Blinded by the Light

A Scanner Darkly

The New York Sun, July 7, 2006

Philip K. Dick (1928-82), the reliably legendary, always eccentric, and occasionally brilliant science fiction writer whose "A Scanner Darkly" is the basis of Richard Linklater's dreadful new movie,is often described as a philosopher, a shaman, and a seer. But that's being kind, the man was bonkers, a nutcase, a lunatic, crazier than a street-corner shouter or attic-roosting aunt. Unfair? Maybe,but then unlike Dick I have never been fortunate enough to be "seized" by a light beam that lifted me "from the limitations of the space-time matrix"and released me "from every thrall, inner and outer."

And if that doesn't sound deranged to you, try popping the meds your doctor keeps talking about. Please. Just do it now.

But Dick's madness (no small part of which was drug-fueled) defined his genius.The best of his novels play with reality, perception, time, and identity in a fun house, madhouse, crack house jumble that can inspire, infuriate, bore, and enchant. And so it's no surprise that, after never really making the major leagues during a lifetime dominated by Asimov, Clarke, and other bards of the rocket men, Philip K. Dick has come into vogue in our own epoch of junkyard mysticism and gimcrack thought, an era where the idea of objective truth finds itself dismissed as mirage at best, deliberate deception at worst. A madman ahead of his time, Daffy Dick too was convinced that he had been "lied to." His light beam had "denied the reality, and power, and authenticity of the world, saying, ‘This cannot exist; it cannot exist'" — asylum jabber that sounds a lot like today's conventional, if idiotic, wisdom (and even more like a screenplay).

In the nearly quarter century since his death, eight movies (including this one) have been made from Dick's work, generating hundreds of millions of dollars and, it sometimes seems, a similar number of bad reviews. I'll admit to not having seen either 1995's "Screamers" (remorseless killer machines on a distant planet) or the unpromising-sounding "Confessions of A Crap Artist" (1992), but, with the glistening, rain-streaked exception of Ridley Scott's eerily prescient and remarkably influential "Blade Runner" (loosely based on Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"), films such as "Impostor," "Minority Report," and "Paycheck" have plundered the author's reputation but enriched his estate. As for "Total Recall," even the presence of Arnold Schwarzenegger, a young Sharon Stone, and the most excitingly irradiated mutants this side of "Beneath the Planet of the Apes" could not stop Paul Verhoeven's account of Dick's "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" from degenerating into kitsch, ham, and fiasco.

Frankly, I doubt if even the lissome Ms. Stone, the mighty Arnold, and the mutated human flotsam could have done much to salvage the wreck that is "A Scanner Darkly." Talky, talky, talky, and with a plot "twist" so telegraphed that it could have been a Capitol Hill secret, this dreary stoner sci-fi police procedural sort-of-comedy cautionary tale (oh, call it what you want: I give up) has little future other than as an alternative for insomniacs too timid to deal with Ambien's regrettably feeble high.

But if "A Scanner Darkly" has a redeeming feature, it is the remarkable use that Mr. Linklater has made of "rotoscoping," something he first tried in 2001's "Waking Life" (a beautiful movie, but more or less unwatchable, life is just a dream, whatever). Put very crudely, this is a technique by which "real action" film is overlaid with animation. Basically, the animators use the live footage as the foundation (in a sense, they trace their designs on top of it) of their own work. In "A Scanner Darkly," the result is images that are both reassuringly realistic, yet disconcertingly skewed, a perfect way of conveying the drug-saturated milieu in which this movie's addled protagonists stumble about their confusing, confused business (a central theme is that of a cop, Keanu Reeves, knowingly and unknowingly spying on himself). It also allows the director to portray the shifting, bewildering "scramble suits" with which the film's undercover policemen disguise themselves, camouflage of such startling, hallucinatory loveliness that it will linger in the mind long after the rest of this wretched, interminable hundred minutes has vanished into merciful forgetfulness.

Ironically, the problem is not that Mr. Linklater has made a mess of Dick's novel, but that he has remained too true to it. The director had already shown himself to be familiar with Dick's thinking in "Waking Life" (which contains a number of references to the writer's ideas), but in this movie he reveals himself to be too much a fan to tamper with a text that, if it was to make an entertaining film, needed a great deal of tampering. It may have the narrative (of sorts) and structure (of sorts) of more traditional science fiction, but Dick primarily intended "A Scanner Darkly" as a demonstration of where narcotic frolics could lead:

... this has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. … we really all were very happy for a while … but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not believe it.

With its sense of dissolving identities (reinforced by the way the rotoscoping is used to turn the film's performers into illusions, visions, and caricatures of themselves), rambling stoner monologues, paranoia, overacting (Woody Harrelson, Robert Downey Jr., I'm talking about you two), insect visions, and insanity, this movie judders, crumbles, and ultimately tips over into being little more than a hip "Reefer Madness" hopped up with a sinister conspiracy. This is a shame, because somewhere beneath the murkily obsessive doper remorse, "A Scanner Darkly" has something important to say about the way the "war on drugs," technological advance, and the needs of the surveillance state feed upon each other.

But that too-neglected topic will, clearly, have to wait for another movie, and the long-suffering, patient, and faithful fans of Philip K. Dick will have to return once again to "Blade Runner," nearly 25 years old now, but possibly the greatest sci-fi movie of all time, and an extraordinary demonstration of how to translate this quirkiest of writers onto the big screen.

A Superhero To Cheer About

Superman Returns

The New York Sun, June 26, 2006

To explain the ultimate source, and the lasting popularity, of Superman would take Carl Jung, "The Golden Bough," and, quite possibly, Zane Grey. What we do know is that, since the Man of Steel's initial appearance in June 1938's "Action Comics," he, like all the gods, devils, and myths of mankind's collective unconsciousness, has changed along with the times in which he finds himself imagined. With "Superman Returns," directed by Bryan Singer, he is still evolving.

If we start, as we should, at the very beginning, 1938's man from Krypton was a "champion of the oppressed," the New Deal in a red cape, tearing down slums, taking out irresponsible mine owners, and, for all I know, campaigning for higher tax rates. By the time of Max Fleischer's glorious animations of the early 1940s, at their best still the finest representations of the Superman who fell to Earth, the plot-lines looked more like conventional science fiction, with our hero fending off the machines, monsters, and cackling villains we have all come to expect. There was a clear subtext too. Memories of the 1939 World Fair's re assuring "world of tomorrow" had been displaced by wartime's Frankenstein technology, and Superman became our ally against science gone mad, bad, or otherwise abused, a role he still plays.

In the 1950s, George Reeves was a Superman for the Eisenhower years, an extraterrestrial Ward Cleaver, invincible even beyond the confines of a fortress of domesticity. His mysterious death (suicide, with added murder rumors) at the end of that decade was, somehow, a suitable way to usher in a more disenchanted era, a time when the Man of Steel ran the risk of being seen as the Man of Corn, as square as the last boy scout, Clark Kent himself.

This must explain why when Superman returned to the big screen in 1978, the director, Richard Donner, felt that this was no longer a story that could be told with a straight face. Fortunately the leaden camp, heavy irony, and witless buffoonery that weighed down both that movie and its immediate successor were thoroughly subverted by the decency, kindness, and strength conveyed by Christopher Reeve in a remarkable performance that, despite a good try by Brandon Routh in "Superman Returns," remains definitive.

