ONE MAN’S FIGHT TO SELL YOU A TV SERIES THAT YOU HAVE NEVER HEARD OF WITH GOOD REASON
Ever on the look-out for films that don’t actually exist, today I stumbled upon this improbable gem at my local Tesco – Rome: Blood and Sand.
Previously on the DVD Detective, we saw how easy it is to re-release an unknown film by combining the title of two successful TV shows, so this time around I wasn’t so much smelling rats as instantly identifying their sub-species of rodentia.
Fusing the titles of the underappreciated HBO series Rome and the over-appreciated nipples-and-gore delivery system Spartacus: Blood and Sand, some cynical distributor was trying to catch me off-guard again, and it wasn’t going to work. Not even the presence of Emily Blunt in the cast list could convince me that this wasn’t some C-list spectacle masquerading amongst the shelves of Smurfs and Twilight movies.
How right I was. Wading through the wiki, I at first assumed the renamed film in question might be Boudica, aka Warrior Queen (my how this was beginning to look like an identical tale to the Thrones & Empires debacle), one of Blunt’s earliest roles, but the casts didn’t align. Soon enough I found that my target was not a film at all but a TV mini-series, something the badly Photoshopped case had neglected to mention. Pity the fool who blind buys from Tesco.
Empire, a much-derided ABC television series that was drowned in the brief praise that accompanied HBO’s less forgotten venture, similarly tells the story of the early Caesars. To spice things up, the show injects the character “Tyrannus”, a former gladiator, into proceedings. It’s like they were baiting Ridley Scott into a lawsuit.
Look at Colm Feore there, so imperial and in no way made for televisiony
According to the back of the box Empire was praised by The Wall Street Journal for its “powerful acting”, a pull quote so suspicious I was shocked to google and discover it was both accurate and faithful to the intention of the reviewer. The cast of 24 veterans (James Frain, Colm Feore, Dennis Haysbert) and pre-Prada Blunt almost make this a show I’d be curious to check out. Although the best discovery of this adventure is learning that the show’s Marc Antony, Welsh actor Vincent Regan, is so much the swords and sandals whore that his filmography includes Troy, 300 AND Clash of the Titans (2010). Now if you ask me, that’s just a bit excessive.
If anything should really warn you off here, though, it’s that tagline. “One man’s fight to destroy an entire empire!” is completely off-rhythm. That “entire” is superfluous, and only draws attention to the fact that this DVD case is disguising its origins as “Empire”. If any empire has been destroyed here, it’s the show itself.
You can view the hilariously rushed and melodramatic opening to the series below. You know, if you’re into that sort of thing.
The S stands for “Strike the pose”: Henry Cavill as Superman
It’s been 26 years since we last saw Superman punch a guy on the big screen. The sole attempt to bring back the last son of Krypton since Christopher Reeve last wore the red cape, 2006’s cringe-inducing Superman Returns, saw Supes battling his greatest nemesis yet: an inanimate chunk of rock. That anti-climax is perhaps the greatest of the reasons that film, and the Superman brand, has suffered so hugely in the public consciousness.
Rebooted here with the explosive verve of a Zack Snyder movie, this take on the Superman myth satisfies both those who crave faster-than-a-speeding-bullet aerial fistfight-ery and those who like their Christ allegories with really good hair.
Superman Returns hammered home its Christ metaphor with Superman descending from the sky, resurrected, in cruciform pose. Man of Steel attempts to one-up it, recreating that divine posture—although at a less pivotal moment—and even having a scene where Clark Kent soul-searches in a church, haloed by stained glass. But it’s actually a lot cleverer than this. Clark, born Kal-El, is planet Krypton’s equivalent of the Virgin Birth, a child born through natural reproduction on a dying planet where kids have been eugenixed in Matrix-like pods for generations. Even before the planet crumbles due to the hubris of its ruling elite, Kal-El is already the last hope for his people.
