Glimmering Grimm.

Once upon a time, there was an action man and his hottie sister, and they were called Hansel and Gretel. Abandoned in the forest at a young age, they stumbled upon a witch’s cottage, killed the witch who was trying to eat them, and grew up to be an Avenger and a Bond Girl.

Jeremy Renner (THE AVENGERS) and Gemma Arterton (QUANTUM OF SOLACE) are the eponymous heroes, not innocent babes as remembered by tradition, as Hansel’s first lines tell us: “One: never walk into a house made of candy, and two: If you’re gonna kill a witch, set her ass on fire,” with Gretel’s first words delivered while holding a gun to a man’s head, “Let the girl go, or I’m gonna blow your sheriff’s brains all over these fuckin’ hillbillies!”

Noice.

HANSEL AND GRETEL: WITCH HUNTERS is a campy, cheesy, guilty pleasure, guns-and-sorcery actioner, self-aware to a fault of all the tropes it is satirizing and paying homage to. Excellent production values, an R-rating, and creative fight choreography only aid the rewritten storyline that The Brothers Grimm would have been proud to have documented and called their own.

In the grand tradition of ABRAHAM LINCOLN VAMPIRE HUNTER, this fast-paced movie plays loosely with traditional storyline (which was a German folk tale tabulated by the Grimms in 1812). Immune to witch spells, Hansel and Gretel become renowned witch bounty hunters throughout medieval Europe. Called upon to investigate a spate of kidnappings in a small town, they uncover a much darker purpose behind the child abductions: a witch’s coven on the “blood moon” (a lunar eclipse) that will render the witches invulnerable. We see milk bottles with drawings of missing children tied around them. It’s the little things…

The movie seems unbound by strictures: forget your expectations from a movie of this stripe – expect the unexpected. Do not become attached to the likeable B-characters – some of them are suddenly snatched from us gruesomely; do not expect the obvious romances to clack neatly into place – and remain happily ever after; do not expect sanitization for kiddie audiences – there is bloody gore and swearing and nudity and pearbottom leather. Maybe it’s the fact that the production boasts almost a complete European cast, and is written and directed by a European – someone from the arcane climes of where this diabolical tale supposedly took place – Norwegian Tommy Wirkola (DEAD SNOW, 2009), with a Euro sensibility that somehow outflanks the American MPAA.

Peter Stormare is the irascible town sheriff Berringer; Famke Janssen, hissing like a raptor, is powerful head witch Muriel; Thomas Mann is Ben, a fussing fanboy of the legendary Hansel and Gretel – an anachronism to be sure, but a recognizable trope that adds another fun element that sets this movie apart; and Pihla Viitala is the accused witch that the siblings save from the sheriff’s pyre (they “prove” she is not a witch because her skin and teeth are flawless and their witch lore has taught them to look for decay in real witches); personally, I would have spared her for her flaming sunrise hair and the bottom as ripe as pear.

Set in a Germanic age when crossbows were the weapon of choice and firearms were just coming into their own, the siblings yet own some tasty custom weaponry, some of it stolen from VAN HELSING. (Although that Hugh Jackman vehicle is this movie’s closest cousin, HELSING couldn’t find that sweet spot between drama, comedy, cheese and special effects.) The witches fly on twigs, broomsticks, branches, anything that suffices for a stick between their legs (like all women, am I right?). Though I am against “magic” per se (because in movies it always seems to have no rules or limitations), writer-director Wirkola has given these witches powers that don’t seem too outlandish, and employs such kineticism in the magic-battle scenes that we do not question loopholes. Yet we still wonder why Muriel, in the climactic battle, does not use her unlimited magic and resorts to good old-fashioned Marquis of Queensbury fisticuffs against Hansel and Gretel. Those paying attention will counter that H&G are immune to witch spells. Correct, but Muriel has control of the environment around her, from making the ground rip open to teleportation. Yet she cannot escape a good left hook from Gretel.

Derek Mears and Robin Atkin Downes operate a towering man-mountain called Edward, a troll that “helps witches.” We wonder then, why he saves Gretel from the sheriff – in the most remarkably satisfying and gory way. We will find out soon enough, when Muriel relates the tale of Hansel and Gretel Unbound, and though it is not as gruesome as the original (abandonment, cannibalism, murder), it is just as illogical, and holds original and entertaining twists.

