Movie Box Review

STAR WARS EPISODE I:  THE PHANTOM MENACE 3D, to give it its fully identifying title, has the distinction of being the most successful movie ever made that is generally agreed to be terrible.  Over $900M in tickets have been sold for Phantom Menace since its opening in 1999 (that number will go over $1B when the current re-release is taken into account), which doesn't even begin to include revenues from homevideo, merchandising, television licenses, etc.--and aside from admiration for the film's special effects, you'd be hard-pressed to find anything good that's been said about it.

The dreadfulness of Phantom Menace didn't stop anyone from going.  It was a colossal pop culture event when it opened, bigger even than Harry Potter or Twilight or Lord of the Rings chapters, because it was the first new entry in 16 years in what was, title for title, the most successful motion picture franchise in history.  One simply couldn't fail to see it.  I attended a 3:30AM show--that is not a typo--at Grauman's Chinese on opening day, and we got in the ticketholders' line almost 3 hours early just to get good seats (there were hundreds of people already there ahead of us).  When the movie ended and we exited, rosy-fingered dawn was just beginning to touch the sky above Hollywood Boulevard, and the only real question was how we'd managed to stay awake.   

And now it's back.  George Lucas, the Scrooge McDuck of American cinema, fondled and squeezed his stupendously valuable intellectual property until he realized there was more revenue to be shaken out of the pockets of moviegoers, and Phantom Menace is just the first of what will be re-releases of all 6 Star Wars films in 3D.  (The Phantom Menace 3D is reasonably high-quality, as transfers go, but since the movie was never conceived for the technology when it was made, it has none of the imagination or visual excitement of recent 3D movies like Avatar, The Adventures of Tintin or Hugo.  Plus the glasses inevitably make the images darker and more grayish, resulting in a visual experience that's overall less enjoyable than the original version.)

This compels us, 13 years after the fact, to take another look at The Phantom Menace and how it stands up as a movie.  

It's instructive to glance at George Lucas' filmography.  He is, depending on how one cuts the numbers, one of the most--if not the single most--successful men ever to work in motion pictures.  But it's impossible to think of another filmmaker with a 40+ year-long career whose work is limited by such a narrow set of boundaries.  In the past 35 years, Lucas' only films as a director are the Star Wars features.  And as a producer, only twice in the past 2 decades has he stepped away from the Star Wars or Indiana Jones franchises, with the forgettable Radioland Murders in 1994 and this year's unimpressive Red Tails.  (Lucas periodically claims that he's going to devote the rest of his career to low-budget "indie" projects, but he doesn't have a lot of credibility on the point.)  Despite having the financial resources and clout to create literally anything he might have wanted to on film, Lucas has chosen to do... more of the same.  It's actually sad, in a way.  Lucas, unlike fantasy filmmakers such as Peter Jackson, Christopher Nolan, Alfonso Cuaron or Sam Raimi, to name just a few, made his life's work the richest McDonalds ever.

Also sad are Lucas' shortcomings as a director and writer, and nowhere is that clearer than in Phantom Menace, which was his first piece of direction since the original Star Wars 22 years earlier.  For those who've lived in a cave since 1999,  Phantom Menace begins the Star Wars saga by introducing the 8-year old Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd), who in the course of the movie meets Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor), R2-D2, C-3PO, Yoda and Pademe (Natalie Portman) who will become the love of his life and the mother of Luke and Leia.  While one can see in the later movies the seeds Lucas was planting in the saga with this view of Anakin as a child, he would have been better off sticking with adults.

The Phantom Menace script, for which Lucas takes sole credit, is a tedious and often all-but-incomprehensible hash of taxation issues, blockades and mysticism, conveyed with dialogue that was either dreadfully expositional, childish (as opposed to believably child-like) or flat-out embarrassing (the latter would include every word out of the mouth of Jar-Jar Binks).  Sadly, although Lucas has been known to tinker with his movies prior to re-release, he hasn't seen fit to remove the messianic undertones from Phantom Menace:  hints of Anakin Skywalker's possible virgin birth and discussion of his genetic superiority.  (These plot points were toned down considerably in the later prequel chapters.)  The somewhat queasy pre-romance between Padme and the 8-year old Anakin also remains.  (This from the filmmaker who also gave us what turned out to be a semi-incestuous brother-sister undercurrent in the initial movies.)  

It can't be a coincidence that Portman, Liam Neeson (as Obi-Wan's mentor), Ewan McGregor and Samuel L. Jackson (as a senior Jedi), all of whom have more than proven their great talent elsewhere, give utterly wooden performances under Lucas' direction.  (Let's speak only in passing of Jake Lloyd, who never had a career post-Phantom Menace, and thus can only be remembered for one of the worst child performances ever put on film.) It's also not a coincidence that the only sequence in the movie that really worked in 1999 and still does now is the pod race, because it involves no dialogue and almost no acting.

