'Space Chimps' on a Wild Ride Through Outer Space

Space Chimps

The New York Sun, July 18, 2008

When Alan Shepard returned safely to Earth late in the Gagarin spring of 1961, a relieved, ecstatic nation treated him to ticker tape, meet-the-president, and, subsequently, a trip to the moon. The previous astronaut sent by NASA into space hadn't fared quite so well. Emerging snarling and indignant from an edge-of-disaster suborbital shambles that was a comedy of human error and simian savoir faire, Ham had to make do with an apple, a pat on the head, and a speedy return to the desert laboratory that had, with the help of occasional electric shocks and (one hopes) more frequent banana pellets, trained him so effectively. Ham, I should say, was a chimpanzee, one of only two to escape the surly bonds of Earth — at least until Tim Burton's "Planet of the Apes."

Ham never returned to space. He was held for years in Washington, D.C.'s National Zoo before being allowed to enjoy a glorious polygamous twilight in North Carolina, a twilight that, if "Space Chimps," the latest CGI saga from Vanguard Animation ("Valiant," "Happily N'Ever After") is to be believed, left him with just one grandson, the ne'er-do-well Ham III. Voiced by "Saturday Night Live"'s Andy Samberg, he's a slacker circus chimp, clad in sub-Knievel kitsch and periodically shot from a cannon in a tawdry parody of his famous forebear's legendary feat.

Everything changes when Ham is conscripted by a flailing space agency to be the p.r. face of a mission to retrieve a probe lost on a planet at the wrong end of a wormhole. Shot into space with the "Star-Trek"-citing straight arrow Commander Titan (a Pan troglodytes Buzz Lightyear, voiced by Patrick Warburton, who played Puddy on "Seinfeld") and the coyly fetching Lieutenant Luna (Cheryl Hines), a chimpanzee hottie with more than a passing resemblance to the Zira who fell so hard for Charlton Heston's bright-eyed Taylor, Ham is forced to decide what he's going to make of himself.

In a movie not notable for its originality, it's no surprise that, in the didactic, rapscallion-with-a-heart-of-gold tradition of children's fiction, Ham ultimately discovers his better self. He helps his friends. He rescues the oppressed. He acknowledges his wise old mentor. By the end of the film, the tousled scapegrace has proved himself a worthy heir to his heroic grandfather, "a chimp," Titan says in one of the better of the entertainingly awful ape-themed puns scattered throughout this movie, "off the old block." And, yes, he ends up with considerably more than an apple.

With its chase scenes, laughable, not-too-scary villain, affable apes, lovable aliens, mild subversion of the adult world, hokey sentimentality, endemic cuteness, cheesy sound track, goofily lame jokes, gentle potty humor, and Crayola-colored extraterrestrial settings, there's probably enough in this movie to make it a good dumping ground for the kids on a rainy summer afternoon. The younger ones, at least, should have a reasonably fun time, particularly if stoned on Twizzlers and Coke. This, after all, is the demographic that enriched the Wiggles — sophistication is not the name of their game.

Despite a few, very few, amusing moments clearly designed to appeal to an older audience (on the whole I'd have preferred a few banana pellets), adults are likely to regard sitting through Ham's space odyssey as something of an ordeal. The film lacks the wit, inventiveness, and charm that made "Toy Story," say, or "Shrek" such strong intergenerational hits. That's not to deny that "Space Chimps" is, technically speaking, an accomplished achievement, certainly to anyone, such as me, brought up in the "Top Cat" era, and, I suspect, even for some of those whose early years were more Pixar than Hanna-Barbera.

But technological savvy isn't enough. This is a film that just lacks the spark necessary to keep it from what seems bound to be a lonely afterlife in the dustier corners of Blockbuster's children's section. For a film about outer space, the screenplay is miserably earthbound. Worse still, the talented cast (which also includes Jeff Daniels, Kristin Chenoweth, and Stanley Tucci) is rarely given an opportunity to do much more than simply recite lines that needed a lot more help than that.

Meanwhile, despite occasional moments of hallucinatory splendor, the almost immeasurably remote planet Malgor is routinely depicted as little more than a Pufnstuf New Mexico. Its inhabitants are, for the most part, by-the-numbers oddball creatures, with the possible exception of the creepily sweet Kilowatt (Ms. Chenoweth), a megalocephalic dollhouse Tinker Bell with, perhaps, a touch of the Murakami studio about her.

If there is one time when this movie manages to rise above itself, it's when the chimps' spacecraft first leaves Earth behind it. In a short, magical, beguiling sequence, the filmmakers manage to convey a sense of beauty, immensity, and wonder. It's a glimpse of the movie that might have been, and a hint, frustrating in its brevity, of the original Ham's strange, wild ride.

Holding Up A Shattered Mirror

Funny Games

The New York Sun, March 14, 2008

When it comes to movie do-overs, the recklessly sexy Naomi Watts just cannot keep herself out of trouble. In remakes of "Ringu" ("The Ring") and "King Kong," she found herself stalked by, respectively, a monstrous spirit and a rampaging ape. If, as has been reported, she stars in an upcoming reworking of Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds," she will soon be facing an enraged avian army. But none of these ordeals, past or future, are enough to deter the much menaced Ms. Watts from appearing in yet another remake — the sinister and distressing "Funny Games," a film in which she confronts the most dangerous creature of all: man.