Even Reeve could do little to save the slapstick-scarred "Superman III" and the motheaten "Superman IV," the latter a movie that appeared to see Superman return to his lefty roots with an attack on nuclear weapons, not just the bad ones belonging to those pesky communists. Those films have, mercifully, been written out of history. Instead, "Superman Returns" is a sequel of sorts, a "spiritual descendant," to "Superman: The Movie" (to which Mr. Singer's plot owes a great debt) and "Superman II."

But while the final decade or so of the last century saw enough twists and turns in the comic-book version of the saga to drive a continuity nerd to drool, it took the feelings of melancholy and danger that enveloped this nation in the wake of September 11, 2001, to create an audience for a sweet, straightforward, and oddly moving account of the young Clark's life in television's "Smallville." At least in its early seasons, this series played on that nostalgic American heartland ideal that has always had so important a part in the appeal of the Superman story (and was one of the few redeeming features of "Superman III"). In a way, the sense of an imperiled Arcadia conveyed by "Smallville" was as emblematic of those troubled, troubling times as the flags then on sad, proud display on homes all across the country, including, naturally, that of Jonathan and Martha Kent.

With the exception of Eva Marie Saint's touching performance as Ma Kent in "Superman Returns," Mr. Singer makes little effort to play to this aspect of the saga, but the tone of "Smallville" must have had some influence on the director's decision to take his subject matter more seriously than his predecessors. While Kevin Spacey's Luthor is partly (and regrettably) played for laughs, his typically sly performance is an immense improvement on the imbecile clowning that defined Gene Hackman's Lex. For the rest, with the disastrous exception of Parker Posey's almost unwatchable Kitty Kowalski, the comedy is, thankfully, played down.

And then there's Lois Lane. In the five years that Superman has been away searching for what's left of his home planet (not a lot), Lois has acquired a fiance, a Pulitzer for her article on, oh dear, "Why the World Doesn't Need Superman," and, hmmm, a 5-year-old son. Adding to her difficulties, she's played by Kate Bosworth, who is both too young and, despite a brunette hairdo, too blonde to be believable as spiky, dark Lois: Her inner Sandra Dee just keeps shining through. For a far more convincing Lane, try Teri Hatcher (Lois before Wisteria) in the counterfeit "Moonlighting" better known as "Lois & Clark" (1993-97), a wisp of a show for a frivolous time, where Dean Cain's Superman was notable mainly as the Man of Snark.

Needless to say, when Superman returns so does his complicated relationship with Lois: there's nothing new about that. What is different about Mr. Singer's movie is the way in which it is a spiritual descendant of the earlier movies, in more ways than one. When, in "Superman III," Clark dances with Lana Lang to the dulcet doo-wop of "Earth Angel," it's a clever joke. It's an indication of the way in which "Superman Returns" reflects today's more religious age that, in this latest chapter of the epic, the title of that old tune could be an almost literal description of who or what Mr. Singer's version of Superman is meant to be.

As Superman's real father (played by recycled footage of Marlon Brando from the first movie) explains, humans "only lack the light to show the way. ... I have sent them you ... my only son," a clear reference to You Know Who, a recurrent theme of Mr. Singer's film that is underpinned, in one instance, by a lovely sequence of Superman ascending into the heavens (the special effects in "Superman Returns" are first-rate) and looking protectively, and a little sadly, down upon our discordant planet, a gorgeous guardian angel carved not out of cathedral stone, but the filmmaker's skill and the power of our own dreams. In her disloyal Pulitzer essay, Lois wrote that mankind has no need for a savior. By the end of "Superman Returns," she has, needless to say, discovered how wrong she was.

But even if this movie sometimes seems to have the length of a sermon (it goes on a little too long), its borrowings from myth and religion are never preachy - they merely throw additional allegory into what is already a potent, much loved legend. And when, at the end of the screening, the audience began to cheer, they were not just cheering Mr. Singer's fine film, but the legend itself, made up of their memories, their nostalgia, the stories they grew up with, the well-thumbed comic books, the courage of Reeve, that heartland ideal, and so, so much more, not least the fact that, at the conclusion of this movie, Superman promises that he'll "always" be around.

And, as Clark Kent would say, that's just swell.

Bottoms Up on the Poseidon

Poseidon

The New York Sun, May 12, 2006

I can't imagine it's much fun being a passenger stuck on a cruise liner that has just flipped upside down, but, according to Wolfgang Petersen, the director of "Poseidon," the sense of confinement makes it even worse. "This is not something a person can run away from. Trapped within a closed environment where there is no escape, no help, and very little time, they are forced to deal with it by themselves." Trust me, Wolfgang, any audience unfortunate or unwise enough to be trapped in a cinema watching this movie will know exactly how those passengers might feel. Well, perhaps not exactly. One of the problems with this film is not that there is too little time, but that there is too much: the last journey of the Poseidon is the most excruciatingly interminable sea voyage since that embarrassing garbage barge left New York all those years ago.

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. In "Troy" (2004), Mr. Petersen took an ancient and much loved story, stripped it of its presiding deities, and left moviegoers with dross, disappointment, and a vague sense of sacrilege. In "Poseidon," he's done it again. In filming his riff on legendary producer Irwin Allen's ("Lost in Space," "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea," "The Towering Inferno," you name it) ancient and much loved "The Poseidon Adventure" (1972), he's stripped the story of Mike Rogo, Linda Rogo, Fallon from "Dynasty," Manny, fat Mrs. Rosen, the Reverend Scott, Nonnie, the annoying boy, and anyone else we might remember and replaced them with a cast of characters so insipid that I found myself rooting for the ocean so busily engulfing their vessel.

To be fair, an earlier, and more literal, remake of "The Poseidon Adventure," a made-for-TV shipwreck from 2005, did no better. Memorable only for the appearance of a startlingly hangdog Steve Guttenberg (evidently still traumatized by "Police Academy 4") and the remarkable restraint of scriptwriters who, despite their obvious desperation, contented themselves with only adding terrorism, adultery, and the Department of Homeland Security to the volatile mix aboard the Poseidon, the film was a fiasco, both in its own right and when compared with the first "Poseidon," which was still seaworthy, if sunk, after more than three decades.

Taking on Allen's old rust bucket was never going to be easy, as even Allen discovered when he tried in 1979's the lesss-aid-about-it-the-better "Beyond the Poseidon Adventure." His original movie may have been schlock, but it was schlock made with a verve and madcap enthusiasm that hasn't been easy to match. It wasn't the first of the disaster movies - essential escapism in an unsettling age - that helped define American cinema in that era (that honor should be reserved for "Airport") but it was the greatest, and it is the one that resonates most today. There's even (God help us) a fan club, complete with reunions, a Web site, and in the venerable figure of the nonagenarian Ronald Neame, the film's director, its own private Roddenberry.

Of course, some of its appeal is purely nostalgic, and the passing of the years has also helped transform the film's fashion tragedies, rococo death scenes, and soap opera melodramatics into a wickedly camp treat, but there's something more to it than that. With the exception of its capsized concept, Paul Gallico's "The Poseidon Adventure," the novel on which Neame's movie was based, was a feeble, sour creation: the only thing worse than the writing was the unwieldy religious allegory that came with it. The film benefited by being a good deal cheerier, taking itself far less seriously, and confining the scripture lesson to the Reverend Scott's uncomplicatedly noble, useful, and entertaining death: a Passion, in fact, with a touch of "MacGyver" about it.

