits the bill alright.  He’s still to this day a favorite Disney villain to many, and why shouldn’t he be?  The winged beast has gone on to be a standard representation of how the Devil should commonly look visually, and many other movies have taken Disney’s lead on that.  Chernabog, over all others, brought the Devil his most epic of screen presences.

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WALTER HUSTON from THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER (1941)

Here we have a classic old Hollywood take on the Devil.  A contemporary retelling of the Faust legend, the movie tells the tale of a farmer who promises his soul to the devil in return for economic success.  After gaining a lot of wealth due to the wish granted by the Devil but little personal happiness, the farmer seeks to cut himself free of the contract and he enlists a lawyer named Daniel Webster to argue his case for him; although Webster himself is also under contract with the Devil.  Going by the name, Mr. Scratch, this cinematic version of the devil is fine example of how to convey his image without making it obvious.  Mr. Scratch, played in a wonderfully hammy way by Walter Huston (father of director John Huston), looks ordinary to anyone within the film, but the pointy, dark eyebrows, mangy goatee, and devilish grin make it clear to us who he really is.  I especially like the touch of the brim on his hat, turned up on the sides to give the impression of horns on his head.  What’s interesting about this version of the devil is that he’s not actively a force of evil, but instead one who capitalizes on the evil deeds of us mortals, merely supplying the means for our own destructive ends.  He’s manipulative to be sure, but this movie also states that it’s our own vices and greedy ambitions that give him his power.  It’s very different from the Biblical version of the Devil, who is a more active sower of discord.  Here, he’s just waiting for us to slip up so that he can collect what’s left of our souls, a reminder of which the movie leaves on, with Huston breaking the fourth wall and pointing directly at his audience in the movie’s haunting final shot.

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TIM CURRY from LEGEND (1986)

While the previous example I shared only suggested the image of the Devil, this version leaves nothing out.  When anyone asks what the Devil should look like, this is probably going to be the first image that comes to mind.  So, it’s interesting that this particular character has nothing to do with the traditional Devil found in scripture.  The character here, known simply as Darkness, merely adopts the look of Satan, though he might as well be him, given his place within the story.  Ridley Scott’s quintessentially 80’s fairy tale adventure features the character of Darkness as the master of all evil in the realm, so the Satanic persona fits very well.  The movie is mostly hit or miss; the 80’s cheese has nostalgic value, but Tom Cruise in the role of an elfish forest child is a little odd.  But, Tim Curry’s performance as Darkness is nothing short of amazing.  For one thing, you have to respect the time he put into getting all that makeup applied to his face, and then acting through it all.  Curry is without a doubt the highlight of the movie and the demonic vision that he and the makeup team has created is nightmare inducing.  The sharp, grotesque features of his face are enough, but the over the top gigantic horns and burning yellow eyes make him all the more frightening.  This is a very romanticized version of the Devil put on screen; beauty in the twisted and profane.  He’s also a very sexualized version of the devil, preying on the heroine in a predatory way, and yet persuasive in his deception.  While re-purposed for a different kind of fairy tale, this version of the Devil is probably cinema’s most dynamic recreation to date, giving us the iconic image in all it’s glory with an actor and design team inspired enough to pull it off.

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JACK NICHOLSON from THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK (1987)

Let’s face it; it was going to be inevitable that an actor like Jack Nicholson was going to play the Devil some day in a film.  No stranger to playing the bad guy in movies (the Joker in Batman) nor a stranger to horror films either (The Shining), Jack Nicholson just seems tailor made to play the Master of everything evil in the movies.  So, naturally the chance finally came along to play the Devil in George Miller’s dark comedy, The Witches of Eastwick.  The film centers on three women in a small New England town (played by Michelle Pfeiffer, Susan Sarandon, and Cher) who encounter a mysterious newcomer named Daryl Van Horne (Nicholson).  Daryl buys the mansion on the outskirt of town and invites each of the women there, and through their encounters, each discovers their own powers and become witches.  But, gaining the powers only isolates them from the rest of the town, and soon they devise a way to turn their powers against him.  This is a very different take on the Devil that we’ve seen to this point, and one that’s suited more towards the persona of the actor playing him.  In this film, the Devil is a suave, playboy manipulator; ensnaring beautiful women through gifts and empowerment while at the same time, collecting their souls.  Jack’s performance as Daryl is naturally within his wheelhouse, easily slippng into the charismatic playboy that the character must be.  His performance stays strong even after that polished veneer is lifted once the witches turn their magic against him.  Nicholson becoming unhinged towards the end, revealing more of the demon inside, is definitely one of the film’s highlights, especially the now famous “Women” monologue speech he delivers.  The Devil himself couldn’t have made that moment any better.