Naomi, peril, remake — so far, so familiar. But what makes this remake so different is the way that it is the same. The new "Funny Games" is simply the Austrian director Michael Haneke's American version of his own 1997 German-language film. And it's no Mulligan. The original "Funny Games" was profoundly and brilliantly disturbing, an unsettling, upsetting examination of human savagery and the spectacle that we like to make of it. It told the tale of the torment — relentless, remorseless, and just for the fun of it — of a vacationing family at the hands of Peter (Frank Giering) and Paul (Arno Frisch), two preppies with more than a touch of Leopold and Loeb about them. Almost all the physical violence was off-screen, but the intensity of the cruelty on display, and the forensic psychological skill with which it was wielded, made "Funny Games" a tour de force that was almost, but not quite, unbearable to watch. And it's that "not quite" that's the rub.

Yes, Wim Wenders, the distinguished German director, walked out when the movie was shown at Cannes in 1997, but most people who have watched it have seen it through to its brutal conclusion. Some may even have enjoyed it. I didn't, but I was fascinated, intrigued, and gripped, which I think, I hope, is something else. Of course, Mr. Haneke was not the first to ask awkward questions about how we react to media depictions of violence, but the clever and highly manipulative manner in which he did so was not the least of his film's far-from-funny games. Throw in the extraordinary performances by the cast, and it is difficult to deny that the first "Funny Games" was some kind of masterpiece.

So why remake it, and why remake it as a shot-for-shot re-creation of the original? The actors are different, they speak their lines in English, and the action has been transferred from Austria to America. But in almost every other way, the two films are identical. The rationale for the remake lies not only in the obvious lure of a wider audience, but also, more interestingly, in its location. Mr. Haneke clearly relished the idea of using a Hollywood studio (Warner Bros.) to inject his film into the American entertainment culture that, he claims, inspired it, but which it repudiates.

That said, positioning "Funny Games" as a critique of a specifically American cinema may win Mr. Haneke the usual plaudits from the usual suspects, but it risks diluting its impact. To see this as a film solely "about America" (and I don't think that Mr. Haneke truly does) is to divert it from the source of its appalling power as a commentary on humanity as a whole — a perspective that will, ironically, be enhanced for American viewers by virtue of the fact that the story is now presented in their own language. Watching "Funny Games" in subtitled German offered Americans the comforting possibility that it was merely an account of Teutonic beastliness, an all too familiar theme. To shoot it in English removes that alibi. Peter and Paul ensnare their victims. Mr. Haneke entraps his. There is nowhere to turn. This isn't a film about Austrians; it is a film about us, all of us, wherever or whoever we are.

In almost every other respect, there is little to choose between the two versions. If the first was a masterpiece, so is the second. When it comes to the principals, Tim Roth and Naomi Watts (as the tortured couple) do just fine, but never equal the depth of the late Ulrich Mühe (so compelling as the hero of "The Lives of Others") or, even more notably, Susanne Lothar: Her portrayal of the crushed and broken wife is one of the most harrowing performances in modern cinema. On the other hand, as Peter and Paul, Brady Corbet and Michael Pitt manage to eclipse their Germanic predecessors, which is no small achievement.

Floppy-haired, soft-spoken, and Locust Valley immaculate, these are the most well-mannered of sadists — Mengeles filtered through Choate, Berias groomed by Andover. Precisely, methodically, and, on the whole, most politely, they test, they probe, and then they tear apart a family just because, well, they can. Of the two, the diffident, pudgy, clumsy Peter (Mr. Corbet), his odd, off-kilter face punctuated with the lips of a Habsburg princeling, comes across as a stumblebum psychotic — as feeble, ultimately, as he is lethal. While some of his supposed weaknesses are themselves just another game, he is, in reality, little more than foil, stooge, and plaything for the more dominant Paul (Mr. Pitt). It is Paul, we come to discover, who is presiding over these games, both within the movie, and beyond. It is Paul who gives us a glimpse of the abyss.

Or is it, more horrifying still, a look into a mirror?

Fight for Your Right To Fight

Battle in Seattle

The New York Sun, September 19, 2008

One doesn't have to agree politically with a movie to appreciate the skill with which it was made or, for that matter, to enjoy it. To combine a bad film, however, with worse politics is to add insult to injury, which brings us to the topic of "Battle in Seattle," a ham-fisted, sanctimonious blend of leftist agitprop, by-the-numbers melodrama, and excruciating self-righteousness that arrives in theaters Friday. If you are currently taking orders from Rage Against the Machine, Michael Moore, or Naomi Klein, go and see it; for anyone else, this is one "Battle" you're going to lose.

The movie begins with a brief but remarkably paranoid introductory history sequence, a sort of Protocols of the Elders of GATT, designed to expose the supposedly sinister evolution of the postwar international trade regime. Having set this bleak, menacing, and thoroughly conspiratorial scene, "Battle in Seattle" then gets down to business — or, more accurately, to stopping business. The film is a fictionalized account of the 1999 anti-globalization protests that trashed Seattle, wrecked the World Trade Organization negotiations, and left a legacy that has bedeviled the WTO ever since.

Its writer-director, Stuart Townsend, tells the tale through the stories of a handful of protagonists, primarily some noble protesters. But he reinforces it with a noble Médecins Sans Frontières-type physician (Rade Serbedzija), a noble representative of the Third World (Isaach de Bankolé), an eventually noble TV journalist who comes to see the error of her corporate media ways (Connie Nielsen, a long, long way from "Gladiator"), and a potentially noble, basically good-hearted cop (Woody Harrelson) who, prompted in part by what befalls his wife (the ever-decorative Charlize Theron), finishes the movie at least dimly aware that he is being duped by the Man.

The case for free trade is, of course, never made. The benefits it has brought the developing world don't rate a mention. All we hear about is exploitation. "Battle in Seattle" is a modern morality play, and like most morality plays, it's drawn with little nuance and less character development. As Mayor Tobin (presumably a rendering of real-life Seattle mayor Paul Schell), Ray Liotta turns in a cleverly convincing portrait of a soixante-huitard bewildered by a radicalism he once would have understood. But Mr. Liotta's sensitive, well-judged performance is the exception. His character is a believable, conflicted human being, a refreshing presence in a drama peopled, if that's the word, by cardboard cutouts.

