pirates, a haunted road, and a lost songwriter

Treasure Island: (2012. dir: Steve Barron) Eddie Izzard is fabulous as Long John Silver, the best I can remember. (Orson Welles mumbled his lines unintelligibly and employed a crazed and unblinking stare; Charlton Heston was far too majestic, and nobody would have bought him as a ship's cook.) He exudes a vulpine intelligence which allows him to humble himself easily for a delayed reward.

Fans of the book, prepare for some updating: we now have political correctness, some of which works mightily well (a racially integrated pirate crew), and some of which falls shamefacedly flat (Jim's mother now has an enhanced and cumbersome storyline in which she has adventures with -- wait for it -- Mrs. Long John Silver!). Possibly the worst alteration is the snarky, socialist revision of Squire Trelawney. Now, instead of comrade-at-arms and philanthropist, he is the more traditional rich man, screwing over everyone and making a ridiculous ass of himself over the gold. Poor Rupert Penry-Jones gives it a game try, but you can see how crestfallen he is over the thankless task when interviewed in the extras.

On the plus side, we get the backstory on Captain Flint's ship, which makes clearer sense of subsequent events and skews our empathy towards Long John. On the downside, do you remember that wonderful, very dark sense of mystery that came with the approach of Billy Bones to the Admiral Benbow? which deepened and gloamed with the arrival of Blind Pew, the Black Spot, and the warnings about a one-legged man? A delicious shudder-fest it was, and that mystery has been stripped away, sacrificed in a communist plot to encourage our sympathy with the downtrodden buccaneers. Ah, well. Still, it's interesting, no question.

Wind Chill: (2007. dir: Gregory Jacobs) An unconventional horror film, it takes bold risks with its slow build and because it pulls no punches in portraying its heroine as a spoiled bitch through a good half of the story. It's got a low budget, and suffers some random occurrences (why exactly did she get locked in the restroom?). If it succeeds, and whether it does is largely a matter of taste, it is down to the charms of its two lead actors, the ever-shining Emily Blunt and Ashton Holmes, whom you'll remember as the son in a History of Violence, and who has become in Hollywood, I think, the dependable guy whose resume gets pulled whenever a forlorn casting director says, "I wish we could afford Jesse Eisenberg."

*SPOILER ALERT*

Searching for Sugar Man: (2012. dir: Malik Bendjelloul) How often do you see a truly heart-warming documentary? And about a musical figure? Never. (I went into Kevin Macdonald's Marley with an age-old and unquestioned assumption that the rasta genius was also a genius at fatherhood. I don't know why. I guess because Ziggy was always smiling. It turns out that for all his talents, he sucked at parenting. Two different kids tell the story of how he'd start a race with a six-year-old, run as fast as he could, then turn around and mock the kid who was struggling to catch up. Man, that's cold.)

Let's face it: most rock stars we already know too much about. If nothing else, we know where they'll be choking on their vomit or the location of the bathtub where they'll take that hot shot or which venue on which night will be their last, and it darkens the hue of the rest of the film. That, or we know it's going to trail off into mediocrity as they dwindle into rich old men with our polite documentarian pretending they are still vital. Even Scorsese's lovely piece on George Harrison, Living in the Material World, as positive as it is, can't be called uplifting because life is complicated, and fame is complicated, and hero-worship can be deadly.

So here we have the story of a man who was Detroit's answer to Dylan in the late sixties, Sixto Rodriguez. Never heard of him? Because his records never sold here. In Apartheid South Africa, though, he was bigger than Elvis. More than one generation grew up venerating him as the voice of a rebellion.

Without giving too much away, it's as uplifting as it comes, because we expect stories of the almost-rans and the could-have-beens to be tales of despondency and failure and drugs, and this one is about the guy who had the genius, should have been famous, wasn't, and lived his life well anyway. See it.

robert carlyle film festival: gunpowder, treason and plot

(2004. dir: Gillies MacKinnon) It's a miniseries in two halves: the first about Mary, Queen of Scots and her doomed reign, the second about James and the plot against his life.

The second half is better than the first, partly due to its sparsely-used but effective soliloquy-to-the-camera device. The writing has more flair; the author was more inspired. Both halves are well-acted: Clemence Poesy (In Bruges) gives a good Mary despite some weakly-written speeches early on, and Kevin McKidd is a tough and passionate Bothwell, a Bothwell for whom any queen might throw over her throne. Michael Fassbender in the second is stoical perfection as the hardcore Guy Fawkes. Clubfooted, twisted, psychically bent, Carlyle is intense and exact, his King James a walking anxiety attack. His relationships with his wife (Sira Stampe) and with his inherited advisor, Lord Cecil (Tim McInnerny) are well-plotted and unpredictable, and the scene in which he manages to fluster the unflusterable Cecil by suggesting they allow the Catholics to go ahead and destroy his loathesome Parliament is simultaneously chilling and laugh-out-loud funny, particularly to any American familiar with our own ridiculous Congress.