HANSEL AND GRETEL: WITCH HUNTERS steps away from the dull conventions of American filmmaking, but not too far that we do not recognize it. A nice European flavor for a dark European tale of attempted child murder. If only more stultified American filmmakers would follow these unbound conventions, we’d all live happily ever after.

END

Hash of the Titans.

Liam Neeson and Sam Worthington try to out-act special effects. Fail. 16-year-old boys rejoice. Mankind tries to live without deities. Fail. Churches rejoice.

CLASH OF THE TITANS is written to be enjoyed exclusively by 16-year-old boys. Hell, I loved the 1981 original film starring Harry Hamlin and Burgess Meredith. When I was 16. The 2010 remake obviously has better special effects and much better-realized and refined supernatural creatures (as homage to the original film, the electronic owl makes a cameo), but the acting and the story have not graduated past the level of acceptance required by 16-year-old boys.

Perseus (Aussie Worthington, who just can’t seem to shake that accent as his ancestors Mel Gibson, Guy Pearce and Daniel Craig did), a demi-god in ancient Greece, must battle against the gods themselves when the city of Argos is forced to sacrifice its princess Andromeda (Alexa Davalos) to the gargantuan monster, the Kraken.

Like any story that involves religion, everything happens for irrational reasons and without motivation and without any point. Perseus’s very birth is laden with irrational backstory, as mortal King Acrisius (Jason Flemyng) feuds with Olympian god Zeus (Neeson), raiding Olympus every weekend, causing Zeus to rape Acrisius’s wife.

Poffeus

Let’s backtrack for a moment: How exactly do you feud with a god? And how does one raid Olympus? Isn’t it on another dimensional plane? And even if Olympus is just a physical abode resting on the lowest clouds, how do the ancient Greek soldiery (possessing no flying machines) actually “attack” Olympus?…Onward…

To rape Acrisuis’s wife, Zeus makes himself look like Acrisius to gain her bed – but being an omniscient god, why stoop to such banal subversion to overcome a woman? Just offer to fly her to Paris for lunch – she’ll be yours before dessert. Acrisius’s wife births Perseus, who is half-god, half-Australian. Acrisius, in a fit of rage, uh, waits nine months until baby Perseus is born, to entomb both baby and mother in a coffin and hurl it into the sea “to destroy Zeus’s seed.” Guess his “fit of rage” didn’t take into account it might have been easier to just stab the mother while she was pregnant…

Long story short: Perseus lives, becomes a fisherman, in a world which has started to defy the gods who created them. Soldiers destroy a giant Zeus statue and broham Hades, ruler of the underworld, immediately appears as a giant black pissed-off winged entity (with smaller bat-winged demons reminiscent of JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS) and wipes the floor with the soldiers. So what kind of cretin would continue insulting gods? (When the Greek scribes wrote this tale, did they not see the paradox of their plot point? In a world where gods continually give physical evidence of their power, just how stupid does mankind have to be to defy them? These people of ancient Greece were written with the sensibilities of people who lived in a world without gods, i.e. ours.)

As testament to this spreading impertinence, Queen Cassiopeia of Argos boasts that her daughter Andromeda is more beautiful than the goddess Aphrodite, at which point Hades (Ralph Fiennes, doing his best Gary Oldman), appears again and calls for Andromeda’s sacrifice – or he will release the Kraken (which we presume is a Very Bad Thing because he pronounces the name so terribly feyly). I was sure he said “OR” he would release the Kraken – but later, he releases the Kraken anyway to pick up the sacrifice. Hey, we made the sacrifice, why not send something not so dangerously fey to pick it up? You killing two birds with one stone here?

After Hades lays down his curse, Perseus unwittingly gets roped into the quest to stop the Kraken, which involves visiting Stygian witches, taming a Pegasus flying horse, lopping off the head of the gorgon Medusa and using it to turn the Kraken to stone. While Hans Zimmer‘s music makes it epic on toast. All in a day’s work for a demi-god. But Perseus spends half his skirt-wearing, sword-wielding time bitching about wanting to be a man not a god.

Perseus maintains to Zeus, “We live, we fight and we die for each other – not for you,” which again, is spoken like a man living in a world WITHOUT gods, or in a world with imaginary gods, i.e. ours. If the gods showed themselves and performed magical, physics-bending havoc when you defied them, I’m betting you would learn quicksmart how to live, fight and die for them.