The protesters at the center of "Battle in Seattle" never emerge from the didactic stereotypes within which they are confined. Beautiful Sam (Jennifer Carpenter) is the sensitive, smart one; Django (OutKast's Andre Benjamin) is the genial joker, and Lou (Michelle Rodriguez) is fiery, feisty, and, let's face it, a bit of a pain. Needless to say, they are all passionate, sincere, idealistic, and selfless, none more so than their leader, the charismatic Jay (Martin Henderson), who is determined, inspiring, and replete with tragic backstory and Jesus hair-and-beard. The only surprise is that when he is restored to his people after a time of tribulation, it is not on the third day.

That's not to say that "Battle in Seattle" doesn't have its moments: The scenes outside the prison where some protestors have been detained are powerful; with the help of a surging melody, they even stirred my own dark, reactionary soul. What's more, the film occasionally — very occasionally — has something useful to say. The two acts of brutality that come to define Mr. Townsend's portrayal of the police response to the protests may dissolve into a bloody sludge of karma and caricature, but the director's depiction of a police department unprepared for what hits the city rings true. So does the obvious implication that the resulting confusion inflamed a situation that may not (as is sometimes claimed) have been a "police riot," but was certainly chaotic and, at times, all too heavy-handed.

To be fair, Mr. Townsend doesn't dodge the fact that the protesters were themselves responsible for much of the violence that marked the Seattle protests, although he is careful to pin the blame on an anarchist minority. There's some truth to that latter claim, but only some, and it sidesteps the awkward question of whether large crowds swarming downtown Seattle with the intention of stopping people from going to a conference they wish to attend can, in any meaningful sense, be considered "nonviolent." At the very least, such "direct action" (to use the usual euphemism) is intimidation, if not mob rule — something that Mr. Townsend veers dangerously close to endorsing in a closing sequence that seems to celebrate the trouble that has surrounded subsequent WTO gatherings.

Judging by his movie's script, Mr. Townsend's justification for this appears to be that the WTO lacks democratic legitimacy, an argument with emotional, if not always logical, appeal in an era when globalization has left many feeling as though they've lost control of their economic destiny. It might have more force, however, if moviegoers could believe that Sam, Lou, Django, Jay, and their ilk would have protested just as vigorously against, say, the no less undemocratic Kyoto treaty. Fat chance. Their real beef, of course, is with nasty old capitalism (the ugliest expletive throughout "Battle in Seattle" is "corporate"), a dreary, shop-soiled grudge to which this film adds little beyond a city's smashed shop windows.

The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful

The Duchess

The New York Sun, September 19, 2008

Barely more than a decade after that tragic dash through Paris and the unhinged, hysterical carnival of lamentation that followed, it is no great surprise that Princess Diana continues to cast a shadow over popular culture, particularly in the country where she once seemed destined to be queen. It is, nonetheless, disappointing to detect that elements of her tawdry, strip-mined melodrama have been slipped into Saul Dibb's new film "The Duchess," which arrives in theaters Friday. The British director gives what should have been a perfectly respectable biopic of Georgiana, an 18th-century Duchess of Devonshire, contemporary resonance it neither needs nor deserves.

Yes, Diana was the duchess's great-great-great-great-niece and, yes, both women weathered marriages that were indeed (to borrow a word) "crowded," but neither genealogy nor (very) superficially similar matrimonial difficulties are good reasons to blend their (very) different stories. The lure of the box office is, I suppose, to blame. Diana still sells.

Very loosely based on Amanda Foreman's clever, immaculately researched, and enthralling biography of Georgiana, Mr. Dibb's movie has taken the story of one of the most fascinating Englishwomen of her epoch — a celebrated socialite and political campaigner — and transformed it into a big-budget blend of Lifetime television, Masterpiece Theatre, and Diana Spencer tribute movie. Thus, the young duchess (Keira Knightley) speaks in the soft Sloane tones more typically associated with Lady Di in her early years than with the Georgian grandee she is meant to be playing. Meanwhile, Ralph Fiennes, in a subtle, show-stealing portrayal of the duchess's cold, buttoned-up, and older husband, manages to punctuate his performance with very specific hints of Prince Charles's lugubrious tics, mannerisms, and phraseology — hints that will make a British audience, at least, shudder or snigger, depending on mood.

For the most part, however, this film's sins are of omission. Georgiana may have been a famed fashion icon, but she was also a genuinely effective power broker, a fiercely intelligent woman known as much for her Whiggery as for her truly remarkable wigs, an angle the filmmakers have downplayed in favor of crowd-pleasing emotional drama and roller-coaster marital crises. It's typical that the movie ends on a note of gently accommodating family reconciliation, concluding its narrative at a point that may make some sort of soap-operatic sense, but is well before Georgiana's final period of political prominence. To be fair, at various times we do see the duchess electioneering, and at others she's shown hanging out with Charles James Fox (a potato-faced Simon McBurney, sufficiently wily, sufficiently charming, insufficiently louche) and the rest of his clique, but, taken as a whole, the film leaves the clear impression that the duchess's political role was primarily ornamental. In reality, it was substantially more than that, no small achievement more than a century before female suffrage.

Rather more flatteringly for the duchess, we are not told, except through the most oblique of references, the extent to which her love of gambling (one of the main aristocratic pastimes of that period) became an addiction, bringing in its wake losses that might have brought a blush to the Lehman Brothers's mortgage bond team and which, in part, explained why the poor duke might sometimes have looked a little pained. The reason for this particular omission is probably the filmmakers' wish to present cinemagoers with a suitably sympathetic romantic heroine (so far as they reasonably could, given the tricky historical record). To show her losing tens of thousands at the faro table wouldn't really have done the trick.

