From the Vault: Kingsman: The Secret Service

In which I review a movie from my collection.

The early months of any given year are often dominated by – if not exclusively composed of – filler: prestige films whose releases were pushed back when it became obvious they didn’t stand a chance against their competition and would-be blockbusters whose release was moved up to avoid the summer’s big crowd-pleasers.  And while exceptions do exist, the sage advice has always been to save your money for May.

2015, however, seems to have abandoned this trend entirely.  I would be shocked if Cinderella didn’t end up on my “Best of” list by year’s end.  Furious7 dominated the box office for a full month before Age of Ultron came out not because it was the seventh in a long line of action movies, but because it was a legitimately good action movie.  And then there was Kingsman: The Secret Service: the latest action / comedy romp from writer-director Matthew Vaughn (best known for Stardust, Kick-Ass and X-Men: First Class).

In the wake of a gentleman spy’s untimely death, The Kingsman – a privately funded, extra-governmental spy agency modeled after the Knights of the Round Table – seek to recruit his replacement.  Agent Galahad’s choice is Eggsy Unwin – the delinquent son of a former Kingsman with a chip on his shoulder and everything to prove – while his colleagues keep with traditional and draw their candidates from old, moneyed and aristocratic families.

But while the selection process is underway, billionaire Richmond Valentine’s growing paranoia about global warming comes to a maniacal head.  In order to save the planet, he sets a plan in motion to cull the global population, bringing the Earth back to a state of sustainable equilibrium.  And when the Kingsman themselves become targets of Valentine’s sinister philanthropy, it’s up to Eggsy to lead the rest of the Kingsman against him.

Kingsman is a raucous sendup to old spy shows like the Bond movies and the invariably overlooked Avengers series.  It revels in the eccentric villains, playboy heroes and increasingly impractical gadgets that defined the golden age of British spy movies.  Valentine’s “Odd Job” assistant is a double amputee whose prosthetic legs double as swords.

In their dapper (and bullet-proof) three piece suits, Kingsman agents are loaded with electrified signet rings, remotely activated poisonous pens, exploding lighters and Penguin-styled utility umbrellas.  Galahad and Valentine exchange barbs about what made the early bond films great and extrapolate how their current scenario would play out in them before ultimately concluding that “it’s not that kind of movie.”

The central narrative of Eggsy’s coming of age amidst the unreservedly classist Kingsman organization is problematic at best when you consider the film’s simultaneous love for and disdain of the lower class.  Eggsy’s ability to get the drop on his fellow recruits (and sometimes instructors) is directly attributed to his unprivileged upbringing; the film as a whole, however, sets itself against those upstart Americans who so uncouthly broke off from British rule.

The villain is a self-made billionaire whose idea of a private gala is serving McDonalds on a silver tray.  When martially the wealthy and politically influential to his cause, Valentine effortlessly wins over the Obama administration (all of whom have their heads explode in the manic finale).  This isn’t to say that the film is itself lacking, just that its often contradictory themes generally amount to a zero sum while the over-the-top action sequences and witty banter are allowed to steal the show.

Vaughn uses Kingsman‘s R rating to its full effect, loading the film down with over-the-top action sequences, outrageous gore and fairly explicit sexual encounters.  In what’s sure to become its most talked about sequence, a Westbero Baptist Church-styled hate group is beaten, bludgeoned, shot and stabbed to the tune of “Free Bird.”  They kill off every last man, woman and child in there seemingly just because it felt good to do so; sure, there was some shoe-horned reason to do it, but it was really just because they wanted to.  The violence never becomes too much, although I couldn’t help but marvel just how much the studio allowed them to get away with.

While its wildly fluctuating themes, tones and subtext keep it from saying exactly what it wants to say, Kingsman is without a doubt the first good movie of 2015.  It’s loud, messy, outrageously hilarious, endlessly exciting and, most important of all, fun.  It the very best version of the movie that it’s trying to be: an overblown classic spy film with a decidedly post-millennial aesthetic.  It’s Goldfinger meets Kick-Ass and I loved every second of it.

 Rating:  8/10

Buy on BluRay:  It is that kind of movie.

So what's your favorite spy movie?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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From the Vault: Man of Steel

In which I review a movie from my collection.