For a film set on a cruise liner, it was also an oddly egalitarian movie, something that still plays well in the country that once belonged to Frank Capra. The Poseidon, like its passengers, had known better days; its glitz was all paste. The stiffs that littered the shattered Grand Ballroom had been regular working stiffs, and so were a good number of the people clambering and scrambling up to the top of the ship's bottom to survive: the cop, the retired hardware store owner, the haberdasher, all of them showing the wear and tear of a more hardscrabble past. The ship's hierarchy proves largely useless in the crisis: it's left to Scott's team of grumbling schlubs to do the right thing. And so they do. In short, the movie is a display of Americana at its most madly, endearingly self-confident, even down to the malign, greedy presence of Linarcos: rich man, jerk, foreigner.

The arrival of Mr. Petersen at the helm of "Poseidon" signals a different approach and, so to speak, a clean deck. The old girl has been transformed into a luxury liner, with passengers to match. Even the plucky band of survivors appears to be culled on snobbish lines (I don't want to spoil what plot there is, but this is not a movie in which you want to play a waiter). At least, the wave (banished from the Gutenberg edition) is back and it's suitably spectacular, as are the repeated images of water, snaking, bubbling, and surging its way through the ship in what appears to be an almost conscious pursuit of its prey. If nothing else, Mr. Petersen (the director of "Das Boot" and "The Perfect Storm") can do H2O.

But his screenwriters can't do dialogue. The game old stagers of the original movie would have compensated for this with an extra portion of ham, but, with the exceptions of stolid Kurt Russell - former fireman, ex-mayor, protective dad of the pretty Jennifer (Emmy Rossum) - and a wonderfully anarchic Kevin Dillon - pencil moustache, drunk - most of the cast is left, like their vessel, hopelessly, helplessly adrift. The only remaining excitement involves the front of Jennifer's dress, which, for a few glorious moments, manages to evoke fond memories of the nail-biting suspense provided by Stella Stevens's plunging decolletage in the first "Poseidon." As for Jennifer herself, she's a pre-Raphaelite delight of pale beauty and dark curls, doomed, I suspect, to die of TB in countless period dramas.

After this film, however, that will seem like a merciful release.

The Myth But Not The Pathos

The Notorious Bettie Page

The New York Sun: April 14, 2006

Whoever said moral decadence, perversion, and cultural decline couldn't be fun? There was a time - a serious, earnest time - when the women of Hollywood's biopics were history's greats: They were queens, empresses, Marie Curie. And now? Well, let's just say England's Bess has been joined by Tennessee's Bettie. She's a queen, yes, but of the pinups, a bondage icon and retro cheesecake, and now she's the subject of Mary Harron's delightful, witty, and touching new movie, "The Notorious Bettie Page."

Bettie Page? Oh yes, you know her. You've seen her face, and maybe much more.

Half a century ago, you might have caught her picture in one of those mags that your dad used to hide from your mom. Blue eyes, black bangs, hokey scowl, sweet smile, succulent figure: She was the most photographed girl next door in the world, some said. You could gaze at her in Gaze and get an eyeful in Eyeful and many, many, other naughty places, even Playboy (January 1955, Santa's cap, nothing else).

There were movies too, three burlesque films, "Striporama," "Varietease," and "Teaserama": The dancing is bad, the comedy acts worse. And then, under the counter, plain brown envelope please, there were those specialty flicks, "Domineering Roz Strikes Again," "Captured Jungle Girl," "In Chains," "Hobbled in a Kid Leather Harness," you get the picture. If you don't, some of the most amusing, if slightly alarming, sequences in "The Notorious Bettie Page" will give you some guidance. Gently, of course. There's no need to be afraid. Trust me.

In the end, the ropes, harnesses, jungle girls, and ball gags were too much of a temptation for Estes Kefauver, an ambitious senator and fashion disaster (coonskin hats, I'm afraid) from Bettie's home state, who'd already trashed comic books in an earlier bout of national hysteria. Hearings were held in 1955. They were the usual grandstanding farce, but were enough to ensure that, not so long afterward, Bettie Page disappeared into obscurity. Her image lingered on without her, and decades later, burnished by nostalgia, and safely lodged at the intersection of camp and carnal, her whips, her smile, and her curves began to resurface. Her visage appeared in comic books (sorry, Senator), fashion shoots, archive collections, posters, T-shirts, photos, souvenirs, any number of tchotchkes (a "tigress" air freshener will cost you $2.95), and, of course, the Internet. As I said, you've seen her.

This film will only add fuel to the fire and sweat to the brow. Its director, Ms. Harron, was previously best known for the perceptive and clever "I Shot Andy Warhol" (1996), the story of Valerie Solanas, the lady who did just that. In "The Notorious Bettie Page," Ms. Harron takes on the story of another woman who was both of, and ahead of, her era. Her Bettie (beautifully played by Gretchen Mol) is a classic American heroine, intelligent, spunky, driven, and good-hearted. No virgin queen (sorry, Bess), she bares with a grin, and maintains her decency, and more remarkably, her dignity, even amid the manacles, catfights, and hog-tied poses ("just silliness," she says) of her more bizarre photographic adventures. "God gave me the talent to pose for pictures ... and it seems to make people happy." She doesn't drink, she doesn't smoke, she gives the casting couch a miss, and when she eventually returns to Jesus, she doesn't have far to go.

This is an America (shot mainly in evocative black-and-white, with bursts of lush, overripe color) that is, like Bettie, both innocent and not. The gawking shutterbugs for whom Bettie poses in session after session after session don't touch, but they do stare. How they stare. Irving and Paula Klaw (sinister name, nice people), the brother-and-sister team that produced many of her pinups and all her bondage work, are pictured as lovable entrepreneurs, hard-working, honest, and careful to avoid falling afoul of the law (no nudity, two sets of underwear in case anything, you know, shows).They are examples of good business practice at its disgraceful, amoral best. Irving (Chris Bauer) is a busy, endearing schlub in shirtsleeves, and Paula (a lovely performance by Lili Taylor, who also played Solanas for Ms. Harron) the shrewd den-of-vice mother that Bettie still remembers with affection: "She never tied any ropes too tight."

Ms. Harron shows this America to be, as indeed it was, a rough, tough place - its noir-and-neon sophistication no more than surface sheen, delusion, opportunity, and trap. Bettie was a survivor (her ordeals included abuse as a child and, later, an appalling sexual assault), but she remained a true child of the Great Depression, unable to escape the hardscrabble life, even when things were going well. Her brush with glamour was only at the edges of fame, her gimcrack stardom (if that's the word) cheap, tawdry, and ill-paid.

Ms. Harron is too smart to avoid the flaws in Bettie's 15 minutes, but her desire to package the Tennessee Tease as a prophet of tolerance and female empowerment glosses over Bettie's darker pages. In particular, we are never shown the miserable later years, the bleak truth of the legendary "disappearance" that in reality was a descent into schizophrenia and a decade in a California asylum, a fate that inevitably raises disturbing questions about her true state of mind throughout that lost pinup heyday.