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AL PACINO from THE DEVIL’S ADVOCATE (1997)

Just as inevitable as Jack Nicholson playing the Devil in a movie, we have also seen Al Pacino fill the role on the big screen.  His version comes in a considerably darker film, co-starring Keanu Reeves and Charlize Theron.  In The Devil’s Advocate, the Devil fills a very different role than we’ve seen before, which is that of a litigator.  The souls he collects are not random victims, but rather clients, all of whom wish for the best defense that money can buy.  But, it’s not them that this version of the Devil seeks the most; it’s Keanu Reeve’s hot shot lawyer that he wants under his power.  Al Pacino is an actor with two different modes; either he’s very reserved and collected, or he’s wildly over the top insane, and by God he uses both modes here.  The movie itself is a bit too dour and bleak at times, but Al steals every scene he is in, giving it the manic energy it needs.  The climax of the movie, where Pacino’s Devil reveals his true nature and ambitions, gives the actor the free reign to do whatever he wants and it is a gloriously unhinged scene.  His “I’m a fan of man” speech is ridiculously over the top, but it feels appropriate given who this is.  What I like about this version of the character is that, like Mr. Scratch from The Devil and Daniel Webster, he’s a Devil that preys on man’s own misbehavior, and that his power is only possible by misdeeds of our own sins.  As he states in the movie, vanity is his favorite sin, because serving solely in one’s self interest leads to every other bad deed in the book.  It’s no mistake that this Devil goes by the name of John Milton, the same moniker of the author of Paradise Lost, another parable about ambition gone wrong.  It was a masterstroke getting Al Pacino on board for this movie, and while the movie is sometimes boring, Al never disappoints.

devil-passion

ROSALINDA CELENTANO from THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST (2004)

Here we return to the more biblical version of the Devil, with Satan present in this retelling of Christ’s crucifixion.  While Mel Gibson’s hyper violent film is polarizing to this day, I think that one thing that does earn universal praise is it’s very vivid portrayal of Satan.  Though Satan’s role in the story has it’s roots in biblical text, with the spirit hovering around in Jesus’ mind as he is tempted to give up his sacrificial plans, the visual representation of the character is somewhat unique.  Instead of following the traditional image of the character popular in pop culture, with the horns and goatee, Gibson instead cast a female model in the role.  There could be many different factors related to this.  One, Gibson wanted to cast against type, thinking that the audience would expect someone who obviously looked liked the Devil we all know, and instead surprise us with this evil spirit in the form of something beautiful.  Though she is beautiful, there is still something off about her, with missing eyebrows and cold stare; it’s still clear that there is menace behind the beauty.  Secondly, and this is my own interpretation, I believe that Satan appears in this form in the movie to represent a twisted perversion of the purest thing in Jesus’ life, which is the love of his mother, Mary.  Gibson seems to back up this idea at one point in the movie when we see Satan holding in one scene what looks like a child, but it turns out to be a grotesque looking demon; done as if to taunt Jesus during his suffering.  Rosalinda Celentano fills the role perfectly and gives the Devil a very unsettling portrayal here, cold and unforgiving, and yet magnetic at the same time.  Of all the evil acts that Christ suffers in this movie, none feels more potent than the sinister voice over his shoulder telling him that all his suffering is futile.

devil-dr-parnassus

TOM WAITS from THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS (2009)

Considerably lighter in tone than The Passion’s version of the Devil, here we have Satan imagined in a different type of persona; that of a gambler.  The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is notable mostly for being the film that actor Heath Ledger was in the middle of shooting before his untimely death, leaving his performance unfinished.  Director Terry Gilliam managed to finish the film with all of Ledger’s footage intact, thanks to the help of some A-List actors filling out the remaining scenes.  But, apart from the off screen dilemma with the film’s lead, the movie has one standout supporting performance from singer Tom Waits as the Devil.  His version of the Devil is much less malicious in his actions and is more interested in stirring the pot to work things in his favor.  In particular, he has an invested interest in besting the mystical Doctor Parnassus (played by Christopher Plummer), and claiming the soul of his daughter.  For him, the misdeeds of mankind are all a game, and he’s solely interested in seeing more lost souls coming his way.  He strangely allows Parnassus a shot at determining his own fate, and when the Devil ultimately wins in the movie, it leaves him strangely unsatisfied, as if he actually feels bad about seeing the Doctor lose everything.  A rare case of sympathy from the devil.  Waits is an ideal choice for the part, keeping the character foreboding when he needs to be, but quirky at the same time.  With the bowler hat and ratty looking tuxedo, his costume definitely supports that gambler aspect of his character perfectly; making him the underworld’s top mafioso.  Considering Waits own fascination with the Dark One in his music (a common theme) he delivers enough credibility to the character to make him far more interesting and likable than he normally would.

Hollywood certainly has gotten their mileage out of this character over the years and he will most certainly be around for a long time still.  Horror remains a potent genre in film-making and to present the highest form of evil incarnate on screen, the Devil will have to be involved in some shape or form.  But, even beyond the Horror genre, there are still surprising ways to work the presence of the Devil into your stories.  As shown above, the Devil can be a part of fantasy (Legend), in a comedy (The Witches of Eastwick), in a religious film (The Passion), a psychological thriller (The Devil’s Advocate) and even be a part of an animated musical (Fantasia).  Whether he’s a trickster, a manipulator, or the harbinger of the world’s end, there are countless possibilities with how to use him.  I think that the Devil works best as a character in movies when the film moves away from the traditional image of the horned demon and portrays him as something different, although Tim Curry’s Darkness from Legend pulls off the traditional look to utter perfection.  Other versions like Jack Nicholson’s Daryl and Al Pacino’s John Milton are able to convey the embodiment of the Devil, without ever having to resort to the pitchfork and horns.  These along with the memorable portrayal of Satan in The Passion show that the Devil doesn’t have to look scary in order to be scary.  Just the idea that this is a being that has power and influence over us mortals is a scary enough idea alone, and that’s what gives the character such a strong presence in any big screen appearance he makes.  As far as Halloween icons go, few can generate a sense of terror the same way as the Devil does.