With all of this Dawn of Justice talk in the air, I figured that it was high time to revisit a movie that I never actually thought that I would like going into it: Man of Steel.  I've never been a big Superman fan; he's basically always struck me as an infinitely less interesting Captain America: a boyscout with no discernible personality other than being a decidedly good guy.  The first movie with Christopher Reeve was solid, but the series quickly spiraled into stupidity from there.  Man of Steel was DC's first real crack at the character in years, and they had a lot to prove given the competition.

In the last days of Krypton, Jor El and his wife Lara commit treason by giving birth to a son: Kal, who is sent to Earth where he will live on as the last son of Krypton.  When General Zod's opportunistic coup is put down, however, he swears vengeance on the Kal, vowing to track him down to the ends of the universe for what his parents did to him.  But a greater destiny awaited him on Earth: to become the hero that the planet desperately deserved.

I will readily admit that I never expected to enjoy a Superman movie this much going into it.  There was actually more to this version of the character than "a genuinely good guy masquerading as a buffoon."  He's a troubled young man desperately trying to find his place in a world that he knows he doesn't belong to.  After discovering where it is that he really came from, however, he steps up to become a beacon of hope to his adopted people and save them from a decidedly Kryptonian threat.

Besides that, the movie featured some incredibly top-notch action sequences.  In particular, the final fight between Zod and Superman was some of the best stuff that I've seen in superhero movies to date.  While it's not quite "Battle of New York" good, it's a savage smack down that's everything I ever wanted to see from what essentially amounts to a battle of gods.

That being said, though, the movie is really flawed in a few fundamental ways.  As I've already enumerated on, Man of Steel neither looks nor feels like a Superman movie.  That's not to say that I miss the comic-looking Reeve movies, just that a Superman movie aught to look like, well, a Superman movie.  It needlessly adopted a gritty, Dark Knight aesthetic that was completely wrong for the franchise because that's what Warner Bros figured would sell.

While I do appreciate the new direction that they took with the character - trying to actually make him dynamic and interesting - they didn't fully succeed at that task.  He definitely has a Hell of a lot more to work with than Supermen of the past, but it all came off as more than a little heavy handed and vaguely adolescent.  And while there's always been a religious aspect to the character (basically having Moses' childhood and Jesus' adulthood, only with more punching), the ways in which the movie manifests this subtext is far too blatant and overbearing.

Zod is an incredibly one-note villain, given life through an absurdly over-the-top performance.  While I really liked the literal twist of his life's purpose - that he was raised to protect Krypton specifically and nothing less than an actual, factual Krypton would do - that comes up so far into the movie, and preceded by so much over-the-top screen time, that it's pretty much a case of too little, too late.

I also never cared for its needlessly non-linear story-telling on the Earth side of things.  Now, I love Memento and The Imitation Game as much as the next guy, but those movies worked precisely because they demanded that kind of non-traditional editing.  Man of Steel is a big budget action movie where aliens punch each other until the world around them is leveled into dust.  The arrangement of the film is both unnecessary and distracting to the actual story that it's trying to tell, and I can't help but feel like it was utilized at least partly to hide a substandard coming of age narrative under its superheroic dressing

Upon rewatching the movie, I was surprised at how little Clark's soul searching quest held up in retrospect.  Sure, none of it's bad, but it's never quite interesting enough to really care about.  On top of that, Jonathon Kent is probably the worst father in the history of cinema: telling his godly son that he should have let his entire class die because saving them might draw a bit of unwanted (and decidedly local) attention to himself.  I agree that his altruism should be tempered with caution, but what he was talking about was standing by and watching dozens of innocent children die for the most thinly justified of reasons.

And for as awesome as the first half hour is on Krypton - seriously, at one point we watch Jor-El fly a dragon through an alien apocalypse - the terrestrial half never quite held up to that opening sequence's promise.  It had a good cast, good director and a bloated budget, but never quite came together into the Superman movie that it was trying to be.

If this is the best that we can expect from DC, they should quickly prove to be no competition for Marvel cinematically.  I can only hope that from here on out, they'll make Superman feel like Superman, Batman feel like Batman and have everybody else fall somewhere in between the two.  That's not to say that Man of Steel is a bad movie, just that it's it's a reasonably solid one that simply fails to hold up as well as it should on repeated viewings.