Historical dramas about royals rarely feel true to me; I think it's hard enough to grasp the weird abnormality of the lives of kings, doubly hard to do so in an alien era. This one does a fair job (better with James than with Mary, whose romance with Bothwell seems a little too romantic, and whose moments of leisure tend to seem a little staged). You get absurdities like an expensive coronation in a broken economy, all in the rain, with a plague threatening London, everybody miserable, even the king and his family. You get two devastatingly effective and miserable wedding nights: the first Mary's to Darnley (an odiously good Paul Nicholls), a depiction that feels horribly veracious, and then James' with his Anne, which is no more palatable but at least perhaps less of a shock.

There is one scene in the second half which feels untrue, a plot-turn involving James convincing a courtier to sacrifice his "honor" in a particularly degrading fashion in return for a promise to restore dignity to Catholics at large. It is contrived and playwrighterly, but the rest of the Gunpowder Plot story flows at a romping pace and captures some crucial, extramundane whiff of that lost moment whose resonance can still be heard rumbling to this very day.

killer joe: stagebound

(2011. dir: William Friedkin) Plays and movies are not the same. Things that play like gangbusters onstage translate awkwardly onto the screen with bemusing frequency. One irony involved is that intimacy is reversed: while you'd think it's more intimate sitting in the same room as your actors, in a movie you're practically up their noses. Shakespearean actors have a blast with it because you can speak "to be or not to be" in a bare whisper, move hardly a muscle, and still deliver its depth of meaning.

But not all writers, let's be frank, are Shakespeare. Not to disrespect Tracy Letts: I saw August: Osage County onstage and it played like a dream, like a dream of a million bucks. My stepmother, no theatrical greenhorn, called it the best play she'd ever seen. Letts is the king of the morbidly dysfunctional southern family, and when I say "southern" I don't mean it in a romantic way, like thick Georgia drawls and haunted houses in Mississippi and fading Charleston aristocracy, but southern at its most prosaic: think Texas and the butt-end of Oklahoma. Letts and Friedkin have worked together before (Bug), and Friedkin knows his business, toning down the white-trash hysteria to a playable volume, containing and re-channeling the extreme trailer-grunge energy into cinematically viable ways while keeping at least some of the humor intact. It's still not enough to make it great, but it's enough to make it interesting.

Friedkin is admirably respectful of Letts' writing, but movies and plays are shaped differently for good reasons. Long scenes of snappy dialogue which can send the house into paroxysms when played onstage feel graceless and contrived on film, not only because we've come to expect shorter scenes, but in a movie theatre we, if only subconsciously, want a story told more through visuals than through exposition, and this we do not get with the play-script. In a play, people who dislike each other are stuck onstage together, and we tend to buy it as a convention of the art-form; not so much onscreen, where it seems so simple to walk into the next room to escape.

The whole shebang is made worth watching largely because Friedkin knows a thing or two about casting. Only Emile Hirsch fails as the debt-ridden Chris, instigator of the action (he owes money, his detested mother has an insurance policy, he has the name of a killer they can hire), unable to summon the glimpse or two of humanity necessary to win us to his side. All the other characters are as flawed and all but one (his semi-innocent and damaged sister, played without a hitch by Juno Temple) are as nasty, and yet the actors (Gina Carano as the slutty and self-serving stepmother, Thomas Haden Church as the thick-headed and self-serving father, Matthew McConaughey as the killer) show us three dimensions and so we accept them, awful as they are. Marc Macaulay, in his single scene as the small-town godfather Digger Soames, is utterly delightful.

It's easy to divide the bulk of film actors into two camps: actors and Movie Stars. Some (Duke, Marilyn, Elizabeth Taylor) are undeniably great movie stars without coming close to being great actors. An actor shifts masks and personas, whereas the emblematic attributes of the Movie Star are a conspicuous, unchanging presence combined with a constant and powerhouse charisma. (Also, the camera never stops loving a true Movie Star, no matter how altered by age or maquillage.) Some more tricksterly types shift back and forth across the line (Clift or Dean, maybe, or DeNiro, who used to be able to go from Nitrogylcerine Charisma to none at all from one role to the next).

McConaughey is a Movie Star, no question, because his voice is unmistakable and his charisma cannot be disguised, but I've always said he's had undeserved short shrift as an actor. If you still need proof of the man's skill, watch Magic Mike, Bernie, and this one together, all three performances from the last few years. Or, in fact, go back and look at his first performances: in Lone Star, a Time to Kill, and Dazed and Confused. The ability is already there: he has the power to carry the dramatic lead, the aptitude to sidestep into an enigmatic smaller role, and the comic timing to deliver the drollities. It's all there from the beginning, and he's been honing his chops for years. As this eponymous mercenary, he's found the wisdom to avoid going for the obvious laugh lines, and that's necessary, because those broad, jokey ironies which play well to the loges would lose their zing in this context of intimacy.

In the Grand Guignol of the climactic scene, a long one of bullying, forced disclosures, and grotesque humiliation, even McConaughey's focus and dignity and the admirably unwavering skills of Carano and Haden Church cannot completely overcome the ugly silliness of the script. As with so many filmed plays, the word "contrived" keeps springing to mind. Still, just about everything besides the script works so well here, I wonder if either Letts can learn to write for the screen, or if Friedkin can find someone just as talented who can. That's one of my cinematic wishes for the new year.