The director's silence is probably just fine with Ms. Page, out and about now, an old woman so wrapped up in her myth that she almost never agrees to be photographed. "I want to be remembered," she has recently said, "as I was when I was young and in my golden times."

Golden? There wasn't even much glitter. But I'm not sure that Ms. Harron wants us to know that.

A Film Sabotaged By Itself

V for Vendetta

The New York Sun, March 16, 2006

With the dangerous and complex struggle against Islamic extremism stretching relentlessly, terrifyingly, and, seemingly, endlessly ahead, there's plenty of room for an intelligent movie that shows how fear, disaster, and fury could lead us all into totalitarian temptation. "V for Vendetta" is not that movie.

To be sure, as should be expected of a film produced by the maestros behind "The Matrix" and based on the ideas and imagery of a pioneering graphic novel, "V for Vendetta" is visually stunning. Even better, instead of some handsome, hapless Keanu stumbling and mumbling through his role, there's the rumpled, brilliant Stephen Rea as a sad-eyed cop and the soothing and sinister voice of Hugo Weaving. These two terrific performances are enough to take this movie a good way beyond comic-book flash or the empty look-at-that of the Wachowskis' CGI conjuring.What's more, after the exhaustingly talky tedium of the latter two Matrix movies, it's a relief, and something of a surprise, to discover that "V for Vendetta" (which is directed by James McTeigue, yet another "Matrix" alumnus) does what thrillers often promise, but rarely deliver: It thrills.

The problem is that this movie is meant to do more than that. It is, we are being told - drum roll, Oscar buzz, Natalie Portman buzz cut - a film with a big, important message, but that, I'm afraid, is where it fails. And it doesn't just fail. It collapses, crumbles, implodes, and melts down, its credibility thoroughly sabotaged by nitwit politics, numbskull preaching, and an understanding of history so feeble it would embarrass a high school student, so peculiar it would delight Oliver Stone.

To no small extent, these flaws flow from the beginnings of "V is for Vendetta" as an overwrought and overrated 1980s British comic strip by two men, Alan Moore and David Lloyd, who were upset, very upset, with that nasty Magaret Thatcher. Their confused, dystopian tale eventually developed into a full-fledged graphic novel, but it never outgrew the paranoia, alienation, and hysteria so often found among Britain's leftists during the long, bleak, Thatcher terror. As that savage tyranny ground to the end of its first decade, a gloomy Mr. Moore warned readers of the initial (1988) American edition of his work that the United Kingdom's "new riot police wear black visors, as do their horses ... The government has expressed a desire to eradicate homosexuality, even as an abstract concept, and one can only speculate as to which minority will be the next legislated against." Blimey.

Mr. Moore wrote that he was thinking of quitting his "cold" and "mean-spirited" country very soon. He "didn't like it anymore." I suppose it's meanspirited of me to mention that, nearly 20 years later, he's, well, still there.

Poor Mr. Moore may not have moved far in all that time, but his hero, the terrorist (freedom-fighter, insurgent, take your pick), V, the enigmatic and deadly prankster in a Guy Fawkes mask (we never see his face), has enjoyed something of a change in image. Played by Hugo Weaving, former elf (from "Lord of The Rings") and current Australian, with the most silkily seductive English accent since the late James Mason, V is now being touted as a libertarian of sorts, an antic and unpredictable Thomas Jefferson playfully throwing blood all over the liberty tree. That's quite some makeover, comparable, perhaps, to suggesting that the historical Guy Fawkes (in reality, a religious zealot and former Spanish mercenary) only plotted to blow up England's Parliament in the interests of liberty. But then, of course, that, absurdly, is another thing this film tries to do.

The V of Messrs. Moore and Lloyd (Mr. Moore was the writer, Mr. Lloyd the illustrator) was more malign, less marketable, and more interesting than the one-dimensional and relatively favorably drawn character shown in the film. Beneath the polished, erudite, and occasionally compassionate exterior, their V was certainly psychotic, undeniably murderous, and very possibly insane. He was also an anarchist,an obvious fanatic (even if his views were portrayed fairly sympathetically) to whom blowing up symbols of the democratic dream came naturally: Like that dream itself, they had never meant much, dictatorship or no dictatorship. Stuck within the crudely drawn and conventional liberal pieties of Mr. McTeigue's self-satisfied morality play, however,such acts of destruction make little intellectual sense. They add nothing to the debate over terrorism (and the response to terrorism) that this movie was supposedly designed to provoke, but who cares? Their real function is as gratuitous pyrotechnic spectacle, an opportunity for Western audiences to cheer on a parable of their own annihilation. If, in the wake of September 11 and so much more, I find that a little strange, I guess that's just me.

The background against which the movie's plot unfolds is just as much of a mess. Worse, by keeping the bad guys as, quite literally, comic book villains, they are left with no meaningful role to play in any discussion about the justifications for terrorist violence. The last time I checked, fighting Nazis wasn't exactly controversial. Nazis? Yup, they're back yet again. The starting point for "V for Vendetta" is the generic fascist regime (black shirts, ranting dictator, ethnic nationalism, "internment" camps, persecuted minorities, bone-headed propaganda, the usual) described in the original graphic novel. Back in the 1980s, such dark, forbidding imagery was routine grist for the anti-Thatcher mill, but even then it came across as loopy, over the top, and more than a touch retro. There was an obvious danger that by 2006, 60 years after Adolf, Benito, and the rest of the gang, it would just look absurd. Thanks to the filmmakers' insistence on pushing the story even further into the future (mainly so they could insert numerous ham-fisted references to the war on terror), it does.

It didn't have to be that way. While I hesitate to mention Orwell's bleak masterpiece in this company, his "1984" was also very much a product of its times. But when Michael Radford filmed it in, well, you can guess which year, he clearly understood that retaining the book's period flavor could actually underpin the power, and the timelessness, of Orwell's terrible warning. And he was right. Watching that movie (it's excellent, by the way, and available on DVD) will do more to make you think about the way that perpetual conflict, whether it's with militant Islam or the hordes of Eurasia, can be used to control public opinion, than anything you'll see in "V for Vendetta."

To be fair, Mr. McTeigue had much less to work with than Mr. Radford, but his screenplay (written by the Wachowskis, and denounced by the reliably ornery Mr. Moore as "rubbish") strips the original storyline of what little subtlety it once had. For that, turn to Mr. Rea's haunting portrayal of Chief Inspector Finch. Finch is a man with a sense of justice working for a regime that he knows to have none.Throughout the film, Mr. Rea dominates the screen in a way that eludes Ms. Portman, even with her shaven skull.

She's in the key role of Evey, the girl rescued by V who becomes pupil, victim, and accomplice, but her missing locks are the most dramatic aspect of a performance only marginally more persuasive than her English accent, an odd confection teetering uncertainly between Posh Spice and the queen. As an imperiled waif, Ms. Portman is believable (just look at her, the poor mite) but, as the film progresses, Evey's evolution into something more forceful simply fails to convince.

Much like this movie, in fact.