Rating:  7.5/10

Buy on BluRay:  If you can look past its glaring flaws, there's a pretty solid movie there.

So what did you think of Man of Steel?  Does it make you excited for the nascent DC Cinematic Universe's future outings?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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From the Vault: Die Hard

In which I review a movie from my personal collection.

So I nearly didn't get a chance to review this movie this week.  You'd have thought that you could find something like Die Hard at any Best Buy, Walmart or Barnes & Noble in town, but you'd actually be wrong.  And on that rare occasion when you do actually find it, it's in a collector's tin with all of its sequels, and I'm not paying upwards of $50 for what essentially amounts to one good movie.  Thankfully something called The Internet exists, which brings us to where we are now.

It's Christmas time, and all through LA not a creature was stirring, except John McClain (alright, alright, I'll stop doing that).  When New York cop John McClain visits his family in LA, he does so hoping that he can reconcile the differences between himself and his estranged wife.  But during the office Christmas party, a group terrorists take the party-goers hostage while they attempt to break into a safe and steal fortune in bearer bonds.  Now McClain, who was able to escape capture, must lead a one-man war against a dozen armed men in order to save his wife.

Die Hard isn't just any old action movie, it is the action movie: the prototypical mold from which everything that followed had to measure up against.  It found the perfect summertime balance between great characters, great plot, great one-liners and great action.  It wasn't trying to be anything deep or meaningful, it just wanted to be a fun time.

And in that sense, it succeeded at doing everything that it set out to do.  Despite the surreal logic that lead to the a-typical casting of Bruce Willis in a role that was initially written for Frank Sinatra, John McClain has proven himself to be the definitive everyman action star: holding his own against muscle-bound icons like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone.

Despite being a touch more simplistic than many of the villains that followed him, Hans Grubber succeeds as an antagonist because of his total commitment to the bit.  He may not be as inherently interesting as The Joker or Raoul Silva, but he's the best possible version of the exact brand of evil he's going after.  Between his menacing accent, his unsettlingly gentleman demeanor and how readily he dispatches those who are no longer of any use to him, he's one of the most strikingly recognizable movie villains of the 20th Century.

While Die Hard was hardly striking new ground with its omniscient point of view, it makes probably the best use of it of any movie that I've ever seen.  It's positively brimming with dramatic irony; we see every twist, double-cross and hidden motive long before the other characters do.

We know that Hans & Co. are just a bunch of thieves while everybody else thinks that they're politically minded terrorists.  We understand that McClaine is a cop on the loose before Hans' men are clued into that fact.  We're let in on how comfortable the feds are at losing huge swaths of hostages even as those hostages anxiously await their arrival as their saviors.  Die Hard's that April Fools Day joke that only you and the guy telling it are clued in to, followed by upwards of two hours of explosive fun at all of the characters' expense.

With as self-aware and well-made of a movie as Die Hard is, its exceptionally few faults add up to very little.  Sure, Holly isn't an especially well-realized character and doesn't have anything all that interesting to do.  Yes, there's an unfortunate "father knows best" subtext blown up to Herculean proportions lying just underneath the surface narrative.  And yeah, the movie has more interconnecting narratives than it necessarily needs (Argyle and Richard - the limo driver and the reporter - being the most obvious).  But when the movie's this good in every other respect, do these minor issues really lessen it in any meaningful way?

Much like Hans is the perfect version of the character that he's trying to be (and McClain too for that matter), Die Hard is the perfect version of the movie that it wants to be.  It's a fun, action-packed ride with more than enough explosions for the casual movie fan and more than enough meaningfully crafted characters for the more adroit ones.  Its the kind of movie that even non-fans of the genre get absolutely pumped for, because it's really just that good of a movie.

Rating:  8.5/10

Buy on BluRay:  Yippie Ki-Yay, Motherfucker

So what's your favorite action movie of all time?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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From the Vault: Ghostbusters

In which I review a movie from my collection.

It might have taken longer than I had initially intended, but I've finally gotten around to rewatching Ghostbusters after Bob Chipman's inaugural episode of Really that Good.  His video stood as a testament to me for why thoughtful, analytical film criticism is an important cultural tool.  More than just recommending or warning people away from a given movie, it challenges its viewers pre-established opinions and forces them to re-evaluate their positions on a given subject.  Whether or not they think any differently afterwards is completely immaterial.

