Saturday, November 17, 2007 Rant Archive
There are many levels of bad movie. There are good bad movies that you love watching because you enjoy making fun of them. There are bad bad movies that you are so mad you wasted your time and money seeing that you are offended by the thought of them. Then there’s SOUTHLAND TALES. It’s the kind of bad movie that you want every single one of your friends to see so that you can all discuss the atrocity to which you’ve just subjected yourselves.
I believe the only way to truly enjoy SOUTHLAND TALES is to be tripping on some pretty good acid. Even then, though, I think you might get bored after about thirty minutes and resort to watching static on television.
It’s truly not a boring movie; that’s definitely not what’s wrong with the film. It’s got nuclear war, Big Brother, political corruption, crazy drugs, time travel, and midgets in SWAT gear. What bored me is that I didn’t care what the hell anyone did or didn’t do.
In 2005, a nuclear bomb was dropped on Texas. This, of course, led to World War Three. Now, three years later, the government has reinstated the draft, issued nationwide identification cards, and controls the Internet. The Republican Party has a good chance of winning the election, and there’s an extremist Marxist group that doesn’t want to that happen.
If you’ve ever been in a high school English class, chances are you’ve read the English epic poem “Beowulf” before. However, that sprawling text with the funny words in it probably failed to give you the jolt you get from watching BEOWULF, the CGI animated, 3-D epic from director Robert Zemmicks.
For those who never made it to high school English class, “Beowulf” the poem described the heroic exploits of Geat warrior Beowulf, who answered Danish king Hrðgar’s call for a hero to rid his great mead (beer) hall Heorot of the monster, Grendel. In the poem Beowulf won three battles: first against Grendel, then against Grendel’s mother, a water demon, finally a third battle against the Wyrm, a serpentine dragon that mortally wounded Beowulf, and set his great legacy in stone.
The movie script, by famed comic book auteur and novelist Neil Gaiman (SANDMAN) and former Tarantino-collaborator Roger Avery, took a bit of liberty with its source material. The film manipulated the basic structure of the poem to craft a deeper story where Beowulf (Ray Winstone) kills Grendel, only to be seduced by the monster’s demon mother (she is Angelina Jolie after all,) who placed a curse upon Beowulf, one that ultimately led him into the fatal battle against the dragon. None of the key elements or themes of the poem were really lost in this Hollywood “remix”—in fact, some of the more insightful points about Beowulf the man, which the poem could only hint at, were given room to breathe on the screen. And while the film did slow down in the middle, it eventually picked up steam again to deliver a pretty spectacular climax.
Boy, you got to keep an eye on that Ang Lee. Every time you turn around, dude’s working in another genre, mixing and matching stuff. Doesn’t he know once you get pigeonholed, you’re supposed to stay there, lest the audiences and studios get confused? You don’t see Tarantino making period pieces, nor are you likely to see Sidney Lumet make a big-budget sci-fi extravaganza, so why should Lee get to play the field? Other than the fact he can, of course. Well, actually, I think that’s all the reason you need, and apparently so does Lee. LUST, CAUTION is just the latest entry in Mr. Lee’s canon to show he’s got the goods.
The movie jumps around in time a bit, but it all takes place between 1938 and 1942. War has broken out (you know, the big war with the Nazis and the A-bombs), and the Japanese have seized various ports and cities, including Hong Kong and Shanghai. In the midst of this, a young Hong Kong student named Wong Chia Chi (Wei Tang) falls in with a group of students dedicated to resistance. At first, their fight is carried on through performing on the stage, but they decide to take a more active role and form a cell dedicated to taking out traitors. Using their acting skills, they hit on a plan to infiltrate the lovely Ms. Wong into a friendship with Mrs. Yee (Joan Chen), in order to find the best way to pop a cap in Mr. Yee (Tony Leung Chiu Wai), a collaborationist whose specialty seems to be in extracting information.
A number of years ago, I reviewed a Stephen King horror novel and, as a joke, wondered where the child welfare people were when he needed them. At the time, King was more reclusive than he is now, and little was known about his background. Since then he’s become more accessible and I’ve read details about his apparently very difficult childhood.
I of course felt terrible. It was a stab at humor that might just as easily become a stab at the heart. It’s why I’m extra careful in discussing MARGOT AT THE WEDDING. The screenwriter-director Noah Baumbach seems to have staked out and laid a substantial claim to dysfunctional families as subject matter.
His 2005 THE SQUID AND THE WHALE earned him an Oscar nomination for best screenplay, and numerous questions from journalists about how much of the movie was based on his real life. In a recent story, the New York Times called SQUID a “film a clef,” pointing out that like the two main characters, his writer parents were divorced when he was a child.
If it turns out that MARGOT is another “film a clef,” I’ll feel terrible again about this review -- and really ticked off at his parents.
When the film begins Margot and her son Claude (Zane Pais) are on a train. They’re traveling from their Manhattan home to a country house in Maine to attend Margot’s sister’s wedding.