As the fascist General Zod (Michael Shannon) mounts a coup, Kal-El’s father Jor-El (an exceptionally enthusiastic Russell Crowe) embarks on a quest to preserve the history of his people, showing the sort of physicality that escaped Marlon Brando back in 1978. The “Codex” of the Kryptonian people is retrieved and launched into space with the miracle child, just as Zod’s rebellion is brought to a close and the planet devours itself in a bowl of lava-Os.
Jor of the Worlds: Russell Crowe showing his son how staring off into the distance dramatically is really done
After this extended introduction to this slightly different take on the Superman origin, David S. Goyer’s screenplay eschews the chronological tracing of the early years of Jor-El’s life as Clark Kent, of Smallville, Kansas, in favour of cutting to his Bruce Wayne-like journey of self-discovery, helping those in need across America with less than sufficient subtlety for the only alien on Earth. In moments of reflection Clark thinks back to suitable lessons from his youth, the calming tone of his mother Martha (a finely aged Diane Lane) and the baseball coach morality of his father Jonathan (Kevin Costner, back with a very calm and insightful vengeance).
The intercutting flashbacks allow us to get to Clark’s discovery of who he is more quickly, uncovering a lost Kryptonian craft hidden in the Arctic and downloading his birth father’s memories, giving Crowe considerably more—and welcome—screen time. Soon he is wearing the old blue, red and bit o’ yellow and blasting around the planet like he owns the place. But crafty reporter Lois Lane (Amy Adams) is on the trail of this super-human do-gooder, and a vengeful General Zod emerges from the shadows of space searching for the Codex and the son of Jor-El.
Snyder, a filmmaker whose hitting and missing along the years have never allowed critics to deny his ambition and flair, shows remarkable restraint here, choosing to focus on the scale of the world(s) his story is set in instead of drawing all attention to action and movement; there is not a moment of his signature slow-down/speed-up style of editing, allowing the super-powered Kryptonians to blast around the screen at their own dizzying speeds. The scenes on Krypton could rival Avatar for sheer scale of world-building, while the flashbacks to Kansas are filmed with the tenderness and tone of an Oscar-nominated coming-of-age tale: the director of 300 shooting like Richard Linklater meets Terrence Malick. Who’d have seen it coming?
Kent touch this: Kevin Costner and Diane Lane as Pa and Ma Kent
The story is well-known, though there are a few new beats to this drum. Superman is unknown to the people before Zod and his army arrive. Lois is on to the son of Jor-El long before she meets Clark. Kryptonite and Lex Luthor play no part in the tale, although the latter’s industrial might is evident in one scene. A new extreme take on the life lessons Jonathan Kent teaches Clark provides one of the film’s most affecting scenes.
The action and drama are updated suitably, and there are some clever allusions to the world of today, with Superman in one scene forced to down a military drone sent to track his location. But the failure to properly evolve the Daily Planet, the “newspaper” of record, seems like both a missed opportunity and a cop-out. The internet is briefly mentioned as an alternative means to break a story, but there is no feel for the crisis in the industry. The scenes in the Daily Planet offices feel terribly dated, with even the layout of the newsroom floor looking like it’s from the 1970s. As if struck by a magic beam fired by some politically correct supervillian, editor Perry White is now black and Jimmy Olsen is now Jenny—all good progressive things, if only the characters were given anything to do.
The script is both the salvation and damnation of Man of Steel. Goyer, whose finest work rests in The Dark Knight trilogy, created this story with producer Christopher Nolan, taking a break from bats. The Batman Begins structure of the early earthbound sequences revels in this reunion, and Goyer’s screenplay is superb at contrasting the patriarchs and the lessons they imbue upon their shared son. But the dialogue outside of these father/son scenes is often dull, and almost every last one of Goyer’s jokes falls sigh-worthily flat. One military character has an identical arc to a police character in The Dark Knight Rises, almost scene for scene. The burden of two enormous themes—what does it mean to be human? and; what does it mean to be the last of one’s kind?—proves too much for Goyer to balance, and by the end one of these questions has been all but completely dropped.