Mutilating Mr. Bean

The Hills Have Eyes

The New York Sun, March 10, 2006

To understand the origins of the mutant mayhem that is Alexandre Aja's new version of "The Hills Have Eyes," it helps to begin with a detour into the old, nasty Scottish legend, the legend of Sawney Bean. Like the finest old, nasty Scottish legends, it's certainly old, probably bogus, and undoubtedly nasty. Sawney, it's said, was a brigand who lived in a cave with a large, feral, and incestuous brood that only emerged from their lair to rob, murder, and, well, eat, innocent passers-by, unseemly behavior even in Scotland, a country not noted for its refined cuisine.

Many hundred years later, Wes Craven, a young American filmmaker then known mainly for "The Last House on the Left" (1972), a sleazy and regrettably sadistic slasher pic (inspired by, of all things, a Bergman movie) decided to update Sawney's savage saga for an America that was already, you would think, more than sufficiently traumatized by the fall of Saigon, the rise of Jimmy Carter, and the persistence of disco. The result, the original "The Hills Have Eyes" (1977), was a bloody, if exuberantly directed, mess of gore, the grotesque, the glib, and the gloating, marked by graveyard humor, graveyard acting, a crucifixion, a corpse used as bait, cruelty to dogs, cruelty to a parakeet, cruelty to an old codger, cruelty to a young mother, cruelty to a retired cop, and way, way too many people eyeing a "tenderloin" of baby as the source of a good dinner.

Over in ancient Ayrshire, Sawney and his clan were, so the story goes, eventually caught and made to pay a high price for their meals (limbs lopped off, left to bleed to death, burned alive, the usual). By contrast, Mr. Craven's orgy of murder and cannibalism brought him fame and box office success, and paved the way for a career that introduced us to, among others, Freddy Krueger ("A Nightmare on Elm Street"), a bunch of frightening cellar dwellers with a left-wing message ("The People Under the Stairs"), and, most sickening of all, the spectacle of Meryl Streep (in 1999's "Music of the Heart") as an inspirational inner-city teacher. Accused by some of dumbing down the horror genre, Mr. Craven is praised by others for smartening it up ("Wes Craven's New Nightmare," and all those "Screams"). He has become a brand ("Wes Craven Presents ..."), a sage, a self-congratulatory icon, and a cult, and there's every reason to think his devotees will be thrilled by what they find lurking in the new "Hills."

This time around, Mr. Craven is only a producer, but the selection of Alexandre Aja to direct the new "The Hills Have Eyes" was a clear signal that the remake would not spare cast, or audience, or parakeets. In some ways, Mr. Aja, who is clearly something of a Craven disciple, was an appropriate choice. His last film, the revoltingly cruel, if skillfully made, "Haute Tension" (2003), was, like "The Last House on the Left" all those years ago, a brutal demonstration of just how low an exploitation flick can stoop. Sure enough, Mr. Aja's "Hills" are alive with the sound (and sight) of appalling violence, and while a depiction of mutants sexually assaulting a young hottie (in this case Emilie de Ravin of "Lost") was never likely to be in the best of taste, there is something about the way in which Mr. Aja prolongs this particular scene (which repeats, and elaborates, on a sequence from the original movie) that vividly demonstrates the depths he is prepared to plumb: You will not feel better about yourself for having watched it. It's no surprise that Mr. Aja's epic struggled to avoid an NC-17 rating, but ghouls, completists, and any surviving members of the Manson family can relax: An "uncut" version is promised for release on DVD.

That said, before the film degenerates, as such exercises tend to do, into the standard, somewhat repetitive charnel-house chopping, slashing, ripping, dismembering, burning, slicing, gouging, and impaling, its earlier portions are effective, genuinely creepy, and will be successful in maintaining the suspense, even among those already familiar with Mr. Craven's original. As for the storyline, it has enough in common with the 1977 version to reassure the faithful, but enough that is different to delight and entrance them. The killer hillbillies of the first movie, products of nothing more than unlucky genetics, have been transformed, fashionably, into victims, their shambles of a DNA the product of atomic testing rather than careless backcountry coupling. However, as in the original, their devolved and debased clan is compared and contrasted with that of its targets and intended menu, the flawed and bickering Carters. As in the original, the most sensible Carters are their dogs.

This is in keeping with the theme of troubled and inadequate family that runs through much of Mr. Craven's work. While Mr. Craven's observations on this topic usually hover somewhere among the banal, the trite, and the tedious, Mr. Aja develops them the best he can in striking scenes set amid the remnants of an Eisenhower-era atomic test village, the Pleasantville from hell. There we witness examples of not one but three distinct and, each in their own way, distinctly problematic families, as a surviving member (the nerdy son-in-law) of the Carter family hunts down members of the mutant clan (thanks to the effects of radiation, a literally "nuclear" family) against the backdrop of what's left of yet another vi sion of domesticity, the cookie-cutter housing, "Leave It to Beaver" decor, and mannequin moms, pops, and kids of the test village, fake from the beginning and doomed to destruction.

That's cute (spot the obvious analogy!), but such ideas, and another (no less routine) subtext that, if that's what it takes to defend our own, even the most civilized among us will descend into barbarism, have less to do with this film's undeniable grip than the way it manages to tap into the deep-rooted American dread of what might be waiting out there in the hinterland. Unlike in overcrowded, long-settled Europe, where the horror film tends to focus inward, into the haunted house, into the mind, into the past, on this side of the Atlantic there is still some sense of living on the edge of the uncompleted, the uncharted, the empty, and the dangerous. The unease and the fear this can bring in its wake haunt countless American movies ("Deliverance," "The Blair Witch Project," "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," to name just three), and this one, too, even if ironically, its most unsettling moments are those that echo terrors from farther afield than Flyoverland. Contrary to some speculation at the time, the first "The Hills Have Eyes" was not a Vietnam parable, and, so far as I am aware, Mr. Aja's version is not about Iraq, but it's impossible to see the Carters' vehicle optimistically heading, Stars and Stripes fluttering, deep into a hostile, mysterious, and treacherous desert without thinking of all too real horrors elsewhere.

And, at the moment, there ought to be nothing more disturbing than that.

A Humorous Performance

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story

The New York Sun, January 27, 2006

There were some who thought Michael Winterbottom's last movie, "9 Songs" (2004) - a dreary, pointless exercise involving a British glaciologist, an American student, and very explicit (and very real) sex scenes - should not be made. They were right. There were others who thought his latest effort, "Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story," could not be made. They were wrong.

Mr. Winterbottom's new film is based, sort of, on "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy" (1759-67), nine bewildering, bawdy, discursive, and chaotic volumes written over eight years by Laurence Sterne, a middle-aged Yorkshire vicar who wrote, he said, "not to be fed, but to be famous." He succeeded. The early volumes were bestsellers, blessed with high society approval ("from morning to night my Lodgings ... are full of the greatest Company ... Tristram is the Fashion.") and critical praise remarkable in a book so confused and confusing that, by comparison, "Ulysses" reads like "Dick and Jane." It was, as a character in Mr. Winterbottom's multilayered, clever, and delightful movie (a film about trying to film Sterne's notoriously unfilmable novel) explains, "postmodern before there was even a modern."

If the book is difficult to read, it's even more of a challenge to describe. If asked, Sterne, whose work is filled with typographical jokes, asterisks, dashes, squiggles, and harum-scarum punctuation, might have proffered a blank page. One of the first unfortunates (a luckless writer for the London Critical Review) to be given the job of commenting upon it simply abandoned the task: "This is a humorous performance, of which we are unable to convey any distinct ideas to our readers." Unfortunately, that's not an approach that would satisfy the difficult and demanding editors of The New York Sun, so I will just have to do my best.