Blaming director Louis Leterrier and writers Travis Beacham, Phil Hay, Matt Manfredi for these discrepancies would be like blaming Peter Jackson for the illogical happenings in THE LORD OF THE RINGS. The Greek mythology is already written – if the movie writers stuck to every detail and inserted every ulterior motivation of the complex characters, we would need a trilogy of movies. As a movie version of CLASH OF THE TITANS had already been written in 1981 by Beverly Cross, these remake writers simply took that script – and dumbed it down even further.

As illustrated by the box office, no one cares. In modern parlance, “going Greek” doesn’t involve mythological classicism.

These are fairy tales that turned into legends that turned into religion that turned into mythology. (Christianity is still at the religion stage.) So it’s irrational from the outset. CLASH OF THE TITANS is one deus ex machina piled on another. Uh, literally.

Mads Mikkelson, Danish megastar and Bond Villain, is Draco, leader of the quest (he was never this hefty in CASINO ROYALE, but in CLASH, can’t stop looking like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson); Gemma Arterton is Io (also a Bond character in QUANTUM OF SOLACE; here, a Google substitute whenever anyone needs info on ancient Greek mythology – and as she’s dodging giant scorpions we almost see her undies!).

The visualization of the creatures – from Flemyng’s Calibos makeup to the ferryman Charon, to Medusa, the Pegasus and the Kraken – is monstrously good, although I will say that Medusa should have been topless. She’s a snake-like monster who lives amongst ruins and turns people to stone with her stare; can you really see her adjusting her ornate bra for maximum push-up effect? I’m just sayin.’

But I do object to the giant scorpions – boring! All CGI arthropods, arachnids or insects make my eyes glaze over. One deus ex later, with the aid of rock creatures, everyone’s riding these useless effects.

The story makes an infantile decision to paint Hades as a “villain,” as if synonymous with the christian devil, but Hades was not a simple polar opposite to Zeus; Zeus ruled Olympus, Poseidon ruled the oceans and Hades ruled the underworld, which was called either Tartarus, Elysium or Erebus, and was a region ALL human souls passed through, not just “bad” ones. And Olympus was NOT the equivalent of christian heaven, it was the exclusive abode of the gods – NO human was allowed there.

Would that any human cast his unworthy gaze on Liam Neeson’s fake pirate’s beard and absolutely fabulous outfit; gadding about in a shimmering silvery ballroom gown made of chromium wings that is even gayer than his costume as Qui-Gon Jin.

The Stygian Witches prophesize that if Perseus goes after Medusa, he will die. Again, prophesy proven wrong. But no one seems to notice. Of what use then was the prophecy? And those rock monster guys who tamed the scorpions abandon Perseus, even though the prophecy said that he would die, not them! And they can’t be affected by Medusa anyway – cos they’re already rock! But who are we to speak of such logic – screenwriters?…

As a final insult to us, and the grandest misnomer of all: the twelve Titans of Ancient Greece were Cronus, Oceanus, Tethys, Mnemosyne, Hyperion, Themis, Thea, Iapetus, Phoebe, Rhea, Coeus and Crius. Any names you recognize from the movie? Of course not. When I was 16, I believed one of the Titans was the Kraken, the other Medusa, still another, Perseus. And though Zeus or Hades are erroneously regarded as Titans by some texts, they are merely offspring of Titans, Cronus and Rhea. So… a movie called CLASH OF THE TITANS which features not one actual Titan.

The moviemakers are just bending us over and going Greek on us.

END

Quorum of Stinkus.

Stunt, stunt, stunt, crash. Stunt, stunt, stunt, crash. Explosion.

QUANTUM OF SOLACE, directed by Marc Foster like a speed freak, and edited by Matt Chesse and Richard Pearson like a chicken fight in a monkey house, makes THE BOURNE IDENTITY look like MY DINNER WITH ANDRE.

Cucumber, Poffy the Cucumber

As I watched the opening car chase grind metal, and the subsequent foot chase beat streets through an Italian town during a horse race, one question kept surfacing: Did I accidentally walk into TRANSPORTER 3?

QUANTUM OF SOLACE exists only for its next popcorn chase sequence only to show off its next stunt, with editing that will maim your optic nerves. Your eyes will start hurting long before you realize there’s nothing onscreen worth watching.

Daniel Craig, still chiseled like a Grecian statue, still super-cool and super-cruel, is listed as playing Ian Fleming’s superspy character, James Bond.