Similarly, the duchess's love life (something she pursued with a splendidly 18th-century gusto) is mainly reduced to misery at the hands of her unfeeling husband (that was true enough, alas), a series of harmless flirtations, a not-quite seduction by the woman who goes on to become the duke's live-in mistress, and then one great romance with a future prime minister, Charles Grey (Dominic Cooper, doing his unconvincing best to channel the BBC's Mr. Darcy). The truth was considerably busier, rather more complicated, and much more interesting.

If Georgiana's biography has been prettied up, so has the country in which she lived. Eighteenth-century England was a grubby, smelly, uncomfortable place. Even its grandest houses were just a pace or two from squalor and were, for the most part, none too clean themselves. The same could be said of their inhabitants, not to mention those unfortunate enough to live beyond ducal walls. The beautifully filmed England of "The Duchess" (courtesy of cinematographer Gyula Pados) is, by contrast, immaculate, a land of lush landscapes, Augustan charm, and gorgeous Palladian magnificence. It bears about as much resemblance to the real thing as Marie Antoinette (a friend of Georgiana's, not that you'd know it from this movie) did to the simple shepherdesses she occasionally pretended to be.

No matter. As a backdrop to what is, in essence, a well-crafted, well-acted, period romance, this prettily stage-set, sceptr'd isle will do just fine. We'll leave the slums, the stench, and, for that matter, the disease that was later to wreck the lovely Georgiana's looks to some other, more realistic film.

But if you allow yourself to overlook the historical inaccuracy, the faint feminist subtext, and the forced, tiresome parallels with the Windsors' domestic disasters, "The Duchess" can be fun. So why not take a break from Wall Street worries and wallow instead in an hour or two of spectacle, splendor, and sentimentality?

Aided by landscape, architecture, and costume, "The Duchess" looks terrific and the script does its best, too, helped along by a cast stronger than this film probably deserves. Mr. Fiennes may steal the show, but as Lady Spencer (Georgiana's mother), a matriarch who combines strong maternal affection with a steely sense of dynastic obligation, the perennially formidable Charlotte Rampling dominates every scene in which she appears. By comparison, Ms. Knightley was bound to struggle, but with her strangely old-fashioned beauty, she at least looks the part, and the pathos she successfully brings to her performance reinforces the aura of victimhood without which no romantic heroine is complete. In such a shamefully enjoyable film, what more could one ask?

Dragging Kennedy Into a New Fight

Virtual JFK: Vietnam if Kennedy Had Lived

The New York Sun, September 16, 2008

At its best, counterfactual or "virtual" history (to use Harvard historian Niall Ferguson's term), the exploration of what might have happened if history had not taken a certain turn, can be a fascinating intellectual exercise, a "what if" that illuminates what did happen. Unfortunately, "Virtual JFK: Vietnam if Kennedy Had Lived," which begins a two-week run at Film Forum tomorrow, is neither fascinating nor illuminating.

Helmed by first-time director Koji Masutani, and featuring Brown University professor James Blight (previously known for his work on "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara"), this new documentary is, at least superficially, devoted to the question of whether President Kennedy would have extricated America from the Vietnam conflict long before it could spiral into the quagmire that, under his successor, it became.

Despite the best efforts of Oliver Stone, that's an old debate that can never be resolved. This film adds little to it other than artfully selected news footage, some interesting audio recordings of discussions within the Kennedy administration, and an inordinate amount of wishful thinking. The filmmakers examine the foreign policy crises that defined Kennedy's term, and use the way he handled them to conclude that he was a president who did everything he could to avoid all-out war, whether of the nuclear variety (over the construction of the Berlin Wall or the installation of Russian missiles in Cuba) or something less apocalyptic (the decision to abandon the anti-Castro forces at the Bay of Pigs, and an early reluctance to commit significant ground forces in Indochina).

Add to this some comments contemplating withdrawal from Vietnam that Kennedy made not long before his assassination, and a case begins to come into focus. But begin is all it does. Most of the rest of the film is devoted to images of an embattled President Johnson and brief glimpses of the Vietnam war itself: nothing new, in other words. The movie's point, it's claimed, is the hardly novel idea that it really does matter who is president. President Kennedy might well have called a halt in Vietnam; President Johnson didn't.

But that's not really what "Virtual JFK" is about. The movie's real target finally emerges emerges in its closing moments when the following quotation appears on-screen: "Every time history repeats itself, the price of the lesson goes up." Ah, so that's it. This film is not about Vietnam — not really. It's about Iraq, and Kennedy's role in it is to act as El Cid, a "virtual JFK" in a very different sense, sent forth to do battle with those wicked Republicans one more time. Thus we see Kennedy in press conference after press conference, his deftness, charm, and eloquence a devastating rebuke both to the sourpuss, crudely belligerent, Grand Old Party he occasionally finds time to tease and also, by implication, to the current occupant of the White House — tongue-tied, bellicose and, as president, responsible for a war that need not have been.

If you think some of that sounds like caricature as much as history (actual or virtual), you're right.

Imitation Jules

The New York Sun, July 11, 2008

On March 9, 1886, poor, deranged Gaston Verne shot his uncle Jules, the French writer often credited with the invention of science fiction. The great man survived, but if he'd known what filmmakers would do with his books in the centuries to follow, he probably would have reached for that revolver himself.

