Better Dead Than RED 2.

A bunch of stunts and car chases got together and called itself RED 2.

It convinced Bruce Willis and John Malkovich to reprise their roles as Frank Moses and Marvin, ex-CIA Retired-Extremely-Dangerous overactors, “indicating” their way through this spy comedy. Movie also convinced Helen Mirren to reprise her role as the most dangerous wetwork queen bitch, given a contract to kill Bruce and Malko, her best pals. Bryan Cox returns, lusting after Helen. And Mary Louise-Parker returns as Bruce’s delicate civilian love interest, so that I may lust after her.

There’s also a plot of a WMD about to be loosed on the world, so Frank and Marvin must find the eccentric professor who built it (for reason unknown). You lost me at why anyone cares about or listens to these old queens if they’re off the grid and about to be whacked. And who is the professor? Well, whenever a character in one of these ensemble movies is introduced by first seeing the back of his head, it’s always a case of speculating on which A-lister was conned into taking a cut in pay to be in this ensemble cast. Turns out the professor is Anthony Hopkins, conned into taking a cut in pay, so therefore, acting while giving only half a rat’s ass.

Forever pursuing Frank Moses – Neal McDonough as a CIA spook, who gives way too much of a rat’s ass. I mean, can you just leave these retired people alone for a second, CIA muttonhead? Maybe you’ll discern that killing them will accomplish nothing. And maybe you’ll keep all the bones in your hands and legs intact.

Catherine Zeta-Jones turns up, Russian spy, kisses Bruce in front of Louise-Parker. Now L-P jealous, but not enough to make it interesting. L-P, so hot and sensual, empathetic, caring, using the weapons she knows best in combat – breaking people by kissing them instead of shooting them. Now she make Bruce jealous. But not enough to make it interesting.

Apparently, it’s funny cos they’re old…

Who is responsible for this garbled mess? Director Dean Parisot (from the enjoyable GALAXY QUEST to the mediocre FUN WITH DICK AND JANE 2005); but more than the director’s fault – the editor, Don Zimmerman. It seems amazing that Zimmerman worked on those same two movies, as well as other A-List titles that never exhibited the haphazard piecemeal approach he effects with RED 2. Shots appear at random after the scene is over, reaction shots that go nowhere, mean nothing; further shots after the button has been pushed on a scene; a hodgepodge of meaningless angles after the point of the scene has been made, etc. After his body of good work, Zimmerman seems like he’s getting too old for this shit, as in apathetic. He could take a few lessons from the editor of CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER. Or maybe from a 7-year-old.

David Thewlis is a French spy called The Frog (and no one sees this as racist because…? American movie?); and Byung-hun Lee is the agency’s premier assassin who somehow can’t kill Frank Moses because – I don’t even care anymore.

One of the stupidest lines: Frank yells to Marvin during a gun battle, to take Frank’s girlfriend to safety, “Get her outa here!” To which Marvin asks, “When?” Frank’s yelled reply, “Now!” When someone says get her outa here during a gun battle, doesn’t it imply NOW? What did Marvin expect the answer to be: “In ten minutes”? Who wrote this redundant piece of idiot dialogue? Turns out, the same two guys who wrote the first movie. Now they’ve figured out how to phone in scripts.

Y’know, movies like RED 2 are the reason why Liam Neeson quietly usurped the Action Hero crown from Bruce Willis. It’s not so much that the movies themselves are bad, but that Willis is also bad in them, forcing his comedic shtick like amateur hour.

Eventually we just get sick of this many idiots firing automatic weapons and hitting this much nothing. Especially when their target – our heroes – are right in front of them and they don’t shoot AT them but fire warning shots into the air, and then AFTER the hero takes cover do they start shooting AT the hero’s location in earnest…. My head’s about to explode with how many times the bad guys have the drop on our heroes and DON’T shoot them.

Don’t make the same mistake with RED 2, Movie Maniac. When you see this movie – shoot to kill.

END

Red-Blooded American Funtime.

A shoot-em-up, rock-em sock-em age-fest.