A good way to start is to think of "Tristram Shandy" as the equivalent of the eccentric and beguiling chambers of curiosities that preceded today's earnest, orderly, and disciplined museums.To open one of its chapters is to peer into a collection of randomly assembled facts, falsehoods, anecdotes, histories,tales,fables,yarns,observations,and digressions that have little or no obvious connection to each other or to the book's underlying narrative, such as it is. And as for the nature of the reminiscences byTristram that are supposed to provide the novel's structure, if I tell you that young master Shandy is not even born until the third volume, well, you see the problem with which Mr. Winterbottom was confronted.

He could, I imagine, have tried cobbling together a few choice bits and pieces from the book in a way that told a vaguely coherent story, but that would have made a nonsense of Sterne's nonsense. Or he could, maybe, have dispensed with narrative altogether and simply assembled a series of period tableaux in the flamboyant but interminable style of a Terry Gilliam. Mercifully, he did neither.The approach Mr. Winterbottom actually took not only pays tribute to the fact that the original "Tristram Shandy" was in some ways a book about writing a book, but also offers audiences both the anarchy and the feel of Sterne's work, as well as the order and the comfort of a reasonably conventional plot line; something, of course, that Sterne neglected to provide.

As the movie progresses, we are tantalizingly shown (far too few) beautifully shot extracts from the "Tristram Shandy" film that is busily being made in the depths of the English countryside. These include Tristram's accidental circumcision (by a window, since you ask), muddled conception, and chaotic birth. Fans of the novel will be glad to know that Uncle Toby (a wonderful and oddly moving performance by British comedian Rob Brydon), his elaborate scale model reproduction of the siege of Namur, his embarrassing war wound, and his possible seduction (by a widow, since you ask) are also all thrown into Mr. Winterbottom's wild mix. In a nice, typically sly touch, the music that accompanies a number of these scenes is drawn from "The Draughtman's Contract" (1982), evoking memories of Peter Greenaway's dark, gorgeous antiquarian frolic while reminding us yet again that we are watching a performance within a performance.

In an industry as pleased, and fascinated, with itself as the movie business, a film about a film could easily sink into the self-importance, sentimentality, and self-indulgence of those little tributes you sometimes see on Oscar night. But Mr. Winterbottom avoids the temptation.The picture he paints is acerbic, affectionate, and funny, with a good-natured sense of the absurd that nicely reflects the antic spirit and ramshackle creativity of those original nine volumes. The project is riddled with problems: It is bedeviled by money worries (as was Mr. Winterbottom's "Tristram Shandy" in real life), has a big American star (a luminous Gillian Anderson, playing herself) flown in only to have her scene cut out, the army of reenactors recruited to fight over Namur runs amok in a war nerd Walpurgisnacht, and, above all, the actors bicker, preen, booze, grumble, and flirt.

Out of a strong cast, two, in particular, stand out. Mr. Brydon not only plays Uncle Toby, but also "Rob Brydon," a fictionalized version of himself. In the same way another well-known British comedian, Steve Coogan, plays Tristram, Tristram's father, and, naturally, "Steve Coogan," a delirious blend of role, reality, fact, and fiction that Sterne would have relished. This "Coogan," a masterpiece of self-parody, shares the real Mr. Coogan's resume, talents, and tendency to tabloid scandal. Despite the presence of his girlfriend (Kelly Macdonald), baby, and an ominously circling journalist (Kieran O'Brien) with a tale of lap dancers to tell, he is closing in on his sexy production assistant, Jennie (Naomie Harris). She's a distressingly obsessive cineaste (it says something for the cheery cynicism of this film that an enthusiasm for cinema is reduced to a joke) but so attractive that "Coogan" contemplates bluffing his way through the meaning of Fassbinder if that's what it takes.

But the relationship that matters most to him is his with star billing. Is he the lead, or is "Brydon"? The two exchange jibes, banter, insults, and insecurities in a ridiculous, marvelously played comic rivalry that lies at the heart of this film and which, incidentally, generates the finest exchange about teeth - a tricky topic in Britain - since the first "Austin Powers." In the end, it's "Brydon" who gets to play opposite Ms. Anderson, and and, yes, he steals the movie too.

But with a film this good, who's keeping score?

Up From The Badlands

The New York Sun, January 20, 1996

Legends that appear only rarely need to make sure that when they do so, it's special. Halley's comet pulls this off. Barbra Streisand does not. The brilliant but reclusive filmmaker Terrence Malick falls somewhere in between. Since first attracting attention with his debut feature, the spare and unsettling "Badlands" (1973), the enigmatic Mr. Malick has developed a reputation as a director of genius that, remarkably, rests on just four films, each of which divided critics and, assuming (as seems likely) "The New World" goes the same way, disappointed at the box office.You can see the whole lot in less time than it takes for Frodo finally to throw away that wretched ring: A full Malick retrospective could be finished in less than a day.

The Brooklyn Academy of Music is taking a more leisurely approach. Its "Month of Malick" began January 18 and will last until February 1. It includes the key elements in the canon - "Badlands,""Days of Heaven" (1978),"The Thin Red Line" (1998), and "The New World" (2005) - as well as, for completists only, "Pocket Money"(1972),a piece of dreary 1970s picaresque for which Mr. Malick wrote the script, and Carole King, God help us, the theme song. Don't bother with "Pocket Money," but any of the others is enough to prove that Mr. Malick's is a unique talent, while two of them, "Badlands" and "Days of Heaven," are unquestionably the product of an extraordinary vision that has rarely been matched in American or, indeed, any cinema.

To be sure, a good part of the Malick mystique stems from a rambling,eccentric resume almost guaranteed to generate the label of genius. Start with the fact that his first work was an English translation of Heidegger's "Vom Wesen des Grundes" (Mr. Malick studied philosophy at Harvard and Oxford and taught at M.I.T.) published by Northwestern University Press, throw in the 20 years of silence, Paris, rumor, and abandoned projects that followed "Days of Heaven," add a reluctance to give interviews, be photographed, or disclose very much about himself, and it's no surprise that comparisons with J.D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon (actually, any hermit icon will do) were quick to be made.

The notion of Mr. Malick as a man apart is only reinforced by the way in which his movies so often maintain an emotional distance from their subjects. In "Badlands," his masterpiece, a film loosely inspired by Charles Starkweather, Caril Ann Fugate, and their Eisenhower-era killing spree, there is no judgment and little passion, just unblinking, meticulous observation as bleak, unyielding, and remorseless as the landscape in which it is shot.

Its deadly, deadpan protagonists, Kit (Martin Sheen, never better) and his young girlfriend, spooky, strange Holly (Sissy Spacek, weirder by far than in "Carrie") reveal little about themselves, not that there is a great deal to reveal. Our own involvement in their fate is further limited by the use Mr. Malick makes of voice-over (something heard in all his movies) to tell their story, another device that reminds us that we are not there in the badlands: We are just part of an audience, spectators, nothing more.