But is it still Bond? Having recently re-acquainted myself with two of Pierce Brosnan’s outings (GOLDENEYE and TOMORROW NEVER DIES), I see that Brosnan (a perfect Bond, I might add) never colored so far outside the lines of the character that he became not just unrecognizable, but indistinguishable from the morass of other taut-buttocked man-toys glutting the action hero landscape. That’s the tragedy here – Craig could be Jason Statham or Clive Owen or Jet Li; the Bond franchise might have been resurrected/reimagined in CASINO ROYALE, but there is not enough “essence of Bond” left by venturing so far outside the box in QUANTUM.

There is still the suaveness, sure, but the infamous Bond gadgets? Not a trace, except maybe the soaring height of computer technology displayed by the whole MI6 organization. Aston Martin? Only a banged up version in the opening car chase. Flamboyant villain? Well, he’s indeterminately Euro with designs on absolute power. Ironic banter? Nope. Quips? Nope. Sex with leading lady? Nope – instead, a glorified extra. Even the catchphrase, “Bond. James Bond” is absent. And the laughable Bond death-traps where – like the 1960s Batman – he is left to die in some contraption with a countdown that allows him just enough time to find an improbable escape with no one watching? Bond actually turns the table on this one, leaving the villain in the desert with only a can of motor oil to sustain him.

Written by the talented Paul Haggis, the Evil Plot in this Bond film is congruent with today’s morally muddy politics, where a shady “green” entrepreneur, Gordon Greene (Mathieu Amalric), deals hand-in-glove with the CIA and the British government, who both admit, “if we didn’t do business with villains we wouldn’t be doing business at all.” Of course, Greene’s ultimate aim is power over others – in this case, monopolizing the water supply in Bolivia, using “environmentalism” as a cover.

For those not paying attention, there are the eye-straining fight scenes and chase scenes to keep you amused: car chase, boat chase, plane chase, moped chase, foot chase across rooftops (where’ve I seen that before? Oh yeh – the last Bond film!), wholesale destruction following in the wake of Bond and his pursuers.

Meanwhile, that wrinkled old man in charge of MI6, Judi Dench, goes swishing about doubting Bond’s loyalties because he is mooning over a chick who got murdered in the last film. So Bond goes rogue long enough to plonk a newbie bimbo by the name of Strawberry Fields (Gemma Arterton), then finds her dead like the chick in GOLDFINGER, covered in oil instead of gold. (Black gold?, heh heh–Waitaminute! Even if you were dipped in crude oil like a shrimp cocktail, wouldn’t it just slide off? How does it cake her body like black syrup?)

And the leading lady – nay, Bond Girl – Olga Kurylenko, doesn’t even schtup Bond! Isn’t that the POINT of being a Bond Girl?! Detached to the point of boring, Kurylenko’s ice queen character is ironic, playing some kind of double-agent with a burn scar on her back that I couldn’t stop looking at, tooling about a searing desertscape, trapped in a hotel fire – yet generating not one iota of heat. Let’s face it: Bond’s universe is no place for a woman too independent. Our primal instincts felt the old magic when dippy Fields bantered with Bond, but that misogynistic fun was not to last. Excuse the pun, but – 18 million cracks, my arse!

Why does everyone moan about the title? Does anyone know what quantum means outside of physicists and Scott Bakula? A quantum is an “amount,” a discrete “packet” of something, especially used in physics to denote the smallest physical quantity that can exist independently. (From imdb: According to Henry Chancellor in his book James Bond – The Man and His World, “Quantum of Solace” relates to the necessary iota of emotion that is needed between lovers.)

Now tenuously link this with Bond seeking revenge for his last bébé and the villainous organization named Quantum. Thank the junkets we don’t have to view the film for this info, which takes us from Haiti, to Italy, Bolivia, Austria, London, Russia, and leaves us north of Eye-Strain.

QUANTUM opens with the good ole sexploitation gimmick of sand dunes as naked women, Alicia Keys and Jack White singing, Another Way to Die; closes with the gun barrel motif and classic Bond theme music.

Just like the last film, Bond’s healing abilities are like Wolverine: every little face cut – healed by the next scene. In CASINO ROYALE, he plonked Vesper Lynn mere days after his mandacious torture – can the franchise heal itself as quickly as Wolverine Bond’s ballsac?

END