RED is Bruce Willis, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren and Morgan Freeman; they’re ex-CIA, Retired Extremely Dangerous. You betcha – each of these operatives could wipe out whole cities: Willis with his arctic cool, Malko with his leering morbidity, Helen Mirren with her sexagenarian sexiness and Morgan Freeman with his pompous voiceover.

The four principals have more years between them than all the stars of HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL combined. Ironically, watching HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL can kill you faster than any RED.

From a DC Comics graphic novel (by Warren Ellis and Cully Hamner), RED follows Frank Moses (Willis) as he evades CIA operatives sent to kill him, led by Cooper (Karl Urban). It’s easy to evade bad guys in movies who still can’t aim after all those years of CIA training. Yes, it’s the yawn plot device of CIA trying to kill its own ex-operatives. Frank recruits his old team mates to get to the bottom of why. (Why? Because it’s the CIA, stupid! That’s what they do.)

Cooper culls Frank’s file from curmudgeonly CIA analyst, Ernest Borgnine (that guy’s still alive?!).

Poffy goes RED

Beautiful Mary-Louise Parker is Sarah, a cubicled government accountant who dwells romantically on her spy novels, merely a phone flirtation for Frank, until he inadvertently pulls her into the chase and she finds herself on the lam with an All-American Hero more virile than any Fabio-based cover model. Her wonderment, amusement and sensual excitement are pitch-perfect, with just that right dash of spinner cuteness. Positively glowing.Brian Cox is The Russian Guy. Was Rade Sherbedgia busy? In forbidden love with Helen Mirren. (Who isn’t in forbidden love with Helen Mirren?..)

Suddenly – Richard Dreyfuss! He’s a slimy weapons contractor (cough–Halliburton) who uses the CIA as his personal hit squad, under orders from the vice president — oh, so this is culled directly from the desk of the real-life Dick Cheney (Dreyfuss played that low swine in W.); here, the VP is Julian McMahon (appropriately, Dr. Doom from FANTASTIC FOUR, and the real-life son to a former Australian Prime Minister, William McMahon).

RED is solid action-comedy that doesn’t take itself too seriously, yet seriously commits to delivering cheeky China White straight-to-the-vein outlandish bombast. Just how drunk was the stunt coordinator who thought up the eye-popping gag of Willis stepping from a spinning car, guns aimed and blazing? And how uber cool (and sexually arousing) is Helen Mirren pumping an automatic machine gun or Bruce Willis in hand-to-hand combat beating up on some guy half his age?

Of course, the mindless action would be immaterial were it not punctuated by the personalities of the principals; Willis, Malkovich, Mirren and Freeman armed not only with guns that never run out of ammo, but a dry, deadly wit that only comes with the accumulation of years that these red-blooded wolves have spent howling at the moon.

END

Lost between the Moon and New York City.

The only way to enjoy ARTHUR (2011), the story of an alcoholic billionaire, is to be an alcoholic billionaire yourself. That way, your brain won’t sizzle with the fury of forced relinquishment of your tax dollars to thug corporate billionaires, who rewarded themselves for crashing the economy by giving themselves bonuses with the money used to bail them out.

Or just be drunk.

The filmmakers should have asked themselves – and the public that they planned to foist this movie on – that age-old question reprised after most tragedies (Holocaust, Kennedy assassination, 9/11), “Too soon?”

The slogan of ARTHUR is “Meet the world’s only lovable billionaire.” Isn’t that the most antagonistic of oxymorons in this economic climate?

This remake of the iconic 1981 Dudley Moore movie of the same name is an embarrassment to that original movie, to Dudley Moore, to British comedy, even to the Statue of Liberty. Even with all its wink-wink references to the original, it is not merely “slightly worse” than that movie, it does not “fail to capture” the spirit of that movie – it is simply a stand-alone abomination.

The half-brained filmmakers (whose names are pointless) have retained director-writer Steve Gordon‘s story (from 1981’s ARTHUR) – that of drunk playboy billionaire Arthur Bach (Russell Brand) standing to inherit the corporate family fortune on the provision that he cease dragging the family name through the tabloids with his idiotic antics, and marry a corporate socialite (Jennifer Garner) with whom he shares no chemistry. Arthur would rather marry a down-to-Earth penniless blond hustler he meets on the streets of New York.