The latest movie to spring from Verne's pages, "Journey to the Center of the Earth," may turn out far better than what has come before, but the precedents are not encouraging. Previous "Journeys" — no fewer than five television projects and four feature films have worn the name — have been more trudge than adventure, despite attempts to boost the novel's sometimes leaden pace with additional love interests, murderous rivalries, a martyred duck, a massive ape, humanoid dinosaurs, sexy primeval girls, noble Maori rebels, gunrunning, and, in a confusing 1989 version that doubled as a sequel to "Alien From L.A.," Kathy Ireland.

The idea that Verne's fanciful stories are, by themselves, no longer enough to draw a crowd can be detected in many of the films that have been made of his work. The two best-known versions of Verne's 1874 novel, "The Mysterious Island," added giant animals into the mix, and one of them also threw in a giant bomb just to make sure. Disney's simpering, sickly "In Search of the Castaways" (1962) hit the rocks when an aging Maurice Chevalier broke into saccharine song.

On the other hand, if we avert our eyes from the grotesque blend of martial arts, slapstick, and ham that was Hollywood's most recent take on "Around the World in 80 Days" (with Jackie Chan as Passepartout), Phileas Fogg's legendary circumnavigation has been treated relatively kindly, notably in its 1956 retelling starring David Niven. Notwithstanding a balloon transplanted from an earlier Verne novel, this effort stuck fairly closely to the original story line and offered its audience a spectacle that the old Frenchman, a man fully in touch with his inner Barnum, would have relished.

Verne would also have been intrigued by the way "Around the World" was enriched by the nostalgia with which it is saturated. Just 11 years after Hiroshima, it depicted the mid-Victorian world as a gentle, almost prelapsarian place, its disorders more antic than dangerous, its inventions amusingly retro contraptions. Similarly, and ironically, Fogg's hectic dash had been transformed by time and technology into a symbol of a leisured era, into something that now seems almost stately. Understanding the implications of these changes in perception helps explain those added dinosaurs, karate kicks, and Maoris: Many of the wonders chronicled by Verne are, nowadays, anything but. Making the filmmakers' task more difficult still, the characters created by this most Joe Friday of novelists are, more often than not, cutouts, sketches, and caricatures. The most worthwhile exception is, of course, Captain Nemo, that enigmatic specter of alienation, vengeance, and the utopian violence of the century to come. The captain has benefited from compelling performances by some of cinema's finest, including James Mason (the most convincing Nemo of all), Michael Caine, Herbert Lom, and, appropriately, another captain, the Starship Enterprise's Picard (Patrick Stewart).

But if Nemo has fared well at the movies, the same cannot be said of his lonely odyssey. Neither Mr. Lom nor Mr. Stewart managed to extricate his respective "Mysterious Island" film (the former in 1961, the latter in 2005) from the wreckage of its screenplay, while even the best "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" project (the Walt Disney version from 1954, with Mason) modified, sweetened, and dumbed down Verne's original in a way that sapped much of its power. That said, it is one of its rivals — the Michael Caine film, one of two made-for-TV versions of this story produced in 1997 — that may indicate the best way forward for renderings of Verne. The narrative, bloated by a bitter father-son rivalry, a romance with the girlfriend from "Ferris Bueller" (Nemo's daughter, remarkably), and, yes, the resettling of Atlantis, is the usual Verne movie shambles. But the film's evocative, almost steampunk aesthetic — an exhilarating blend of brass, iron, pumps, and valves, of William Morris, satanic mills, and a science that never quite emerged — is not.

Verne's future may, in one sense, be behind us, but as an alternative reality, or as an imagined universe of (to borrow William Golding's lovely phrase) "astronauts by gaslight," it still has the potential to enchant. There are glimpses of how this could be in Captain Nemo's appearance in Alan Moore's graphic novel "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," but Verne's stories themselves still await such treatment.

The Man Who Would Be Kingpin

Wanted

The New York Sun, June 27, 2008

Whatever else you might want to say about it, Mark Millar's graphic novel "Wanted" was one of the most effective evocations of nerd-boy rage since the days of Bobby Fischer. Obscene, misogynistic, scatological, and saturated with a nasty geek nihilism, it's a clever, unsettling, and unpleasant bloodbath only occasionally softened by signs that it was intended as some sort of parody. Reports that "Wanted" was to be turned into a major Hollywood vehicle made for a bad day. The news that it was going to be filmed by Timur Bekmambetov made a bad day worse.

Mr. Bekmambetov is a Russian director best known in the West for "Night Watch" and "Day Watch," huge hits in his home country that were, if nothing else, reassuring evidence that the era of the Soviet collective-farm epic has, mercifully, drawn to a close. Indeed, the Russian appetite for flashy, empty-headed movies with pretensions of saga status is, these days, just as great as our own. The first installments in a confused and barely comprehensible fantasy trilogy, "Night Watch" and "Day Watch" have been compared by the deluded or the hired with the "Lord of the Rings" films, a comparison not unlike claiming that "Van Helsing" should be ranked with "Dracula." The prospect of Mr. Bekmambetov taking his restless, gimmicky, and derivative camera into the depths of Mr. Millar's perverse multiverse was almost too awful to contemplate.

Remarkably, however, the director and his scriptwriters (previously best known for their contributions to "The Fast and the Furious" canon) have surmounted both their limitations and the business problem presented by Mr. Millar's original material by coming up with a plot that is not only pretty much their own, but, once one has accepted its fundamental absurdity, fairly easy to follow. The starting point in "Wanted" owes much to Mr. Millar and his concept of a geeky loser trapped in Dilbertland who comes to discover that he is the heir to something powerful, dangerous, and strange (wish fulfillment, anybody?).