British actor Henry Cavill, following performances in The Tudors and Immortals, shows himself a strong leading man as the adult Clark Kent. Preposterously handsome, like TV Clark Kent Tom Welling but sculpted in marble, Cavill’s presence dominates when he is not pitched against the two Robin Hoods, who utterly steal the film. Cavill may not be given too many opportunities to show off his talents, but in the few scenes where it counts his face unleashes an intensity and pain that totally sell the moment.
Hard-knocking journalism: Amy Adams as Lois Lane
Amy Adams is less lucky as Lois, working with an awkwardly written version of the character, but still ever-believable as a successful female reporter. Zack Snyder, whose Sucker Punch has been the subject of more women’s studies PhDs than Sylvia Plath (FACT), refrains from making an obvious sex symbol out of Lois, keeping her professionally dressed throughout, and able to give as good as she gets in debate with even the most alpha male of men. If Goyer had been more successful in writing both her character and the love story between Lois and Clark, Adams could no doubt have stolen the show. Michael Shannon is similarly let down by lax characterisation, but his undeniable intensity makes him a riveting Hitler-esque Zod to Terence Stamp’s more Rasputiny take.
Hans Zimmer may be no John Williams, but his score rises at the most crucial moments and lingers in the ear with the same fire, if not the same bombast. This is a film with an almost faultless soundscape, and the sound effects on Krypton help sell it as both a believable world and society. The production design on Krypton is fantastic, with devices using Pin Art-style illustrations to communicate instead of video screens, and the costumes looking like Liberace-in-space, flamboyant but superbly detailed.
This all brings us back to the action, because yes—indeed—Superman does punch someone in the face. Several times. For the most part Snyder conceives a remarkable, rocketing look to his action scenes, although the speed can be hard to follow. Clark’s first battle with the Kryptonians is thrilling but overstays its welcome, and the camera at times is more concerned with framing the logo of an IHOP than showing the fates of those thrown through its windows. A battle with a tentacled robot is a poorly edited and indecipherable mess, but the payoff is immense. A re-enactment of a major scene from Independence Day slips from homage into theft, and the film’s recurring usage of the fatal consequences of buttons being only half-pressed down is insulting to the audience.
Zod man out: Michael Shannon looks, as ever, as if he is only moments away from snapping and killing everyone
The carnage of the finale is unspeakable, and the presence of Transformers 3 DP Amir Mokri seems hardly a coincidence, with buildings crumbling and exploding all across Metropolis in a veritable blitzkrieg of CGI. It looks superb, but with Goyer choosing to focus on only three civilians throughout the colossal donnybrook there is little sense of human tragedy in what must be a ground zero of Nagasakian proportions. The Avengers was far more concerned with the average citizen.
Like the film itself, the action sequences are troubled, but overall satisfying. Snyder has not made the magisterial Superman film that people had hoped for, but he has made the most exciting take on the tale yet. Sequels will come, and the end earns them. But no scene is more deserving of a Superman franchise than that moment when Henry Cavill first takes to the skies, as if lifted by Zimmer’s score, and jets across the world, Snyder’s camera slamming from left to right, struggling to keep up with the superhero. It’s the cinematic moment the character has been craving since Action Comics #1.
You won’t need to believe a man can fly; you’ll see it.
Rise of the Guardians fell under the radar somewhat in late 2012. A family entertainment for Christmas (set at Easter) with some wonderful animation and an undeniable sweetness at its core, it has under-performed hugely for DreamWorks, only now in late January taking in twice its $145m budget, which will elevate it to just a notch above “disappointing”.
Exactly what went wrong is unclear. Admittedly trying to portray childhood fantasy icons such as Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy as Avengers-style superbeings is a bit much to ask of audiences, but compared to other US animated films released in recent years this was still a step above the average.