Right there, the plot smells. Maybe in 1981 millionaires were worried about their spawn creating tabloid headlines, but in 2011, we don’t see Richard Hilton giving an ultimatum to his retarded alcoholic slut daughter Paris to stop being a retarded alcoholic slut on the threat of disinheritance. On the contrary, the more tabloid press, the more publicity for the Hilton brand. And any publicity is good publicity.

Brand has been asked to portray more of an arrested development child than an alcoholic; he has studiously been made to slur his speech ever so slightly to pretend to be inebriated, because in this anti-drinking, anti-smoking society, heaven forfend he actually portrays the “loveable drunk” that Moore gave us, never mind vomit on someone’s dress or pee on himself while lying in the gutter. The replacing of Arthur’s male butler with a female liege (Helen Mirren) twists the original theme from that of jaded, enabled heir seeking true love rather than manufactured marriage, to a man-child seeking an Oedipal mother figure.

Though they’ve retained the story structure, the filmmakers have rewritten Moore’s witty verbal onslaught to accommodate people who don’t read; they’ve replaced Moore’s phenomenal piano interlude with some guy tinkling jazz at a bridal shower; they’ve given Brand a magnetic bed for no apparent reason other than one sight gag that isn’t funny; and though the brilliant Brand’s talents are wasted here, at least his accent sometimes conjures nostalgic recall of Moore at his finest.

Mirren staunchly plays Hobson, the role made Oscar-worthy by the imperious Sir John Gielgud. Arthur’s down-to-Earth love interest is the bland, vanilla, uninteresting, insipid Naomi (Greta Gerwig, who was unfortunate enough to be born with no personality – but I guess you don’t need a personality with legs like that). Luis Guzman is even more pedestrian than Gerwig, as Arthur’s driver. Nick Nolte is the tough-as-nails (literally) father-in-law. And Jennifer Garner is still on that diet that keeps her unnaturally thin and distressingly ugly.

END

Owling at the Moon.

LEGEND OF THE GUARDIANS: THE OWLS OF GA’HOOLE is epic and poignant and majestic and cute in all the right owly ways.

Young forest owl Soren (voice of Jim Sturgess) is a dreamer, infatuated with mythical tales of the Guardians – ancient owls who defend owly honor throughout the land. His older brother Kludd (Ryan Kwanten) poo-poos Soren wearing makeshift leaf helmets and reenacting Guardian legends (equivalent to us kids tying towels around our necks and fantasizing we are Superman), while Soren’s father Noctus (Hugo Weaving) encourages Soren to dream big. (Weaving’s voice is so distinctive as Agent Smith from THE MATRIX that we’re constantly expecting him to drop an accidental, serpentine “Mr. Anderson.”)

Soren and brother Kludd are kidnapped by mountain owls led by the fearsome Metalbeak (Joel Edgerton). Like every great villain, Metalbeak wants to rule all of owldom for no apparent reason. In the grand tradition of being evil and rebranding yourself as something beneficial (Republicans’ rebranding of the rich as “job-creators” comes to mind), Metalbeak’s villainous owls are called The Pure Ones. (This also conjures the Republican-based Tea Party “tests for purity.”)

At the Pure Ones’ wrought-iron mountain aerie, owlets like Soren are brainwashed by being forced to stare at the Moon, being overcome by a blank stare called “moonblink” and subjected to slave labor, collecting mystical blue pellets hoarded by bats for some buzzing energy source cauldron. Soren and a cute dwarf owl, Gylfie (Emily Barclay) escape the clutches of the Pure Ones, ally with a couple of other owl characters (and a snake!), and must fly across a vast ocean to warn the actual Guardians of Ga’Hoole of Metalbeak’s plot.

