Cleopatra, Sith, Death Proof
April 10th, 2007
Prompted by the grand finale of Rome, we took another look at Cleopatra, which is one of those movies I can rewatch every few years. Compare-and-contrast is a fun enough game, and Marcy, who was never entirely sure which of the HBO characters were fictional, was entertained by noting differences in motivation and plot. Every frame of Cleopatra must have cost more than an entire episode of Rome, but the storytelling is much more contemporary on HBO. The movie nearly bankrupted Fox because it was designed to trump TV by outspending it. Forty years later, it has been shown up by… a TV show. But the images are still twice as wide, and the characters twice as grand.
Here’s what fascinated me, though: the palatial sets, outlandish backdrops, and outsized drama of Cleopatra resemble another, much more recent epic about larger-than-life figures. Along with forties serials, The Hidden Fortress, Ray Harryhausen and all the other usual suspects, there is no doubt that the Cinemascope epics of the fifties and sixties, and specifically Cleopatra, served as a blueprint for the Star Wars films. Archetypes in ever-morphing hairdos and caped costumes acting out eternal tragedies and reciting awkward, overwritten lines of dialogue — especially Revenge of the Sith, the episode in which the galactic shit hits the fan, is the spiritual and cinematic heir of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s four-and-a-half-hour epic.
Read on for more about Star Wars, Grindhouse, and why Jar-Jar Binks is cooler than Stuntman Mike. Also, lots more screenshots.
Alex Rider: Stormbreaker
October 17th, 2006
How did we end up seeing this movie about a teenage secret agent saving the world from Mickey Rourke? It’s a long story, but it’s my blog, so I might as well tell it. It involves a severely sprained ankle, ridiculously oversold showings of The Departed at both 34th and 42nd Streets, and time to kill before the NYFF closing night party. All in all, we claimed three sets of free tickets before I simply couldn’t walk any further.
Turns out Stormbreaker was no dumber than a regular James Bond movie, and the cast–Ewan McGregor, Bill Nighy, Alicia Silverstone, Rourke–was obviously having a splendid time. And to think that I’d never even heard of it before my ankle gave out!
Stormbreaker. Geoffrey Sax, 2006. **
[tags]film, 2 stars, james bond, alicia silverstone, mickey rourke, bill nighy, ewan mcgregor, explosions, action, teenagers[/tags]