What Phantom Menace did have in 1999 was a then-revolutionary expansion of the role of digital special effects.  Lucas had re-invented special effects with the first Star Wars, and he all but did it again here, with settings, sets, spacecraft and entire characters like the loathed Jar-Jar residing in computers.  It was all quite extraordinary, an entirely new palette for filmmakers to use in creating cinematic worlds, and whatever else one can say about Lucas, he deserves full credit for his visionary development of the technology.  Unfortunately, in 2012 these effects have come a long way from their 1999 standard, and these days--through no fault of their own--many of the Phantom Menace effects look rudimentary and old-fashioned.

There's no question that Phantom Menace will continue to make money on this go-round, and so will the subsequent Star Wars re-releases.  Lucas has the ultimate good thing, and the movies, along with the innumerable spin-offs, prequels, games, products and additional ancillaries, will sell forever.  In the case of Phantom Menace, however, that didn't--and doesn't--make it any good.

HAYWIRE:  Worth A Ticket - For the Gasp-Inducing Fight Scenes Alone

You might think that if a major, celebrated filmmaker were to take the extraordinary step of announcing, years in advance, that he had set the time for his retirement from movies, and that, even though he was only middle-aged, he would at the very least be taking an extended break from the medium after he had completed a certain set of particular films--well, you might expect that those films must express a summing up of his world view, a final statement about his ideas about mankind's place in the universe.  If the filmmaker were Steven Soderbergh, though--as in fact it is--those remaining works include a movie about male strippers, an HBO biography of Liberace, a film version of the old TV series The Man From UNCLE, and HAYWIRE, the action movie that was tonight's "secret screening" at the AFI Film Festival, and which is scheduled to reach theatres in early 2012. 

Haywire was, as Soderbergh explained in a Q&A, very explicitly designed as a showcase for its star, the real-life MMA fighter Gina Carano, whom Soderbergh happened to see in a nationally televised bout.  Soderbergh has long been fascinated by toying with the interplay of real life with fictional stories; aside from casting non-professionals in his low budget Bubble, his Ocean's 12 included the strange plotline that featured Julia Roberts as a character who resembled--and ultimately impersonated--Julia Roberts.  In particular, Haywire and its casting recalls Soderbergh's decision to cast porn star Sasha Grey in The Girlfriend Experience. Even though that film had no explicit sex at all, he seemed to want the lead role played by someone who everyone knew had had the experience of performing sexual acts for pay, just as Carano, who simulates injuring her fellow actors in Haywire, has earned her living battling people for real. 

Of course, the great benefit of casting an actual fighter in an action movie is that there's no need for stunt performers, and Soderbergh seems to have convinced Carano's professional actor co-stars, including Ewan McGregor, Channing Tatum and Michael Fassbender, to handle their fight scenes themselves as well.  Thus the fight sequences in Haywire are ultra-thrilling and spectacularly intimate, with none of the need to cut away from faces and employ masking angles that almost every action movie you've ever seen has had to do.  The fights, which are staged without musical or editing hype, have a measure of reality that's the absolute opposite of the grand-opera fakery we get in big-budget Hollywood epics.  

Those scenes are by far the highlights of Haywire, which is otherwise slick and enjoyable (especially a very Bourne-like chase scene through Dublin) without being terribly interesting.  Mallory (Carano) is a black ops agent for an independent company employed by the US and other governments.  When she and her partner (Tatum) are sent to Barcelona to rescue a hostage Chinese journalist, it's the start of a string of not particularly surprising betrayals that sends her on a journey of revenge throughout Europe and the US.  Among the other operatives she encounters are Fassbender, McEwan (as her boss and former lover), Michael Douglas and Antonio Banderas, with Bill Paxton as her supportive dad.  Soderbergh plays some of the time-shifting games he enjoys so much, as the first half of the movie has an awkward flashback structure in which Mallory is telling the story thus far to a boy she's taken temporary hostage (Michael Angarano), but that doesn't disguise the fact that the plot and characters are paper-thin.

As an actress, Carano has plenty of charisma and beauty, and along with her phenomenal physical skills, that's probably enough to make her an action star; whether she can actually act will be a question for another movie.  (She's unable to suggest any convincing emotional connection to McGregor's character, past or present, although that may be a shortcoming of the script more than her performance.)  Soderbergh has supported her with that top-notch supporting cast, and they handle most of what heavy lifting Lem Dobbs' script requires (Fassbender is particularly smooth).  Soderbergh serves as his own cinematographer as usual (under his pseudonym of Peter Andrews), and the movie is much more attractive to watch than his (deliberately) sickly work in The Informant and Contagion.  The editing is swift, and David Holmes' score propels the pace in a coolly intense way.