This Australian CG cartoon (where all the accents are amusingly DownUnda) is lifted from the series of books by Kathryn Lasky, and directed by Zack Snyder, using the same filmic techniques he used in his poetically violent 300: during battle scenes, the shink of steel augmenting talons, the clash of claw on flesh; fearsome slaughter crashed with sudden slomo and balletic arcs. Let’s face it: if it was all in real time, ‘twould be nought but a flurry of feathers.

The animation is startling, with jaw-dropping attention to detail, especially in the avian faces that boldly display the palette of human emotion. (These blips are literally better actors than Rob Schneider, Will Ferrell, Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts, Jennifer Lopez, Keanu Reeves, and anyone in any given George Romero film). We are so used to seeing smooth people and surroundings (PLANET 51, DESPICABLE ME) that GA’HOOLE is a welcome sensory overload of feathers, forest and flying; wings making shadows through smoke in the sunlight; exhilarating flight, transporting us with every camera swoop to the freedom of the skies; striking battle scenes in three dimensions – by that I mean, air battle like dogfighting feathered Spitfires, not putting on 3D glasses. Diametrically opposite to a CG cartoon like CARS, with its clinical steel and sleek sterility, these animals of GA’HOOLE breathe with an organic, fluttering life force.

Another plus is that the story is not preachy. Besides the passé “follow your dreams” trope, there is avarice (Metalbeak), caution (a legendary hero owl hides within the community in plain sight), betrayal (Kludd – like Edmund in Narnia – betrays his brother Soren), and loyalty (Soren fights for his family and baby sister Eglantine). GA’HOOLE doesn’t send any stupid messages to kids via talking animals.

Sam Neill voices the regal Allomere, David Wenham is a frisky little Digger owl, Anthony LaPaglia voices the artiste Twilight (who plays the lute!), Geoffrey Rush is the Guardian Lyze of Kiel, and Helen Mirren is the Pure One headmistress.

The payoffs are mighty, because – as in all these stories of legendary heroes – the legends are REAL, and Our Young Hero stakes a place for himself among the legends with a final battle that makes the feathers rise on your neck and arms. The Zack Snyder battle slomo helps, backlit by raging inferno and orgiastic orchestra – oh, rapturous raptor!

I am just left to wonder: How did the owls create all these beaten iron structures without opposable thumbs?

END

SexyRegal is the new Streep.

Regal AND sexy. Only Helen Mirren could pull that off…

Her Royal Cukesty Queen Poffy II

Mirren is THE QUEEN. Inhabiting the role of Elizabeth II like she was born into the English monarchy, giving the old biddy some reg’lr ole toughness, independence and spunk, at one point reminding her aides that she was a mechanic during The War.

THE QUEEN is not a biography of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, it merely covers a short period of her life in the aftermath of the paparazzi-induced death of Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales. The Queen’s protocol reaction and the public’s kneejerk perception of the Royal Family makes for an interesting well-acted and directed couple of hours.

Movie opens with the election of Tony Blair (Michael Sheen) as Prime Minister of England, and the death of Diana (artfully done in swift shots interspersed with real footage). Blair is made to look like a strong, acute leader; the only head of state who discerned which way the populist wind was blowing. (Of course, this was before he became Bush’s bumboy in 2002, when he failed miserably on predicting the gunmetal winds).

Time and again, Blair would try to advise Elizabeth to make a public statement of grief over Diana’s death. But the Royal “we,” supported by imperious husband Prince Philip (James Cromwell) instead turned to protocol, insisting Diana was no longer a member of the royals (which was correct) and so deserved no public display of royal commiseration.

Even as the Queen’s British approval ratings plummet, she continues to insist she knows the tenor of “her people.” Yet how could she, being holed up since her twenties in that gilded cage?

Director Stephen Frears and writer Peter Morgan walk a delicate tightrope with the Queen’s character; though she comes off as snooty in dismissing Blair, she retains a fragile humanity, which I credit to Mirren’s performance. I’d stake my life that the actual Queen – after so many insular decades behind those lascivious, hedonistic palace walls – has no clue what humanity IS anymore.