From there, however, the film mainly goes its own way (apart from the watered-down finale), with only the occasional allusion to the original "Wanted." Mr. Millar's key dystopian premise has been shelved, and with it, his supremely unattractive super-villains (including a Thing-like creature composed of serial-killer fecal matter), the use of random killings and rape as methods of empowerment, and rather too many sequences of peculiarly grotesque violence.

Instead, moviegoers will be treated to a mildly enjoyable piece of hyperkinetic hokum. Innovative it is not. "Wanted" is overreliant on car chases as dully prolonged as a mid-'70s guitar solo and about as original, age-old conspiracies with more than a hint of Dan Brown about them, and slow-motion bullet ballets of a type already clichéd by the end of the first "Matrix" film. If "Wanted" feels by-the-numbers, that's because it is: Even its mayhem comes across as just a touch too planned. Crash the car. Wreck the train. Kill someone.

The movie has its moments, one or two good jokes, and a satisfactory number of exploding heads, but, whatever its director's aspirations, it fails to convey that sense of another world — ours but not quite — that ought to be key to any comic book adaptation. A film of this type should be a magic carpet ride, exhilarating and impossible. "Wanted," by contrast, is as functional as a trip on the crosstown bus, complete with stops, starts, and periods of boredom.

When given the chance, the cast does the best it can. Mr. McAvoy is splendid as Wesley, the bright, put-upon office drone who discovers that he is a member of an ancient caste of assassins. Slight and not particularly tall, Mr. McAvoy is not an obvious action hero, but as Wesley is taught the ways of the Weavers (the ancient caste, not the ancient folk group) in a series of tutorials that appear mainly to involve repeated beatings, target shooting at corpses, and riding the roofs of Chicago's 'L' trains, the actor offers a surprisingly convincing picture of a nerd being transformed into possibly the planet's most lethal killer — no small achievement for a man who played a faun in the first Narnia movie.

Meanwhile, as Weaver chief Sloan, Morgan Freeman takes a break from playing the president and God to remind us that he can portray someone altogether less lofty. Clad in what looks like early Reagan-era Men's Wearhouse, he's bureaucrat, capo, and mentor — a blend of organization man, Don Corleone, and the X-Men's Professor Xavier. He's also an individual with secrets to hide, something that Mr. Freeman manages to convey with little more than a deft glance. Under the circumstances, it's an amazingly subtle performance.

And then there's Angelina Jolie as Fox, the Weaver who is the first to wrench Wesley away from his previously humdrum life before becoming his trainer and, on his first mission, accomplice. Fierce, chiseled, and commanding, Ms. Jolie dominates nearly every scene in which she appears. As is to be expected of the former Mrs. Smith, she makes a very believable assassin. Nevertheless, it's difficult to shake the feeling that her role is as much "Angelina Jolie" as it is Fox, as much a riff on her own public image as an interpretation of the character she is allegedly depicting. Either way, it's a hypnotic performance, if it is a performance: There's an alarmingly feral glint in her eye that must, I imagine, be very, very tricky to fake. There are times when I tremble for Brad Pitt.

The Man Who Would Be Khan

Mongol

The New York Sun, June 6, 2008

On vacation some years ago in a post-communist Mongolia now free to venerate its most famous son, I asked one of the locals if he thought Genghis Khan, the founder and posthumously declared emperor of what became the largest contiguous empire in history, had been, well, just a touch brutal. "Oh, yes," came the reply, "but he was provoked."

That's pretty much the spirit in which the Russian director Sergei Bodrov has made "Mongol," a lavish, highly praised (it was nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar this year) movie that opens in the city today and depicts the rise of Genghis as a well-deserved triumph over adversity. To be fair, this is also the way this tale is told in "The Secret History of the Mongols," a 13th-century Mongolian text that, despite its misty mix of myth, history, and propaganda, is probably the most accurate account of the khan's early years.

It's from there that Mr. Bodrov has taken the core of his story about the young man, known as Temudjin, who will be khan. The film begins in his childhood, and as childhoods go, it's rough, a blend of the bleaker elements of "Oliver Twist," "Harry Potter," and the princes in the tower, transported to Central Asia and reimagined by the creators of "A Man Called Horse." The 9-year-old Temudjin (Odnyam Odsuren) witnesses the murder of his father, is robbed of his right to succeed to the chieftaincy of his clan, and, finally, is forced to escape into the wilderness. As the years pass, ordeals pile on. Even Temudjin's much-delayed honeymoon is transformed into a nightmare when marauding members of an enemy tribe kidnap his gorgeous, free-spirited bride, Börte (Khulan Chuluun).

That ought to be quite enough misery for anyone, but Mr. Bodrov, a true Slav, adds more. In sequences that owe nothing to "The Secret History of the Mongols" and everything to the need to provide a vaguely respectable rationalization for one of Genghis's later massacres, Temudjin is handed over to the rulers of the neighboring Tangut kingdom. They treat him very nastily indeed. At this point, astute cinemagoers will know that the Tanguts are toast. And so they turned out to be, although in "Mongol" this barely merits a footnote. The Tanguts were, in fact, annihilated. Their once-advanced civilization was reduced to desolation, archeological fragments, and something less than a memory. Their only crime was to have been in the way.

Not that that appears to worry Mr. Bodrov much. Once best-known for the lyrical, haunting "Prisoner of the Mountains," an adaptation of a Tolstoy novella updated to reflect today's Chechen conflict, the director has abandoned his earlier, subtle take on the cost of war in favor of something cruder. His last film, "Nomad," was a cack-handed Kazakh "Braveheart," a laughably acted, lamentably written slab of nationalist kitsch redeemed only by its deft use of a landscape so lovely, so strange, and so huge that John Ford should have been there to film it.