After having their university funding revoked, paranormal academics Ray, Egon and Peter put their collective supernatural knowledge to use in the private sector.  They become the Ghostbusters: a startup team of paranormal exterminators who track and trap the spooks haunting New York City.  But when Gozer the Gozerian threatens to bring about Armageddon, they have to fight everything from ancient Sumarian gods to City Hall in order to save the world from destruction.

Although there's a lot to gripe about and nitpick in the movie, what Ghostbusters does well it does so phenomenally well that it's impossible to do anything but overlook its numerous faults.  Its absurdly good cast perfectly pairs the comedic antics of Billy Murray, Dan Akroyd and Harold Ramis with the straight-man conduct Sigourney Weaver, Ernie Hudson and William Atherton.

The writing is sound enough so that every major player - from its hapless heroes to its petty antagonists - get their fair shake at the lime light.  And while some might receive a little too much screen time (Rick Moranis) and others not enough (Ernie Hudson), it mostly balances out by the end of the movie.

One of the best known bits of Ghostbusters trivia is that the original script was radically different from the one that would eventually get produced.  It depicted a distant, ghost-ridden future where teams of Ghostbusters would patrol the streets and keep the city safe from supernatural harm.  The team that the movie would focus on was the Caddyshack-styled screw-ups.

And although that initial premise is rife with potential (not just comedic, but scientific and fantastic as well), the much more modestly conceived origin story that we ended up with is invariably the best version of the movie that we could hope for.  While there's a lot to be said about the success of movies like Caddyshack and Police Academy, I honestly can't think of much to say for them in terms of actual merit.

Forcing the story to address the Ghostbusters beginnings, as opposed to its mainstream eventuality, necessitated intelligent, innovative and capable protagonists, rather than the bumbling screw-ups that we invariably would have gotten.  And while there are plenty of physical gags and jokes aimed at their general dysfunction as a team, the humor is mostly relegated to the hilarious marriage of exorcist and exterminator and the verbal quips of screwball academics.

Although I was never nearly so enamored with Ghostbusters as the rest of my friends were as a kid, it was never the less one of the comedies I most admired.  The ghosts were the perfect degree of frightening for a kid to appreciate (grotesque enough to be scary, but tame enough to not be repulsive) and it featured a handful of cornerstone jokes that still hold up decades later (see above).

Looking back on it now, however, I can see exactly where the movie lost me as a kid: the exact same issues that Bob brought up in his video.  Between their first real job at the hotel and the climax with Mr. Stay Puft, the movie relies far too heavily on the team's rise-to-fame montage.  While it was certainly an efficient sequence, it robbed the movie of another scene or two of actual ghost busting (of which the movie was surprisingly light on).

The character of Lewis Tully was likewise completely unnecessary.  While I certainly understand what they were trying to go for with the romantic lead's bumbling, socially awkward neighbor, none of it really worked for me.  He didn't add anything substantive to the Dana-Peter binary, his jokes weren't especially funny and he was mostly there to give Egon and Janine something to do while Ray and Winston were researching the Gozer-infested apartment and Peter dealt with the Zuul-possessed Dana.

That being said, however, I can whole-heartedly say that Ghostbusters is "really that good."  The premise is the perfect blend of imaginative and fun, produced at a time when special effects had caught up with the idea but before blockbusters became as formulaically cemented as they did in the 1990s.  And, most importantly, it holds up better today than most other comedies.

Rating:  8/10

Buy on BluRay:  Yes

So what is your favorite comedy from the 1980s?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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From the Vault: Maleficent

In which I review a movie from my collection.

I can't help but wonder if I'm cheating with this week's From the Vault.  I actually do own the revisionist Disney remake in question.  I only saw it this weekend, however, because while visiting my parents for Easter, it just so happened to be their Netflix DVD for the week.  But since Ghostbusters hasn't arrived in the mail yet, I'll have to make due this week with being technically correct.

When Maleficent - the strongest and most beautiful of the moorland faeries - befriends the human Stefan, it appears to be the first step toward repairing the warring kingdoms' strained relations.  But when Stefan's ambitions cause him to cut off her wings in the dead of night and present them to the dying king, he makes a powerful and, above all, vengeful enemy.  And although she curses his only daughter to suffer an eternal, death-like sleep, she ends up loving the child instead: unable to reverse the doom that she placed upon her.