As much of the action takes place within the palace, I’m intrigued as to how many details of the Queen’s bedchambers and private quarters they got right. Every time a movie is made on an Oval Office set, the filmmakers crow about the intricate detail they put into it (because Americans are allowed to take tours through the President’s domicile and office), but who’s going to know if the halls of Buckingham Palace are authentic, except the few hundred people who work within them (and they’re not talking for fear of being beheaded)?

Throughout the movie, Mirren is suitably regal and British, yet when she goes on national TV for the Diana statement, suddenly we hear her adopt that super-posh “Queen voice” – up to this point, she needed to do nothing else to secure the Academy Award she would win (2007, Best Actress, Leading Role), but as soon as she dropped that Queen voice on us – it was all over. Everyone else could tear up their acceptance speeches.

SexyRegal was the new Streep.

END

When the frame gets filled with old people – Look Out! Cutie Pie Alert!

ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN meets Blackwater.

Politics, conspiracy, murder – is the STATE OF PLAY. And Rachel McAdams looking tastier than Christmas dinner.

A murdered congressional aide is linked to Republican Congressman, Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck, playing it straighter than Tom Cruise’s public persona) in a sex scandal that leads to questions regarding his links to a no-bid, war-profiteering contractor, PointCorp (think: Blackwater, renamed Xe). A former roommate of Collins, investigative reporter, Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe, playing it scruffier than Nick Nolte on a bad hair day), uncovers what looks like a conspiracy.

For those uninterested in political intrigue, there’s spinner Rachel McAdams (whose only conspiracy is to commit hotness), as McAffrey’s naif reporter chum, Della Frye, wearing dresses that nicely accentuate her high, tight a-cups, looking cuter than a Hello Kitty backpack on a 16-year-old girl scout.

All the news that’s fit to Talking Points!

Writer Mathew Michael Carnahan (LIONS FOR LAMBS, 2007) once again displays his uncanny Beltway underbelly knowledge and knack for conjuring compelling stories from dry political duplicity. Kevin McDonald directs STATE OF PLAY (which could have easily become a talky mystery) like an action thriller.

Crowe, looking faintly like Jesus, plays something almost non-existent in this 24-hour-news-cycle world – an investigative reporter. Taste the syllables in your empty mouths, news media; remember when this species was not extinct? No wonder he looks like a martyr.

Crowe’s acting chops simply beats the rest of the cast to death. Deep in The Method, he appears in his shoddy car (the back seat a scandal of wrappers and paper cups), on the way to a crime scene, singing loudly to Irish beer-drinking songs. He is paunchy, unshaven; his cubicle is reminiscent of paper-age pack rats, his apartment the messiest in the world – yet his mind like a shark’s tooth.

It is not surprising that democrat Affleck (the only man brave enough to satire progressive demagogue Keith Olbermann on SNL) is playing a Republican, and it is certainly not surprising to any Republicans that he is busted in a sex scandal; what is surprising is that his Republican congressman actually cares about The People, trying to uncover corporate corruption, rather than being molded by it, which would effectively make him a pariah at the All-White All-Male Racist Repub Country Club.

Helen Mirren is the newspaper’s ribald editor, showing us what The Queen would sound like with the tongue of a construction worker. She only wants the dirt on congressional philandering, while McAffrey pleads more time to go deeper into the story.

But maybe McAffrey just wants to go deeper into something else, as we discover a past affair between him and the congressman’s wife, Anne (Robin Wright Penn). At one point, he tells Della he is following a lead and slinks off to have a drink with Anne.

Jason Bateman is PR man, Dominic Foy, a pimpster for richies, playing the same distracted, ad-libbing eccentric he has made a hilarious career of. Through him, we discover everyone is in collusion (again, like THAT would surprise anyone in politics!).

A PointCorp insider tells McAffrey about corporate operating procedures: “They do whatever the fuck they want; they answer to no one. It’s a fundamental restructuring of our domestic intelligence policy – the privatization of homeland security, billions of dollars… wrath-of-God money.” Is he talking about Blackwater/Xe? Of course he is. The filmmakers don’t go too far to disguise PointCorp’s analogy to George W. Bush’s real world, no-bid murdering mercenaries; the logo even resembles Blackwater’s.