The first substantial buy of the Toronto Film Festival (Shame had sold first, but for art film prices) turned out to be Salmon Fishing In the Yemen, a modestly engaging romantic comedy from Lasse Hallstrom. 

Hallstrom has made a career out of "modestly engaging," following his early distinction with My Life As a Dog and What's Eating Gilbert Grape with a collection that includes Chocolat, The Cider House Rules, The Shipping News and Dear John. All bittersweet romances, none particularly memorable. The same goes for Salmon Fishing, which is more on the Chocolat (humorous) end of his scale.

Salmon Fishing In the Yemen, from Simon Beaufoy's screenplay (based on what is reportedly a much more politically satirical novel by Paul Torday), is about exactly that. Ewan McGregor plays Alfred Jones, a fisheries expert who is approached by Harriet Chetwode-Talbot (Emily Blunt), on behalf of here client, Yemeni sheik (Amir Waked). As the title says, he wants to find a way to import salmon to the river he's created with a dam on the Yemen. Fred thinks it's impossible, and he and Harriet rub each other the wrong way: she thinks he's an officious obstacle, and he thinks she's out of her mind. Of such, of course, are movie romances born, once inconveniences such as his wife and her boyfriend are taken care of.

McGregor and Blunt are charming together, which makes the slog to the predictable ending easier to take. And Hallstrom and Beaufoy have a (not so) secret weapon in their supporting cast: Kristin Scott Thomas as the government press secretary, hitting every arrow of dialogue with a bullseye, even the duller ones.

Salmon Fishing In the Yemen isn't exactly what we think of as a "film festival" movie--it's the kind of innocuous entertainment that turns up on cable several times a day. In the context of the bleak and the difficult that makes up many festival days, though, it can feel like a relief. Those cable schedules can feel like a Lasse Hallstrom festival of its own some days, and Salmon Fishing will fit in perfectly.

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Mike Mills' BEGINNERS is about the fumble for love, the wrong turns and mistakes that can delay--although luckily not always prevent--true happiness.  Mills has said that this story is semiautobiographical:  like his protagonist Oliver (Ewan McGregor), Mills learned after the death of his mother that his 75-year old father (Hal in the film, played by Christopher Plummer) was and had always been gay.  Uncloseted at last, Hal, like Mills' father, lived as an openly gay man for the last years of his life, finding love with the younger Andy (Goran Visnjic) before succumbing to cancer.  

Beginners takes place along 3 simultaneous timelines in Oliver's life, intercutting between them:  his childhood relationship with his mother Georgia (Mary Page Keller), who was troubled and dissatisfied for reasons Oliver would only come to understand decades later; the period after her death when he became closer to his father as his dad happily explored his own sexuality; and shortly after his father's death, as Oliver enters into a relationship with a beautiful French actress, Anna (Melanie Laurent).  As the movie develops, we see how each period of Oliver's life affected the next, and the ways echoes of his youth have shadowed his adulthood.  He comes to understand that neither of his parents did anything wrong, exactly, and certainly not to hurt him; they were just trying to live within the strictures of their times and upbringing (Oliver gives us mini-documentary slideshows within the film to tell us about the differences and similarities of the eras).  Still, it's all affected him in ways he'll need to move beyond if he's to have fulfilling relationships of his own. 

Mills has come a long way from his pretentious debut Thumbsucker (which was based on a novel rather than his own material).  Beginners flows beautifully between its chronologies, with humor and imagination--once Oliver has inherited Hal's lovable Jack Russell terrier, the dog occasionally makes his (subtitled) observations known to Oliver.  All the characters are layered--even Andy and Anna, who could have been pure fantasy figures for their respective men, have their own issues, rooted reasons for the ways they act.  Mills presents them all with compassion and generosity.  The actors give lovely performances.  McGregor can be a weak presence in some films, but here that drifting quality works well for Oliver, while Plummer does some of the most likable work of his career; Laurent, who played the Jewish partisan Shosanna in Inglourious Basterds, brings shadings of darkness to Anna.  Mills' understated, effective use of music, by Roger Neill, Dave Palmer and Brian Reitzell, is also notable 

There are innumerable traps in making a gentle, eccentric film like Beginners, and Mills has sidestepped most of them.  It's a quietly moving, illuminating story about the ways in which we're formed, and the possibility that we can learn to live beyond them.