jürgen fauth’s muckworld

Words fail me. There’s a certain kind of twisted logic to it: a novel about the persistence of love has turned, in the hands of a mediocre director, into a a campy, puffed-up piece of rotten Oscar bait, a movie of such boundless badness that it would take somebody with a Nobel Prize in literature to truly fathom the extent of its wretchedness. Gabriel García Márquez’s 1985 novel is an impossibly sustained lyrical romance of unfulfilled love that stretches over decades, set among the lush vegetation and brimming cities of the Colombian coast. With his adaptation, Mike Newell (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) demonstrates that there’s more to Garcia Marquez than extravagant plotting: without the master’s ineffable touch, even his most fertile fictions turn to dust.

The story’s all there: in the late 19th century, the young clerk Florentino Ariza (Javier Bardem) falls in desperate love with the beautiful Fermina (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), but her father (John Leguziamo) interferes, and she marries Dr. Urbino (Benjamin Bratt) instead. Undaunted, Florentino decides to wait for her, no matter how long it will take. In the novel, Garcia Marquez fills the intervening years with outrageous and obsessively detailed anecdotes and labyrinthine detours rendered in extraordinary language, but Newell gives us nothing but a few dusty costumes, uninspired direction, and — instead of subtitles — Spanish accents that are supposed to communicate some sort of foreignness.

For the teenage Florentino, Newell uses a different actor (Unax Ugalde), but when the star-crossed lovers turn old, he just covers them with layers of ridiculous make-up. Were there no aging actors available that could have given the septuagenarian Fermina and Florentino a bit of desperately needed verisimilitude? Even worse, the film is completely tone-deaf when it comes to Garcia Marquez’s mingling of ruefulness and bawdiness. Newell plays all the wrong dramatic moments for laughs and mistrusts the romance to such a degree that he slathers every emotional cue with a syrupy score that makes identification with the characters impossible. As Fermina’s confidante, the wonderful Catalina Sandino Moreno (Maria Full of Grace) is not only wasted but, for the later part of the story, has to suffer the indignity of a fat suit.

But enough. It’s fruitless to count the ways in which Love in the Time of Cholera fails. Critics’ screenings here in New York are usually quiet affairs where you can get shushed for looking at the screen funny, but at the one I attended, people were talking back at the movie, Rocky Horror-style. Love in the Time of Cholera is scheduled to open on November 16.

Love in the Time of Cholera. Mike Newell, 2007. *

• Reading Love in the Time of Cholera
• The Painted Veil also features broken hearts and a deadly disease
• If you must, here’s the trailer

“It’s 1183 and we’re barbarians!” proclaims Eleanor of Aquitaine (Katharine Hepburn), and she’s got a point. The infighting between aging Henry II (Peter O’Toole), his jailed queen, and jealous sons vying for the crown (Anthony Hopkins, John Castle, Nigel Terry) is some of the ugliest — and most twisted — I’ve ever seen.

Based on a play by James Goldman, the dialogue reaches levels of viciousness usually reserved for Edward Albee, with many more quotable lines than you can digest on first viewing and acting that should never have lost an Oscar to Oliver! or Charly. Like The Ice Harvest, this movie belongs on our list of Top Ten Christmas Movies for Cynics. With Timothy Dalton as King Philip of France.

The Lion in Winter. Anthony Harvey, 1968. ****

Just in case you somehow managed to avoid the longest-running TV sitcom in American history, do not worry: The Simpsons Movie is careful to include everybody in the fun. In the opening minutes, after Itchy and Scratchy have landed on the moon and everybody in the audience has been declared “a sucker” for paying good money to see what you can get for free on TV, the script introduces every character fresh.

Here’s Homer, the oaf, and Marge with the blue beehive. Earnest adolescent Lisa has a new cause and a new crush, baby Maggie knows how to fend for herself, and Bart–well, Bart should need as little introduction as the “evil corporate mascot” he impersonates with a black bra on his head. In the process, some of the essence that has gotten away from the characters over the years is restored: Lisa playing her saxophone, Bart riding his skateboard through town naked, Homer equal parts stupid, selfish and compassionate with a pet pig that rates its own theme song. Call it “Homer Begins,” call it “Casino Springfield”–you’re not required to know anything about the extended cosmology of the Simpsons to enjoy their movie.