For all its problems, from the basics of its premise to its mismanaged marketing, I for one enjoyed Rise of the Guardians. The animation was as strong as DreamWorks has ever produced, and the story provided a deeply affecting reversal in the final act for the character of Jack Frost that was as good as any moment in How to Train Your Dragon (although Dragon admittedly had more than its fair share of those moments).
But while I liked Guardians, I could not shy away from the fact that the universe it created repeatedly threw up mental roadblocks for me. Overt silliness in the dialogue or subtle visual references to other projects (intentional or not) would grab me by the brain and drag me right out of the movie. I imagine, given the box office returns and lack of word-of-mouth, that I cannot be alone in this.
Here are the issues that troubled me most.
1. Guardians! Guardians! Guardians!
No, you did not see this movie
It’s not DreamWorks’ fault of course, but my goodness there are a lot of films with “guardians” in the title doing the rounds of late. Back in 2010, Zack ‘300’ Snyder directed Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole, a CGI owl fantasy movie. If you know five people who saw it, you’re probably lying.
Elsewhere, Marvel have announced their most risky project for “Phase 2” of their Avengers series, Guardians of the Galaxy, which features a brigade of intergalactic superheroes (including a rocket-powered racoon – take THAT magic owls!).
Of course what both of those films have over Rise of the Guardians is that we know from the title precisely what they are guardians of. Rise of the Guardians could be set at a foster home for all anyone can tell.
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2. Guardians Will Rise
Planets full of apes have also been known to rise
It was an unfortunate year to choose “rise” to be the load-bearing noun in your movie title. The Dark Knight Rises was one of the biggest hits of 2012, and laid a flat-out claim to the verb “rise” and all its subsidiaries.
But Rise of the Guardians really is a nothing title. In fact, when we first meet the Guardians as a group, they are already an assembled unit; there really is no rising going on here. It’s just a title for the sake of it; that “rise” could be the most redundant noun in a movie title since Aliens Vs Predator: Requiem.
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3. Where have I seen this before?
Oh what fun Jack Skellington might have had behind the other doors…
I won’t be the first to point out the fact that Rise of the Guardians is more or less the film that happens when you open all the doors in The Nightmare Before Christmas. Far more troubling though is the similarities to the plot of (sorry about this) The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause.
Seriously, just try and see how much of that trailer you can get through before wanting to jam a fork in your eyes.
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4. Logorama
What if he hooked a person?
In this secular fantasy, the Guardians take their orders from The Man in the Moon – who traditionally appears in all DreamWorks films as a part of the company’s logo. In Guardians, is he a stand-in for God, or an overt advertisement for the company that produced the film?
It’s like having James Bond report for duty, only to learn that M has been replaced by MGM, a giant 80-year-old lion.
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5. Tom Hiddleston!
He even LOOKS like Tom Hiddleston!
What a 2012 Tom Hiddleston had! Riding high from the get-go after strong performances in War Horse and The Deep Blue Sea, he played the maniacal villain Loki in The Avengers before voicing the dastardly Pitch Black in Rise of the Guardians. How could things possibly get any better for… wait. That was Jude Law?! Well fuck me they sound alike!
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6. Santa LOLZ
If there’s one thing kids love it’s Night of the Hunter references
Santa Claus having a Russian accent makes a lot more sense than the English accent he regularly has in films (although it’s not quite the Turkish accent it should be). But seriously, Alec Baldwin does the voice?! That’s the best Russian accent they could dig up?!
Further to the film’s secular standpoint, Guardians moves away from calling him Santa and he is regularly referred to in the film as “North”.
But wait a second, his name is North, he travels all over the world, and his best friend is the Easter Bunny? Where have I see this one before…?
Oh.
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7. Rabbit-proof farce
Is that an Aboriginal tattoo in his fur?