That same terrain, or somewhere very much like it, adds an equally hallucinatory grandeur to "Mongol." What's more, like "Nomad," the new film shows clear traces of "Eurasianism," a distinctively Russian, distinctly shaky interpretation of history sometimes deployed to explain why Western-style democracy could never work in Russia. Whatever the similarities between the two movies, however, "Mongol" is a significantly better film. This time around, the screenplay is refreshingly adequate (despite sporadic slips into portentousness, narrative muddle, and shamanistic hocus-pocus).

The acting is much more than that. Casting a Japanese actor to play the 20-something Temudjin may irritate some purists, but at least Tadanobu Asano is considerably more "authentic" than his most notorious predecessor, John Wayne, who played the role in "The Conqueror," Howard Hughes's bizarre, irradiated (it's a long story), and very approximate take on the same tale. Mr. Asano is also far more convincing: His compelling, carefully calibrated performance should quiet most doubts. His Temudjin is watchful, stoic, and self-contained, his terrifying, patient stillness that of the predator waiting his turn, even under the most horrific duress.

Mr. Asano is beautifully counterbalanced by the Chinese actor Honglei Sun (most of the rest of the cast here is, tactfully, Mongolian) as the ebullient Jamukha, Temudjin's rescuer, blood brother, ally, and, ultimately, adversary. Mr. Sun delivers an unexpectedly touching performance as a man driven by custom, power politics, and fate into a savage conflict that he would have given almost anything to avoid.

This sense of destiny galloping onward and ominously at an ever-increasing pace lends the film much of its force, which is only amplified by our knowledge of where the saga will lead. Those first skirmishes on the vast grasslands, wild lightning horseback clashes conducted at a speed that would shame the Comanche, are precursors of a razzia that will, eventually, rage across two continents with a brutality that is breathtaking even by the demanding standards of the 13th century. But as those quick clashes evolve into brilliantly filmed, dizzyingly choreographed massed battles, it's impossible not to wonder if the spectacle is not a dazzling, distracting camouflage deliberately designed by Mr. Bodrov to mask the horrors he purports to show — horrors that foreshadow the hecatombs to come.

"Mongol" concludes with Temudjin imposing a bloody unity on his perpetually feuding nation — an objective, justification, and excuse typical of strongmen throughout the ages that have, in Mr. Bodrov, clearly found both a willing listener and a talented apologist. The director is now proposing to turn his attention to Temudjin/Genghis's subsequent wars of conquest. If "Mongol," the first of a planned trilogy, is anything to go by, the remaining two films will be wonderful to watch and troubling to ponder: Atrocities are still atrocities, however much time has passed.

A Cabinet of Soviet Curiosities

Paul R. Gregory: Lenin's Brain 

The New York Sun, May 21, 2008

Moscow, February 1991 © Andrew Stuttaford

Sometimes the smallest of things can illuminate the largest. A fossil tells the story of massive planetary change, a line or two of poetry does more to explain trench warfare than a dozen history books, and the miniatures of Nicholas Hilliard bring Gloriana's long vanished England back to iridescent, dangerous life. In writing "Lenin's Brain" (Hoover Institution Press, 163 pages, $15), Houston University professor Paul R. Gregory has mined the Hoover Institution's extraordinary collection of Soviet archival material to come up with 14 brief, deftly chosen tales that brilliantly illuminate the cruelties, the absurdities, and the failures of the USSR's malignant, broken-backed utopia, with a precision and a concision that have rarely been equaled.

Professor Gregory's book is as grim as it is fascinating; the nearest it comes to offering any sort of relief is with its account of the fate of its eponymous red-gray matter. The Soviet leader's brain was not the source of much laughter in the course of Lenin's lifetime, but the absurd, darkly funny story of its subsequent fate is a farce that would have delighted Mikhail Bulgakov and must surely, one day, tempt Tom Stoppard.

The saga begins with the removal of the brain in the immediate aftermath of its owner's death, to be poked and prodded, examined and venerated. From there it went on a long, strange trip from skull to jar to slide, ending up divided into 30,953 carefully selected slices. (I am unclear whether this total includes the portion that was dispatched to Berlin's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.) A German brain specialist was put in charge of the project for a while, but he proved unacceptably foreign and irritatingly independent. In the end, however, Stalin's Politburo got the result it wanted from a team of more biddable experts, "proof" that Lenin was smarter than just about anybody else — a mixture of pseudoscience and elitism that was all too typical of the Bolshevik project. As the episode reminds us, the Soviet leadership believed that the masses were inherently unreliable: Without an "enlightened elite to manage [them], there would never be a peasant-worker paradise. By this logic, the creators of this dictatorship must themselves be head and shoulders above the rest."

The rest of "Lenin's Brain" shows the society these geniuses created. It was a civilization where mass murder was commonplace ("the Leningrad troika sentenced 658 defendants to death in a single day"), where history (such as the truth behind the massacre of Polish officers at Katyn) was almost infinitely malleable, and where, in 1944, 180,014 Crimean Tatars were exiled from their ancestral homeland "without incident," a comment from the secret police chief that, in just two words, shows how brutal and brutalized this paradise had become.

And so it goes on. Mr. Gregory introduces his readers to the notion of "former people" (byvshie liudi), individuals whose background, behavior, or associations (such as who they were related to) meant that "they were no longer [to] be regarded as human beings." We read how debate was suppressed (even at the Party's highest levels), and are given details of a paranoia that ran so deep that the notion of "anti-Soviet agronomists" could be taken seriously. In the end, ironically, the result was that the Kremlin's bosses no longer had access to the information they needed to run their empire efficiently: The chapter describing how the decision was taken to invade Afghanistan is a devastating portrait of a secretive and fumbling gerontocracy seduced by conspiracy theory and ancient ideological assumptions into a disastrous international adventure.