But it helps. As far as I could tell, The Simpsons Movie is stuffed with enough in-jokes and references to past episodes to keep a dozen Internet forums humming for months.The supporting cast seems to include every character who’s ever appeared on the show, and many of them have lines. The animation–the familiar vast fields of flat, juicy color bounded by satisfyingly thick black lines–looks great on a movie screen. For this fair-weather fan, the laughter started during the studio logo (!) and didn’t end until far into the credits. (Make sure to stay for Maggie’s first word.)

The plot? Like most things Simpsons, it loses in the telling, so let’s just say that it’s appropriately large-scale for the movies, and each of the principal characters is tested to the breaking point — as it should be. Beyond that, it’s worth noting that the movie’s villain is the American government. Ruled by a president who’d rather “lead than read,” Springfield finds itself at the mercy of a corrupt official (voice of Albert Brooks) whose response to a natural disaster is even worse than FEMA’s. Clearly, somebody in the Simpson White House doesn’t care about yellow people.

Does The Simpsons Movie achieve the lofty heights of brilliance the show regularly scaled during its mid-nineties heyday? More than just the longest episode, is it also the Best. Episode. Ever? I’m pretty sure it’s not, and I don’t think it could have been. Try as they might, The Simpsons simply aren’t as vital now as they were during the Clinton years, when their whiplash wit, easygoing snarkiness, and compulsive pop referencing influenced an entire generation’s sense of humor. If anything, The Simpsons succeeded so completely that they faded into the fabric of our culture, and going to Springfield for an hour and a half feels a little bit like going home. No matter where you’ve been for the last 18 years, these are some very familiar characters with very familiar voices. Seeing them up on the big screen, it’s like we knew all along they had it in them to become movie stars.

The Simpsons Movie. David Silverman, 2007. ****

“That’s a lot of entertainment for five grand!” Philip Marlowe’s talking about the questionable spectacle of a bunch of gangsters (including an uncredited Arnold Schwarzenegger) stripping to make a point, but it applies equally to Robert Altman’s time-traveling Chandler adaptation as a whole. Mumbling Elliott Gould is miles apart from Humphrey Bogart but drop dead cool in his own inimitable way, and all of 1970s Los Angeles emerges as his deceptively sunny antagonist.

The Long Goodbye. Robert Altman, 1973. ****

• Roger Ebert
• Terrence Rafferty revists The Long Goodbye
• Terrence Rafferty on the occasion of Altman’s 81st birthday
• Ill-Informed Gadfly
• Christopher Sieving at PopMatters
• The Long Goodbye at Wikipedia

The trailer:

The Internet Movie Database lists 48 adaptations of Macbeth–give or take a few TV versions–but Geoffrey Wright’s contemporary gangster take on the Scottish play doesn’t resemble any of them as much as a low-budget remake of Scarface. There’s lots of gunplay between drug dealers, the witches are a bunch of doped-up goth chicks, and some of the Bard’s best soliloquies are abbreviated in favor of extended orgies (some literal, some merely orgies of bloodletting.)

Fresh off of Slings & Arrows‘ pitch-perfect second season, in which the New Burbage Festival takes on the cursed play, Marcy and I were more than eager to see a fresh take on Mackers, but there’s precious little to praise here. In the title role, Sam Worthington gives most of his speeches in voice-over without changing his expression at all, and Victoria Hill looks like she would be more comfortable in a prime time soap than as literature’s most cruelly ambitious woman. She gets to do “Out, out damn spot” topless.

The contemporary updating–Duncan and his men are Melbourne drug lords–is supposed to make the drama more accessible but only distracts instead. (Macbeth’s gated estate bears a sign identifying it as Dunsinane, Banquo likes to ride motorbikes just so he can ride something when he gets whacked, and Burnham Wood is a logging company.)

Worst of all, the direction lacks the go-for-broke pomo gusto that made Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo & Juliet such a success: everything about this adaptation, including the slow-motion finale, feels unconvincing and lackluster, and the beauty of the language never takes wing. How could it if you cut “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” before the punchline? Stick with Orson, Roman, and Akira. Opens July 6.

Macbeth. Geoffrey Wright, 2006. *

Videos: Geoffrey Tenant takes on Macbeth at the beginning of Slings & Arrows S2E2, newsreel footage from Orson Welles’ 1936 all-black stage version, and trailers for Polanski’s 1971 and Kurosawa’s 1957 adaptations.

