Jonah Hex: (2010. dir: Jimmy Hayward) Jonah Hex, particularly as played by Josh Brolin, is a great, great character. I've got a soft spot for those borderland antiheroes, the liminal fellows who stride back and forth between hell and here then heaven and here, between life and afterlife and life again. John Constantine is a big one for me (from the books, I mean, although I'm here to tell you that against all the odds it turned out alright, Keanu Reeves playing the role). Stark from the Sandman Slim books is another, alongside sundry archangels and vampires, and now Jonah Hex.
Not that the movie is all that good. Throwing myself against the overwhelming tide, I'll go on record saying that I think comic books don't make great movies most of the time, and this is no exception. Still, I didn't regret these few hours. Hex has some good lines, and Brolin gives them the unencumbered deadpan he used to such advantage in No Country for Old Men. Like when he's going off to his final battle: he gives his horse to the stable-kid and says let him run free if I'm not back by morning, and the kid says does he have a name and Hex says, "Nnhn. Horse." Then he looks down at the dog who's been, um, dogging his steps since he saved it from a wrongful circus, and he says, "I don't know what to say to you," then he walks off to face his destiny.
John Malkovich is working a lot these days, and that's alright, but this is the kind of role I wish someone else had got. His INSTRUMENT, as they say in the biz, by which I mean his voice and his plasticity of facial expression, is not a particularly good one. And because his choices have become deadeningly familiar over the years, a thing has to be extraordinarily well-written or he's dishwater dull, which is a turn of phrase I wouldn't avoid in describing this one-dimensional villain. Michael Fassbender has all the charisma as his cruel Irish sidekick, and it feels like the story would have been better served had he played archnemesis to the inimitible Jonah.
In fact, it's too bad this was such a bomb and so it won't have a sequel, which might have been a very good thing. It's the movies like this one, with full, exciting but underused or badly-used worlds which ought to have sequels. Things like Pirates of the Caribbean and Jaws, they got done right the first time and sequels can only add weight until the whole gets dragged down from those original towering heights.
Nightmare Alley: (1947. dir: Edmund Goulding) *SPOILER ALERT* Dark, dark carnival noir about Tyrone Power's rise from studly carny to rich conman and his subsequent fall into geekdom, barely finding last-minute salvation in the steadfast love of a good woman. As in all noirs, he's got a choice between the smart, sexy, tough broad and the nice, pretty girl, and he generally chooses wrongly. It's an unrelenting film set in a brutal world, and it's got at least one shot that's a knockout: his face when he accepts his destiny as a geek, the thing he's always feared most.
Agora: (2009. dir: Alejandro Amenabar) *SPOILER ALERT* Hypatia (the always wonderful Rachel Weisz) is a teacher and scientist of some genius in 4th-century Egypt, in the days when everyone was a Roman whether they liked it or not. Unfortunately for the world, Constantine had made a canny decision in the previous century to embrace a crazy young religion peopled by zealots and troublemakers who worshipped a dead man on a cross, and the world is torn asunder by their fanaticisms.
Political "Message Movies" are tough. On the one hand, you want to make a movie that does some good in the world; on the other, movies are made to tell stories, and was it Sam Goldwyn who said if you want to send a message, call Western Union? He had a point. We The Audience resent your message, because it gets in the way of our suspension of disbelief, keeps demanding that we look at it. A character becomes a mouthpiece, manipulated, and the auteur's forearm can plainly be seen stuck into the back of the puppet.
Think of a message movie that you really loved, not one that you paid admiring lip-service to as you left the cinema, but one that engaged you so much you watched it over and over compulsively. It's not easy. There's On the Waterfront, which is carried into greatness by a tough, first-rate script and the young Brando's incredible charisma, the two combining to blind us to the controversy of its narcing-on-your-friends-is-OK message. The one that comes first to my mind is Peter Weir's anti-war film Gallipoli, a grand success because it sticks close to the characters, follows them through thick and thin, gives them priority and tells their story, which just happens to end badly courtesy of an infamous battle on a remote Turkish peninsula called Gallipoli during World War I. The message is delivered because it's secondary to the characters. Weir got it right, but he's a rare bird. In Agora, Amenabar pays scrupulous attention to visual historicity but his film exudes that falseness which rises from giving one's message precedence over one's story.
Aside from that, the details feel real, the acting is heartfelt; its vision is lovely, with the camera seeming to perform great swoops upward into the atmosphere to remind us that the world is far vaster than the problems of even a great community. The script feels strangely unintellectual for a movie about an intellectual. The story is utterly depressing, of course, even though they left out the clam-shells (seriously, don't ask), for which I am eternally grateful. The guy who gets to walk away the hero at the end is her Christian ex-slave who gives her an easy death. From a feminist perspective, the eroticism of the moment is certainly troubling, but it's hardly surprising, since this is not Hypatia as revealed from within but as seen and experienced from without, and always by men (there is no other speaking female character in the thing). When it was over, I didn't feel like I'd gotten to know her, in spite of all of Weisz's strong and good work; more damningly, I didn't feel like the script-writer knew her any better than I did.
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