Hugh Jackman’s Easter Bunny gets upset when people get his species wrong and think he’s a kangaroo. “It’s the accent, isn’t it?” he asks in his actual Hugh Jackman voice. Yes, it is. That, and the boomerangs. If you want people to not think you’re a magic kangaroo, put down the goddamn boomerangs.
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8. Oh Guillermo…
Who honestly thought this didn’t look stupid!?
Executive producer and top-tier visual fantasist Guillermo del Toro’s fingerprints are all over this movie, but nowhere more so than in its interpretation of the Tooth Fairy as a humanoid hummingbird woman. Honestly, I preferred his tooth fairies in Hellboy 2.
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9. I represent the estate of Miyazaki Hayao…
You know, I can handle the fact that Santa’s workshop shares its architectural plan with the bathhouse from Spirited Away. What I can’t handle is that the yetis that populate it look like this:
What does that remind me of?
Goddammit.
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10. Safe sex elves
Insert additional “horn” comment here
I get the need to redesign the look of Santa’s elves, but why must they look like they’re wearing festive condoms? It brings a whole new meaning to the term “bell-end”.
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11. Putting all your eggs in one basket case
Kill it! Kill it with fire!
Living eggs that walk were creepy enough in Garfield and Friends. This was the stuff of candy-coloured nightmares.
Yeah, remember Garfield and Friends!?
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12. The last three issues, combined
So the film explains where the Guardians come from rather well, but where the hell do all their minions come from?! Are the little hummingbird fairies actually the Tooth Fairy’s children?! This is the kind of thing that keeps me up at night.
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13. Rabbit Hole 2
Nicole Kidman in Rabbit Hole, from children’s entertainer David Lindsay-Abaire
Based on the book series The Guardians of Childhood by William Joyce, the film was adapted by David Lindsay-Abaire. When he’s not scribbling family entertainment like Robots or the Shrek musical, Lindsay-Abaire is busy winning Pulitzer Prizes for work like his play Rabbit Hole, about family disintegration following the loss of a child. No one else finds this combination jarring?
Is it a coincidence that the Easter Bunny in Guardians has the ability to open magic rabbit holes anywhere he chooses? Does David Lindsay-Abaire shit in the woods?
It was in those first few days, after I had mustered the willpower and bother to finally set up a blog and began to get down to work on it, that I took a last minute-ish week’s holiday to China.
Ok, so it wasn’t exactly unexpected, but since this is essentially a film-only blog I chose not to prattle on about my life’s doings and so never mentioned that I would be absent. Of course, I planned to blog from China, but WordPress is suspiciously blocked over there on those censored Eastern shores.
I could talk at length about my impressions of China after my first visit – half of which I spent in Hangzhou, a “medium-sized” (only 8 million inhabitants) city with a stunning amount of greenery, and half in Shanghai – but I will be brief, and then link everything back to the movies.
The level of economic growth there is astounding; the major cities have grown and continue to grow at unprecedented speeds. High-rise buildings rival New York in numbers. Roads, railways and subways are all improving in quality and safety (if only the same could be said of the drivers). People eat and dress at the height of fashion and cost; designer labels are everywhere, and now that most of the counterfeit markets have been shut down in lieu of the Beijing Olympics, their store-bought prices are enormous (ironic really, since so many of them are “Made in China”).
What I found hard to ignore as a psuedo-journalist and pop-culture junkie was the failure of China to embrace global culture by creating something new. Their sky-scraping buildings are impressive but all are in a very Western style; there’s just nothing strictly Chinese about them. Chinese pop music, the little of what I heard of it as I quickly shuffled away from the speakers playing it, is a nasty mix of five-year-old hip-hop and pop.
Most notable to me of course was the lack not only of a film industry but of film advertising altogether. In my entire trip I saw one sole billboard for a film, a Chinese thriller of some sorts. Cinemas are few and far between and seem to play limited and neutral American imports; the few hundred or so they take in for the year chosen wisely and censored carefully.