But of all Professor Gregory's stories, the most haunting is that of Vladimir Moroz. After the arrest of his parents and older brother in 1937, Vladimir and his younger sibling were transferred to (separate) secret police-run orphanages. There he made the mistake, records show, of expressing "dissatisfaction with the arrests" of his family. He was then arrested himself, tortured, and sent to a corrective-labor camp. He died there six months later.

He was 17 years old.

Making the Modern Iron Man

The New York Sun, April 25, 2008

iron man crimson dynamo

With its dusty Humvees, violent Afghan battlefields, and worries about the munitions business, the upcoming "Iron Man" is a film set firmly in 2008. That'll do, I suppose, but what was wrong with 1963? If there's any tale that deserves the chance to return to the sheen, swank, and soul of its Rat Pack, space-age, pay-any-price-bear-any-burden origins, it's Iron Man's. Conceived by comic maestro Stan Lee and launched by Marvel Comics in the final year of the Kennedy administration, "Iron Man" was Bond-in-a-can, a doughty cold warrior manufactured in the jungles of a Vietnam that still could be won. Fearless, noble, and smart, he was a mighty, mechanized embodiment of the belief that there were no limits to what the combination of American spirit and know-how could achieve.

But that sentiment, however admirable, has since found somewhat mixed consequences abroad.

You won't find any trace of such reservations in "Tales of Suspense," no. 39. That's the issue in which Marvel's readers were first introduced to Tony Stark, the man who became Iron. He's a millionaire industrialist and scientific genius, a member of the military-industrial complex so patriotic that even President Eisenhower would have approved, an inventor and supplier of the high-tech armaments needed to defend America from the communist menace: Within a few frames of the book, Stark is in South Vietnam testing some miniature mortars.

They work ("the reds never knew what hit them!"), but the mission collapses into chaos when Stark steps into a booby trap. He regains consciousness to find himself desperately wounded (fragments of shrapnel are edging ever nearer his heart) and a captive of "red guerilla tyrant" Wong-Chu. Drafted by this "grinning, smirking, red terrorist" to design armaments for communism, Stark secretly builds an armored suit instead. Crucially, it includes a gizmo to fire up his faltering ticker. Lethally, it includes weapons to fire on the enemy. Stark dons the armor. Iron Man is born. Wong-Chu dies.

Once back in America, Iron Man does what superheroes once did: rough up a series of monsters, creatures, mutants, and villains with a wild, grand, uncomplicated élan. And it's striking that there are more Marxists than Martians in their midst. This was a time when Americans knew who the real bad guys were:

"A telegram for you, Mr. Stark...from behind the Iron Curtain!"

"From Commieland? Sounds like trouble, Pepper!"

Spy rings are dismantled, and the gap-toothed, near-Neanderthal Red Barbarian ("A top red general ... noted for his brutality!") is thwarted. "Pudgy, scowling" Nikita Khrushchev sends the Crimson Dynamo ("vast electrical powers") to destroy Iron Man, but the Dynamo fizzles. The Unicorn ("Back, you capitalist fool!") is blunted, and the beautiful Madame Natasha ("I only serve the cause of international peace!") turns out to be insufficiently seductive. Slab-faced Boris ("Boris does not walk around obstacles ... it is easier to hurl them aside ... so!!") fails, too, gunned down by the former Crimson Dynamo — who had earlier been won over to the American Way. But the American Way is not only stronger; it's also kinder. When, after a three-issue-long struggle in "the tiny, neutral nation of Alberia," Iron Man defeats Bullski The Merciless (Titanium Man), he is, naturally, merciful: "Lucky for you, I'm not a red! I can't continue to attack a helpless enemy!"

No, he couldn't. A sense of America's essential decency runs through Marvel's depiction of the country that Iron Man risks so much to defend. It has its rough edges, sure, but at its core, Iron Man's America is a socially cohesive, hardworking, and fundamentally good-hearted place. It's neither sappy nor nostalgic enough to be Bedford Falls, but it's still a notion of nation that Frank Capra would have appreciated, one made all the more compelling by its distance from, and closeness to, the truth. It's a we-the-people fantasy that helps explain why Stark agrees to appear before a congressional committee that could compel him to disclose that he and Iron Man are one and the same: "No one has the right to defy the wishes of his government ... not even Iron Man!"

Howard Roark, he's not. Howard Hughes, on the other hand, well, the saturnine, pencil-mustached Stark, a regular at El Morocco and the Stork Club, "is rich, handsome ... constantly in the company of beautiful, adoring women ... linked with every actress and society beauty from Hollywood to Rome ... the dreamiest thing this side of Rock Hudson." When Mr. Lee subsequently acknowledged the similarities between the 20th century's two greatest playboy-industrialist-scientists, he wasn't giving too much away.

But, in a twist that would delight Cotton Mather, if not Howard Hughes, Stark's need to conceal his life-sustaining iron chest plate means that there's a limit to how far he can go with the ladies. His relentless partying only emphasizes what was taken from him in Vietnam. It's a sort-of-disguise, and it's a sort-of-distraction. It's also an effective device to keep pretty Pepper, his loyal, adoring secretary, at arm's length: A truly tragic hero, Stark has lost what remains of his heart to her, but he cannot risk a relationship: "Marriage is for other men, not for a fella who lives in the shadow of death!"

Back in the real world, however, an infinitely greater tragedy was unfolding. America, too, was being horribly wounded in, and by, Vietnam, wounds that changed it in ways so profound and pervasive that comic book red-white-and-blue no longer found so many takers. Stark's thinking, as the smug saying goes, "evolved": The old Iron Man is — like El Morocco, the Stork Club, and South Vietnam — no more.

But he, like they, and their world, should be remembered and, sometimes, mourned.