The first two acts of this W. Somerset Maugham adaptation are fantastic: Naomi Watts plays a woman who marries stodgy bacteriologist Ed Norton out of desperation and cheats on him with Liev Schreiber as soon as they arrive at his home in Shanghai. To punish her and himself, Norton takes her into the interior, to a village ravaged by cholera. The way the two steer their wrecked relationship through the lush landscape stalked by death is terrific–it’s sort of a grown-up version of Battle Royale, in which the stakes of love are ratcheted up to 11: if you leave me, you’ll die a grisly death. Toby Jones (Truman in Infamous) provides the cynical but helpful foreigner, and there are nuns.

I was less fond of the third act, in which Chekhov’s Law is adhered to much too slavishly: if there’s cholera around, somebody’s gonna get it! Still, The Painted Veil is big classic Hollywood cinema, splendidly engaging, marvelously acted and shot, sumptuous and emotional. The real mystery is why this film, far better than The Departed and most of the other nominees, didn’t get any kind of attention at Oscar time. In decades past, this would have been exactly the kind of thing the Academy would’ve gone gaga over. As a sign of how much times as changed, the The Painted Veil wasn’t even technically released by a major studio but by their “indie” distributor Warner Independent. It was drowned out in December’s mad movie rush, and now the official site is hocking the DVD as “just in time for mother’s day!”

The Painted Veil. John Curran, 2006. ***

• Rotten Tomatoes: 75%

The hype machine is in high gear, but for once there’s truth in advertising. As far as megabudget superhero adaptations go, Spider-Man 3 delivers exactly what it promises: more of the same. If you liked the first two installments, this is great news. Unlike the self-important Batman Begins, the Spider-Man movies know exactly what they are and what they want to be.

Again, Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, and James Franco engage in cheeseball humor and soapy storylines illustrating bromides like “everybody needs help sometimes.” As before, Sam Raimi’s crisp direction makes elaborate three-dimensional action set pieces as transparent as a few well-chosen comics panels would. Again, the bright color scheme, the iconic NYC locations, the funny bit players (J.K. Simmons and Mageina Tovah as Ursula), the swooping score, and the gee-whiz wholesomeness that leaves no doubt that this poppy entertainment is squarely aimed at kids.

There are three new villains: Franco turns into the hoverboard-surfing New Goblin, Sideways‘ Thomas Hayden Church becomes the Sandman (who, by film’s end, looks like the Trash Heap from Fraggle Rock), and Topher Grace as Eddie Brock, who is covered with alien goo as Venom, the most wicked of the Spidey villains. Their tag-team battles are the most exciting of the series so far.

Peter Parker also undergoes some transformations. As a deft metaphor externalizing his anger and aggression, the alien symbiote colors Spidey’s costume black, and he ends up with a hipper haircut and a mean new attitude: the dweeb struts to a James Brown tune and turns into a sexual predator (or at least a dweeb’s idea of a sexual predator.) In mythic terms, the symbiote represents the Devil of the Tarot deck, but by the end of the movie, the Sun of forgiveness comes up over Manhattan. There’s room for plenty of sequels.

Spider-Man 3. Sam Raimi, 2007. ***

• Spider-Man 3 on Rotten Tomatoes
• In case you managed to miss it, the trailer:

Sarah Polley’s first feature, an adaptation of an Alice Munro short story about a couple dealing with Alzheimer’s, is getting a lot of praise on the festival circuit, and she was appropriately celebrated at the premiere for MoMA’s Canadian Front program last night.

Julie Christie plays a woman in her sixties who finds herself putting pans into the freezer, and before you know it, her husband of 44 years (Gordon Pinsent) has to drive her to a home — where she soon forgets all about him and begins a touching/infuriating relationship with another patient instead. It’s well acted, of course, but the dialogue is a tad too “literary” for my taste, and Polley’s direction left me somewhat confused in the end. Still, it’s a story that rarely gets told–when was a last time you saw a tour of a nursing home as act-ending set piece? It’s goes without saying that it’s all terribly sad, even though there are a few flashes of humor. In a way, this is a movie not quite unlike Severance: Away From Her can be just as hard to take, and you really have to be in the mood for it. At the Q&A with Polley and Olympia Dukakis, it was nice to see that Polley can, in fact, smile.

Away from Her. Sarah Polley, 2006. ***

• Official site with trailer
• Wikipedia
• Away from Her on Rotten Tomatoes
• Away from Her on GreenCine: Sundance
• The Reeler has photos and quotes from last night’s screening
• Reverse Shot loved it
• YouTube Bonus:
  • Sweet Hereafter video of Sarah Polley singing “Courage”
  • Sarah Polley talks about Away from Her at the Berlinale