This sense of detachment continued into "Days of Heaven," a love triangle set amid the wheat fields of early-20th-century Texas. Once again framed (and held at a distance) by the words of a narrator, this time in the haunting, scratchy voice of a disconcerting urchin (Linda Manz) from the slums of Chicago, the story unfolds against the astonishing, gorgeously shot landscapes that are the director's trademark. But, just as typically for Mr. Malick, these also serve to underline the grubbiness and insignificance of the human drama that transpires. We may be gripped by the doomed relationship between Bill (Richard Gere), Abby (Brooke Adams),and "the farmer"(tellingly, this character, played by Sam Shepard, is never even given a name), but in the greater scheme of things, their tragedy counts for nothing.

Judging by "The Thin Red Line," the beautiful, intriguing, but ultimately absurd movie that marked the director's long-awaited comeback, not much changed for Mr. Malick in those two intervening decades. As usual, his film looks lovely (even if it occasionally topples over into Sierra Club kitsch), but its protagonists have to take a distant third place behind first-rate cinematography and fourthrate philosophizing.

With the exception of a ravaged, raging lieutenant colonel (Nick Nolte) and the saintly, selfsacrificing Private Witt (Jim Caviezel, limbering up to be Jesus), the members of the cast are barely differentiated and serve largely as examples of certain stock types: the cynic, the softie, and so on. Still, they shouldn't be offended. Even World War II (the film is set during the battle for Guadalcanal) is reduced to a generic conflict, little more really than a platform for Mr. Malick's musings on war (he's against), mankind (not a fan), and the meaning of life itself (quoting Witt's maudlin speculation about whether "all men got one big soul" is as much as I can stomach writing down, but it tells you all you need to know).

In one respect, at least, on this occasion Mr. Malick qualifies his general misanthropy with the rather biblical suggestion that we are a fallen species instead of one that was bad from the beginning. Early in the movie, Guadalcanal's native inhabitants are shown living harmonious (literally, there's a lot of singing), happy, unspoiled lives in marked contrast to the brutish, supposedly civilized men who descend upon them and then proceed to wreck Eden. In essence, this is also the theme (along with yet more dollops of the reheated transcendentalism that casts its sickly pall over "The Thin Red Line") at the heart of "The New World," Mr. Malick's latest film.

This muddled but sometimes mesmerizing movie is far more evenhanded in its treatment of Jamestown's English settlers than some critics have suggested, but its highly romanticized depiction of an American Indian culture that is all Rousseau and no Hobbes again shows Mr. Malick to be a director too ready to abandon subtlety for cheesy hippie didacticism. That's not to say it's a bad film. Far from it (among other achievements, Mr. Malick has coaxed surprisingly touching performances out of both Q'orianka Kilcher as Pocahontas and Christian Bale as the man she ultimately marries).

But it would have been a much, much better movie had Mr. Malick been able to abandon his fantasy of an Eden that never was: Humanity lives in the badlands. Always has. Always will. And we need Mr. Malick back there with us to show how it's going to be.

A Legendary Lover, Brought Down to Size

Casanova

The New York Sun, December 23, 2005

New Mexico, August 2016  © Andrew Stuttaford

Even his name, Giacomo Casanova, with its lovely rhythms and hint of a sigh, sounds like seduction. Try saying it without smiling as you savor the memory or, more precisely, the legend of this trickster Romeo, bogus aristocrat, and genuine original, a man (perhaps character is a more appropriate word) about whom nothing was ever quite as it seemed, but who deserves better than the lame, preachy mess that is Lasse Hallstrom's dreadful new movie.

To start with, Mr. Hallstrom's "Casanova" fails miserably in its attempts to be sexy, which is, given its subject matter, a remarkable achievement, roughly akin to making a gladiator movie without swords, togas, or thumbs down. Secondly, with the exception of the occasional merciful interlude, usually involving the splendid Oliver Platt, it's simply not amusing: an embarrassing fault in something billed as a comedy. And while we're on the subject, Mr. Hallstrom, Mack Sennett is dead: Pratfalls are no longer funny.

All this is bad enough, but the greatest disappointment is that this Casanova is never allowed to be Casanova. The opportunity to represent the weird, wild, and, all too often, imaginary "real" life of a man more interesting, challenging, and bizarre than anyone encountered in this movie is wasted. The historical Casanova's confused, and confusing, shifts in identity ought to resonate in our own era of experiment, paradox, and uncertain attachment to the notion of objective truth. They ought to, but in this film they are not given the chance.

What we are subjected to instead is a plodding morality tale saturated with the Hallmark treacle and dismal contemporary pieties that ensure that "Casanova" will one day find a natural berth on television's Lifetime channel. To cut a short story shorter, after a few feeble twists, twitches, and turns of what passes for a plot, Casanova loses his heart to Francesca Bruni, an annoying protofeminist played by Sienna Miller, who is much more than one "n" away from being a believable Italian, let alone a feisty thinker centuries ahead of her time. It would, I suppose, be too much of a spoiler to reveal whether the legendary libertine finally succumbs to the questionable pleasures of monogamy, but, suffice to say, the real Casanova, who once announced that marriage was "the tomb of love," is now rolling around in his.

That's not to say this movie is without its pleasures. Reasserting his heterosexual credibility after the recent cowboy interlude, Heath Ledger is charming in the title role, a pleasure to watch, and a fine leading man, but slightly too young, hugely too nice, and way too uxorious to be convincing as the brilliant, complex, and cynical charlatan that he is meant to be playing. For better Casanovas, try Vincent Price's cameo in Bob Hope's ludicrous "Casanova's Big Night" (yes, really) or, if dim memory serves me well, Frank Finlay in the BBC series from the 1970s. Oliver Platt, meanwhile, ever the vaudevillian, steals every scene he appears in as Paprizzio, the lard king of Genoa, and Jeremy Irons doesn't come far behind. He does his usual saturnine thing with his usual saturnine competence, this time as Bishop Pucci, an agent of the Inquisition who combines Clouseau's skills with Beria's charm. Naturally, a beautifully filmed Venice, the Garbo of cities, does its usual thing, both as exquisite backdrop and, in its gorgeous, mysterious way, as an essential protagonist in the drama that unfolds.

And the overwhelming sense of this film as an opportunity missed is only sharpened by the occasional tantalizing hint that its makers did indeed have some idea of the enigma that explains (yes, yes, along with all that sex) why, more than 200 years after his death, naughty, elusive Giacomo remains a scandal, a legend, and an enchantment. In one clever scene, Mr. Hallstrom's hero ambles unrecognized by a puppet show dedicated to his purported exploits and rumored intrigues. It's a sly, effective reminder, reiterated in a different way later on in the movie, that the man was not the myth. It's a nice touch and one that the old rogue, writing his unreliable memoirs in the Bohemian castle that was his last refuge, would have appreciated.

Those memoirs, the extraordinary creation of a man who was, ironically, in all other respects a failure as a writer, have done more than anything else to make the idea of Casanova what it is today. Beginning with the fake, vaguely aristocratic, name that Casanova added to his own on the title page, they are a hilarious, disturbing, shameless confection of fact, fantasy, fiction, recollection, confession, philosophy, pornography, wisdom, stupidity, and mischief that throw history off balance and leave morality who knows where.