STATE OF PLAY never mentions what government is in power, because – as we have seen with the new spineless Obama administration – it doesn’t matter what government is in power for government misfeasance to continue. (Nine months into Obama’s reign, Bush’s shit still rains: still Iraq, still illegal surveillance, still Afghanistan, still Guantanamo, still no health reform, still no torture investigations, still no Bush, Rove, Cheney, Woo indictments for war crimes…)

STATE OF PLAY brings together many suspenseful story strands and clacks them into place neatly, but in the end, backs away from its high level of crime, bringing the story down to one man’s bad decisions which only made it look like corporate conspiracy. Collins, who seemed so sincere, was only looking out for his own interests – That’s Our Republican!

McAffrey asserts something demonstrably incorrect: “Through all this gossip and speculation that permeates people’s lives, I still think they know the difference between real news and bullshit, and they’re glad that someone cares enough to get things on the record and print the truth.” No, they don’t know. Why else would Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck still be on air? How else did networks garner ratings by talking about Palin’s wardrobe for a week? How else did George W. Murderer crouch for two felonious terms in the Oval Egg?

Yet this movie’s construction and its performances are superb. The hardest aspect to swallow in STATE OF PLAY is that there are newspaper offices where investigative reporters still exist.

END

I’m going to take a Treasure Bath!

For all its contrived clue-solving and annoying coincidences and tiresome car chases, and even Nicolas Cage‘s mourning face, NATIONAL TREASURE: BOOK OF SECRETS is a lot of fun.

Cuxocoatl

Maybe producer Jerry Bruckheimer had something to do with the fact we can hardly take a breath before the next relentless action sequence derived from chalky historical jargon disguised as clues to something only the inventor of Sudoku can understand.

Sequel to the less-fun NATIONAL TREASURE, this film finds Benjamin Franklin Gates (Cage) mourning-face-deep in another treasure hunt, this time for a Mayan City of Gold. Pointless outlining the roundabout manner in which the Mayan City becomes his goal, suffice to say the clues involve McGuffin piled on McGuffin piled on Abe Lincoln’s assassination with Ed Harris on top like a cherry.

Harris is villain Wilkinson, who also seeks the City for his own reasons. It is a thankless role, for he imbues the obvious “villain” with many layers. His motivations are not evil, though his actions are, and there is always doubt on how far he is willing to go for his “noble” cause. It is a subtlely shaded character that all villainous actors can learn from.

All the principal cast return, Jon Voight as Ben’s dad, Justin Bartha as Riley (given a little more to do this time round than just whine), Diane Kruger as Ben’s girl (whose stage direction was simply “whine louder than Justin Bartha”) and Helen Mirren (three times older than Diane Kruger and twice as sexy) as Voight’s estranged wife, for feisty comedic arguing. Even Harvey Keitel returns, to mill aimlessly on a professional basis.

Written by The Wibberlys (which sound like a couple of furry things from another planet) and once again directed by Jon Turteltaub, BOOK OF SECRETS takes our intrepid adventurers to Paris (where – so it says in the Foreign Director’s Handbook – the Eiffel Tower must be in every shot), to London’s Buckingham Palace, to the White House and into the Oval Office itself, to the revelation that “Mount Rushmore is a coverup…”

Nic Cage gets his Gom Jabbar moment when he puts his hand blindly into a rock orifice; the cast gets to tramp around blindly in labyrinthine passageways, but the coolest sequence by far is a Mayan death trap – a gigantic, tottering square slab that they must all balance, using each other’s weight as counterbalances.

The Book of Secrets is supposedly a Presidential tome – a captain’s log, if you will – of all the nation’s secrets tabulated by presidents for presidents, covering Area 51, the Kennedy assassination, the moon landing, etc. Movie plays it like a gag (with Bruce Greenwood as Pres) but we all know there really are secrets that only one president may pass onto the next, maybe not in an all-encompassing book, but surely in documentation which, if exposed, would lead to impeachment, jail, or being slapped to death with a cabbage.