Unable to attend the cinema where all would be dubbed into a language that I could neither understand nor comprehend the basics (largely because despite being only a two hours’ drive apart, Shanghai and Hangzhou have different dialects which made all the little Chinese I had picked up in the first few days utterly useless in Shanghai), I was forced to sample films on the hotel TV. Obviously Chinese shows were inaccessible to me, and those that I saw were all very soap opera-ish, of the kind of quality one would associate with the more popular of those two Australian ones (I am choosing not to name them on purpose), if not worse.
Thank god for BBC World, because the Chinese news, which does actually come in an English language version, is utterly biased towards the State, with no care at all for the outside world. Thankfully, in the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake, the focus was largely on survivors and aid efforts, which propagandistic or not are still important to cover, and the positive and negative aspects of the whole thing are moving regardless.
As for the movie channels, I didn’t really have the time to inspect them thoroughly, due largely to the lousy selection on view. Sex and drugs were of course more or less off the cards, and violence was ok as long as it wasn’t too brutal. Much of this I assembled from watching about 20 minutes of 300, that amusing festival of riotous machismo. The most notable edits were of course the missing nudity (all except Gerard Butler’s ass, I must protest) and interestingly the removal of all decapitations.
Hilariously all of the violence was more or less retained, except that blood was replaced with what could only be described as some kind of dirt mixed with oil. If anything it resembled the orc blood from The Lord of the Rings, which is amusing to think that they could de-humanise the Persians any more after all the criticism that was fired at this film for that very reason. I’m left wondering why they wouldn’t just show something else.
To return to my original point, China should not just be taking what is foreign and bending it to be acceptable to the Chinese. Censorship is something I am unhappy with in most cases but for a country rebuilding itself as quickly and successfully as China I think it’s something that can be accepted provided there is a move towards a more open scenario.
Having built up its economy so rapidly, China has undoubtedly ignored, for the time being one hopes, its political and cultural developments. Culture is particularly on the edge of the knife, because there truly does not appear to be anything deeply Chinese and modern bar the ever-present figure of Jackie Chan (his face advertises almost every product you could imagine).
It was a great shame that a play that I was to attend, directed by Zhang Yimou no less, was cancelled due to rain (it was an outdoor performance on Hangzhou’s West Lake). The Chinese are undoubtedly eager to update their culture, but seem to be lost in the past, as the story of this play, Impressions of the West Lake, and indeed much of Zhang’s filmography.
Walking and taxiing around Shanghai I saw a city that was incredibly international, perhaps even more so than New York, if not close to, and countless locations offered infinite possibilities for any kind of film; thrillers, political dramas, cultural comedies, romances, bleak dramas, uplifting dramas. China is simply to afraid to show itself, despite how well it is doing. A film on the societal effects of the one-child policy could be fascinating, horrifying and/or touching, but there is just no way it could be allowed. Yet.
The status quo in China is simply not ready for that, which is a shame, because the rest of the world is ready to see the new China. I saw a brief glimpse of it and was hugely impressed by how far they’ve come; the Olympics will no doubt speed the process along, but it’s a journey very few will ever actually make. If they can experience just a taste of the new China through media; books or television or film; then the positive light that could shine on China will no doubt help them secure the international primacy they seek.
I’m not saying that films are the answer to all of China’s problems… I’m just saying that a revamp of their industry and outlook couldn’t hurt. Cause if I see another goddamn Wuxia movie I’m just going to give up altogether.
Writer’s note: Just to clarify that the title of this entry was not just a random and pointless film reference. Toto is a Japanese company which manufactures bathroom fixtures, and thus the name TOTO was branded on every urinal, sink or toilet I used while in China. And as almost any male will agree, if you see a funny name written on a toilet, you’re not going to forget it any time soon.
The Diary of a Film Cricket 