And as they do, they introduce us to the man that Mr. Hallstrom overlooks, to the man who became Casanova, rake, romantic, con man, entrepreneur, gambler, cleric, spy, jailbird, magician, snob, rebel, and so much more, or, perhaps, so much less. As for Casanova, he simply claimed, more than a little disingenuously, that the joke was on him: He wrote about Casanova to "laugh at myself" and, he said, he succeeded.

Mr. Hallstrom's "Casanova" would have reduced him to tears.

Ladies' Man: Kong and his women.

National Review Online, December 16, 2005

As all too many of us have discovered, to be unlucky in love is unlovely, but it’s only the saddest of suitors who ends up in a heap at the bottom of a skyscraper, riddled with bullets and circled by gawpers. Poor, mighty, helpless Kong. When he fell for Ann Darrow all those years ago, he fell hard: “It wasn’t the airplanes. It was Beauty killed the Beast.”

So it was, but who can blame an ape for trying? Life on Skull Island was dull, dull, dangerous and dull. Sure, there was a constant supply of comely native girls to snack upon, tear apart, or do whatever it was he did with those sacrificial brides of his, but for the most part his existence was foraging for food and fighting off dinosaurs and nasty spider-like things. The arrival of a blonde deco goddess must have been a welcome distraction.

But who, exactly, was she? We’ll see how Naomi Watts fares in Peter Jackson’s new film, but screaming Fay Wray was never quite up to the Darrow of her creators’ dreams. For that, look to the 1932 novelization of the first Kong’s screenplay. In this eccentric epic, as in the movie, Carl Denham rescues Darrow from the shop where she had been caught stealing an apple. Miracle! She was the girl he needed for his new film: “Large eyes of incredible blueness looked out at him from shadowing lashes; the ripe mouth had passion and humor…Her skin was transparently white. That marvelous kind of skin belongs with the kind of hair which foamed up beneath her shabby hat. This was of pure gold. If Denham had been poetical, which he was not, he might have pictured it spun out of sunlight.”

Phew.

But if it is clear how audiences were expected to react to Ann Darrow what exactly was Kong meant to think about her “bright hair, her perfect face, [and] graceful well proportioned figure”? In a sequence so naughty it vanished for nearly 40 years, Kong gently peels off Ann’s clothes, piece by flimsy piece, pausing only to smell one delectable scrap, before returning to ogle, sniff, and toy with the prize lying prostrate and nearly naked in his hand. In his enthralling, entertaining, and essential history of the Kong movies, Ray Morton notes that director Meriam Cooper always claimed that the scene was purely playful, while Willis O’Brien, the special effects maestro who was, with Cooper, the creative genius behind the film, argued Kong saw Darrow “as a beautiful object”. The “removal of her clothes was akin to plucking the petals off a flower.”

Perhaps, in a more straitlaced time they just had to say that, but to be fair, the Kong novelization does back them up. Sort of. “Ann screamed again, Kong snatched at her. His hand caught in her dress and the dress tore in his huge fingers. More whiteness was revealed. Kong touched the smooth revelation. He pulled again at the torn dress. Then holding Ann tightly, he began to pluck her clothes away as a chimpanzee might undress a doll. As each garment came free into his hand, he felt it excitedly, plainly trying to find some connection between the frail tissue and the whiteness he had exposed.”

As I said, sort of. As I said, phew.

But a world able to accept the marriage of Julia Roberts and Lyle Lovett ought to be sophisticated enough to recognize Kong’s feelings for what they really were. Understanding his besotted gaze, we can see how he protects the object of his impractical adoration and, ultimately, we warm to the sacrifice he makes. We may not have asked, but he has told. And those cynics who claim that Kong’s infatuation was no more than pre-Neanderthal lust need to remember the moment that Kong hurled a woman to her death when he discovered she wasn’t Ann. This was a one-girl gorilla.

Or at least he was before he got to Tokyo. Undaunted by his death, the King turned up three decades later in two Japanese movies for which no appropriate adjective has yet been devised. In the first, King Kong versus Godzilla (1962), he’s found on the Pacific island of Faro, where a tribe of Japanese in dark make-up had found a suitably Sixties way to keep him happy: narcotic red berries. Narcotic red berries are the only possible explanation for the confusing narrative that follows, but there is a poignant hint of Kong’s more majestic past when he takes foxy Fumiko Sakurai to the top of Tokyo’s capitol building. She escapes, but only after a narcotic berry spray knocks Kong into the merciful unconsciousness to which the movie’s audience has long, long since succumbed.

For all the turmoil on that tower, however, there was something a touch desultory about the fling with Fumiko. Apes prefer blondes. The makers of Kong’s next Japanese excursion, King Kong Escapes (1967) threw Susan Watson, a blonde lieutenant in the U.N.’s submarine fleet (who knew?), into the mix. It worked. As soon as Casanova Kong, by now living on yet another remote Pacific Island, saw the minx from Turtle Bay, it was love. He demonstrated this in ways sometimes reminiscent of the original King Kong, but sometimes, notably when rescuing Susan from a robot Kong, not. Mie Hama, the former Fumiko (who had in the meantime also been pawed by cinema’s other rampaging id, James Bond, in You Only Live Twice) also returned to the fray in this movie, this time as the villainous Madame Piranha, an agent for Red China whose presence was, I like to think, a reproach to Kong for the way in which he had now taken to playing the field.

If there was a touch of Teddy Roosevelt about the attitudes underpinning the first King Kong, so the movie that marked the franchise’s return to America in 1976 mirrored a suspicion of big business that was, along with an environmentalist subtext, hints of corruption in the White House, and refreshing honesty about the real nature of Kong’s interest in his latest blonde, very characteristic of its time. In the same way, the blonde, played by a Jessica Lange hot enough to bring Godzilla to his knees, was, in contrast to the passive Ann Darrow, an emancipated woman of the ERA era perfectly capable of telling her simian seducer what for. Hear her roar, monkey boy. More than that, the erotic attraction went both ways. Kong’s earlier sweethearts may have felt sorry for the big lunk, but that was it; with Dwan, there was, in the end, something…else. And if you think I’m wrong, just check out the look on her face when Kong, ahem, dries her off.

But Dwan may have been too forward for Kong, something of a reactionary when it came to the fair sex. In King Kong Lives (1986), he retreated to the safety of his own species, even fathering a little Kong with Lady Kong (who had, conveniently, been discovered living in Borneo) before dying his now traditional death at the hands of the US military. The potential human love interest, although blonde only to her highlights, was pretty Amy Franklin (Linda Hamilton), the doctor who gave Kong his artificial heart (don’t ask), but as the ungrateful ape seemed not to notice, the lovely Linda fled to CBS to play Beauty to a lugubrious lion-man, a Beast who actually paid her some attention.

Kong shunned Amy, audiences shunned Kong. Without the girl, the monkey was just a monster. And without much of a screenplay the monster was just an oaf. King Kong Lives died, but its classic predecessor remains unscathed, intoxicating, and immortal. With its groundbreaking effects, beguiling score, glorious cinematography and haunting clash of primitive and modern, the original King Kong will always endure, but it was the doomed, hopeless love for Ann Darrow that turned movie into myth and Kong into you, somehow, and me. That myth was so strong it could survive and even sustain the ludicrous liaisons and absurd exploits of the Japanese years, and it flourishes still: Any King Kong that ignores its lessons, its passion, and its tragedy will be in deep, deep trouble.

Over to you, Naomi.