Gods and Generals: (2003. dir: Ronald Maxwell) This is somebody's favorite movie, I'm sure of it, someone for whom the War Between the States is as real today as it was 150 years ago, and I respect that. Most of us, though, will find it overlong and a little tedious, employing too liberal a dosage of swelly music. It can be summarized as somber, earnest speechifying by very good actors, punctuated by protracted (and probably very accurate) battle re-enactments. You can find here all your favorite quotes by all your favorite Civil War heroes (Robert E Lee pausing long enough to say the thing about it being well that war is so terrible, or, my favorite, Stonewall Jackson's dying words about crossing over the river and resting beneath the shade of the trees.) Nobody can argue with the performances, though, and the over-serious, thoughtful and sentimental way of speaking, although strange to our ears, rings true for the time. This is Stonewall's story, mostly, and when Stephen Lang (an actor who never stops amazing me) takes off his hat and starts to pray aloud, it is as genuinely stirring as it is alien to our modern cynicisms.
Civil War enthusiasts will want to hang on every moment, but most of us benefit from keeping the fast-forward button close to hand. If you speed through the first five seconds of every scene, generally a long, establishing shot, a sweeping pan of the next battlefield or an extended view of a crowded parlor with a young lady playing piano, and then again some through the thicks of the battles, you can cut this epic back by a much-needed half-hour.
A Time To Kill: (1996. dir: Joel Schumacher) Self-righteous claptrap intertwined with sentimental hogwash, but every now and then they get a moment just right and it almost sends a shiver down your spine.
Much as I hate to admit it, this failure does not rest at Joel Schumacher's door (like all his myriad other failures): he did his part just right. It's old-fashioned in its presentation, old-fashioned in a good way, perfect for the story, which is courtroom melodrama in which the villains are heinous and the heroes are spotless. (Patrick McGoohan is a piece of perfection as the judge.) It's the script that's mostly the loser. With its repetition of charged emotional exchanges, it put me in mind of soap opera, like when they have to re-live the heated conversation they had last week for any viewers who missed last week's ep. The characters are shallow, and only a top-notch cast, clear down the line to the smallest supporting roles, gives it the leg-up to make it watchable.
Schumacher creates a world we can experience with all our senses: this is a South where you can feel the heat, smell the sweat, you can taste the sensuality between the leads. The colors are saturated so it feels like an old-time movie, and the editing goes right along with that, never drawing attention to itself. Seriously, though, Grisham (or whoever) should be ashamed of himself, writing soppy, melodramatic dialogue like this.
the Manitou: (1978. dir: William Girdler) Ah, the cheeseball horror films of the seventies. This has something in common with the Fury, the Car, the Brood (although none of the best things), and it wants to have something in common with the Exorcist, but you can't say that with a straight face. The thing it has most in common with, in fact, is the original Star Trek series. It has Michael Ansara (Kang from "Day of the Dove"), the big-assed lizard from "Arena", an overblown score by Lalo Schifrin that could easily have whumped up over the top of Captain Kirk overacting, and the same set-builder, as far as I can tell. When the "manitou" (a 400-year-old spirit of a powerful medicine man) is about to erupt (from the neck of a randomly-chosen woman) into the world, the whole floor of the hospital goes ice-cold, and it looks way more like Star Trek than the Exorcist, with all the cheap badness that suggests (ie: styrofoam icicles instead of seeing people's breaths).
This is about the epitome of an MST2K movie, and should be approached as such. I think Susan Strasberg got cast because of a strange facial anomaly: when she screams, it appears that her mouth is larger than the rest of her face. And that's as good a reason as any for a movie like this.
No comments:
Post a Comment