When Candy Crowley of CNN asked newly-inaugurated President Obama in 2009 whether he had seen anything in his new job that had “given him pause,” he simply shot that gleaming smile at her and refused to comment. Why? Because he saw the real world analog of that Book of Secrets.

Yet the biggest mystery remains: What exactly is Harvey Keitel doing in this movie?

END

Those Comedy Traffic School guys always try too hard.

Mining the Diary, Missing the Madman.

Douglas Adams did not live to see his wondrous literary creation, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, made into this feature film. Maybe that’s fortunate.

Each individual component of this movie is well done, from Garth Jennings‘ direction, to the astoundingly creative set design (all the good guys sport spherical décor, the bad guys, cubical) and creature visualizations (the Vogons are magnificently vile prosthetic puppets), to the performances (from creatures and humans alike), to the creation of the on-screen Hitchhiker’s Guide entries, to the artful compressing of Adams’ sprawling opus into a 109 minute movie. Yet somehow, the end result of all these superior elements comes out as flollopy as a mattress from the swamps of Squornshellous Zeta.

Eternally-vexed Arthur Dent (Martin Freeman of Ricky Gervais’ THE OFFICE) is hitch-hiked off Earth by Ford Prefect (Mos Def) just before it is vaporized by Vogons to make way for a hyperspace freeway. So begins Arthur’s trek through the galaxy in the company of opportunist Ford, intergalactic rogue and President of the Galaxy, Zaphod Beeblebrox (Sam Rockwell) and flighty Earth girl, Trillian (Zooey Deschanel), attended by “paranoid android,” Marvin (voiced by Alan Rickman).

Approaching a movie with this level of cult status is slippery from the outset. The screenplay issues from the demented pen of Adams himself, so cultists have little to complain about, though whether his second draft should have been the FINAL one – his death getting in the way – is definitely a matter for contention. Objectively, this enterprise is miles above the British television series – for production value, better acting and snappier writing – but fails in conveying a sense of empathy, because we do not get to live with these characters through weekly adventures.

The actual Guide is smartly purveyed as a computer – even in our modern day, we call laptops “notebooks” – and there are seemingly endless elements of Adams’ book incorporated into the Guide and the movie itself. The more obsessive you are, the deeper into the movie you’ll fall.

At film’s end, when the Improbability Drive turns the spaceship into various objects – as our intrepid adventurers seek the Restaurant at the End of the Universe – Adams’ face is the last image we see as the space cyclorama fades to black. We can only hope he would have been proud of the effort.

And the question remains: With the movie failing to break box-office enough to warrant funding for a big-budget followup, how many inferior sequels will be churned out to court the cultist fanboy dollar?

The answer may be as unimportant as Slartibartfast’s name.

Then again, the answer may just be 42.

END

A Midget in the Footsteps of Giants.

The POFF 9000

No one said it would be easy. Following in the mythic footsteps of Stanley Kubrick and equally legendary Arthur C. Clarke. Maybe it was this inimitable pedigree that gave lowly Peter Hyams the impetus to craft such a reasonably watchable sequel to 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. A tension-filled space trek where we laugh at John Lithgow, gasp at the skyscape and weep for a computer, 2010: ODYSSEY TWO is a one-step-forward, one-step-sideways kind of movie.

Considering Mr. Hyams is the writer-director behind two films that boast “scientific” backdrops, yet lay claim to the most scientifically-bereft storylines of the technological age (CAPRICORN ONE and OUTLAND), 2010 surprisingly retains much hard science in its telling and is consequently a more enjoyable experience for it. Due in full, we must presume, solely to the dogging of author Arthur C. Clarke, who was in constant communication with Hyams through the production process. (Clarke’s book of the same name was more or less plundered for initial momentum, rather than adhered to devoutly.)

To state the obvious, the story picks up 9 years after Kubrick and Clarke’s pioneering and inimitable 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. A joint Soviet-American mission, headed by American scientist Heywood Floyd (now Roy Scheider, was William Sylvester in 2001) and Soviet Commander Kirbuk (Helen Mirren), is sent to Jupiter to retrieve the abandoned hulk, USS Discovery (found silently spinning in orbit about Io, one of Jupiter’s moons), to gather data on the “failure” of the HAL 9000 computer and to maybe make sense of Dave Bowman’s last intriguing transmission regarding the Monolith, “My God! It’s full of stars!”

As economically unsound as this venture may seem, plausible reasons are given for the mission, but – like they say – you’d have to be a rocket scientist…

Amid growing political tensions on Earth, the Soviet ship Leonov arrives at Jupiter with its Russian and American crew, Hyams performing a controlled set of vignettes to bring about tension between the crews (initially distrustful of each other), then building the tension around the giant Monolith orbiting Jupiter, which unites the crews for their lives’ sake.

Though it retains none of the breathtaking poetry and grandiose vision of 2001, Hyams’s lesser vision is aided by spectacular views of Jupiter and Io, thanks to Voyager 1‘s groundbreaking flybys of the planet in 1979. Mattes of these images are put to excellent use during a suspenseful spacewalk by astronauts Max and Curnow (Elya Baskin and John Lithgow), as they approach the dead Discovery.

“No, come around this way– no, stop pulling on your end– wait wait wait I got it, no, just float don’t try to swim– now you’re getting it tangled– wait, lemme pull this part around, no, just hold your end, don’t tug on it…”

Though science is bowed to more often than in his previous efforts, Hyams doesn’t quite shake off his trademarks of outrageous conceptual anomalies and immutable physics laws treated like arbitrary physics suggestions. (With the Earth and its Moon in the same screen shot, Hyams makes the same sophomoric mistake that most non-credible space movies make when depicting these two celestial bodies which are on average 240,000 miles apart – if they were as close as depicted onscreen, not only would tides be generating tsumanis daily, both celestial bodies would have torn themselves apart eons ago or smashed together due to gravitational attraction.)

After the Monolith mysteriously goes about its business of doing nothing on a monolithic scale, puny humans pondering its purpose, and after HAL is revived and jovially goes about his business of being unnervingly menacing, Dave Bowman (model mannequin Keir Dullea) appears to Floyd, in the form of a constantly-morphing old man/astronaut/elder, and tells him “something wonderful” is going to happen.

Only Arthur C. Clarke would have the temerity to blow up Jupiter. Crumbling under the confluence of millions of Mini-Monoliths, Jupiter goes nova and becomes a sun, whilst the Leonov makes a narrow escape. HAL, through the intercession of Dr. Chandra (an ascetic Bob Balaban, perfectly congruent with his typecasting from CLOSE ENCOUNTERS and ALTERED STATES, who is somehow able to bring that same character to his future comedic roles with Christopher Guest), becomes sympathetic enough to weep for, when he is destroyed along with Discovery.

Another beauteous message from a mythic entity that no one on Earth will heed…

The last scenes of Earth and its twin suns illustrate Hyams’s kindergarten comprehension of planetary orbits: we are shown a constant two-sun sky everywhere on the Earth, yet in becoming our newest star, Jupiter (which is renamed Lucifer) has not changed its orbit, nor will it ever. Its orbit will appear exactly as it did when Jupiter was merely a planet – that is, it will continually “cross the sky” at a different rate than the actual Sun, thereby causing two suns to be in the sky at ever-changing positions, or sometimes merely one Sun in the sky, sometimes only Lucifer, sometimes no suns. (And I am surprised the great Arthur C. Clarke allowed this anomalous visual to be committed to film!)

After this silly sequence, we immediately jump-cut across the solar system – in an uncharacteristic grandiose sequence – to Europa, the moon of Jupiter that the Monolith forbad any landings on, in its final message to Earth:

“All these worlds are yours, except Europa. Attempt no landing there. Use them together. Use them in peace.”

And lo, the last frame sets up sequelae ad infinitum, as The Monolith makes a cameo on Europa, and the harbinger-like strains of Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra crouches and then leaps at us – banging its head on Hyams’s lowered ceiling.

After all, for midgets, the ceiling can afford to be that low.

END