In the vein of Grendel and Wicked, Maleficent is a feminist retelling of a familiar story from the villain's point of view.  It's hard to say why, exactly, Maleficent is so highly regarded among Disney villains.  It's more than Sleeping Beauty's uniquely flat art style, more than than the character's timelessly wicked iconography.  It's even more than the fact that she transformed into a dragon in what is easily Disney's most perfectly realized animated climax.

If I had to put my finger on exactly what makes Maleficent so beloved among Disneyphiles, I would put forward that it has to do with her total commitment to the bit.  She's not just evil: she is all-consumingly evil.  She's not just petty: she's absolutely malicious.

Whereas a lesser villain would have simply killed Aurora where she lay in the cradle, Maleficent wanted her parents - and by extension, the kingdom - to suffer.  Her curse wasn't just the princess' eternal slumber, but the inevitable certainty of it.  She didn't just keep Phillip from saving his true love, but rubs his nose in his failure.  When you square off against Maleficent, you're not just fighting the witch, but "all the powers of Hell."

To remake the film and set her as its chief protagonist begs the question of how you make such an unrepentantly vile character sympathetic while still staying true to her villainous roots.  As it turns out, it's all just a matter of context.  While her reimagined back story as the warrior princess of the fae is a bit overly elaborate for my tastes, it does succeed at setting her up less as of an outright villain as it does an vengeful victim.

What I have always found most interesting about this film is that subtextual readings of Maleficent's mutilation seem to be strictly divided along gender lines.  Women generally seem to draw a parallel between her pinioning and forced mastectomies: focusing the social repercussions of removing a highly visible part of her anatomy.  Men, however, aware of Stefan drugging her and having his way with her body while she sleeps, tend to identify her story most closely with date rape.  This last interpretation actually frames the rest of the narrative as a rape revenge story in the Disneyfied vein of movies like I Spit on Your Grave (which is probably an article's worth of topic all by itself).

Moving beyond its uncomfortable subtext, the narrative plays out a lot like Frozen: both in its sly condemnation of "love at first sight" and its indifference toward the alleged importance of romantic love as a whole.  Despite having met only in passing, Sleeping Beauty rouses Aurora from her slumber with his true love's kiss, because they were simply meant to be together.  When repeated in Maleficent, it doesn't work, reminding us of the superficiality of their previous interactions.

It's Maleficent's love that wakes Aurora this time around: the very same woman who cursed her in the first place.  In the context of this particular narrative, however, she is the only person who makes any sense doing so.  With her mother dead, father insane and "aunts" hopelessly clueless, there's only Maleficent: the shadow that stood behind her her entire life, watching out for and looking after her despite her worst intentions.

Consider, however, the actual wording of the curse.  The film established when Maleficent attempted to unweave her spell that technical language woven into the enchantment was as important as the magic itself:

The princess shall indeed grow in grace and beauty, loved by all who meet her, but before the sun sets on her sixteenth birthday, she will prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and fall into a sleep like death: a sleep from which she shall never awaken [ except] by true love's kiss.

A condition of the spell she wove - doubtless intended only to be a poetic extension of the previous gifts of Beauty and Grace - was that she would be loved by all who meet her.  While this doubtless means that the prince's love was true, I would have to imagine that true love's kiss is a reciprocal affection.  Aurora was certainly enticed by the handsome young prince, but could hardly have loved him by then.  But Maleficent, under the glamour of her own spell, fell in love with the "beasty" and Aurora, though her naivete and fascination, fell in love with her.

Although its added back story is needlessly excessive, there's hardly anything that Maleficent can be faulted with.  The production design is excellent, the feminist core of the story is well-crafted and Angelina Jolie is so absurdly perfect in her role that it's a wonder they actually managed to cast her in it at all.  The resulting film is surprisingly nuanced for a Summer blockbuster and makes for an interesting companion piece to Enchanted, Frozen and Into the Woods.

Rating:  7.5/10

Buy on BluRay:  As long as you're not too defensive of the animated classic.

So what's your favorite version of the story of Sleeping Beauty (Disney or otherwise)?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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From the Vault: Divergent

In which I review a film from my movie collection.

This was originally meant to be last week's Unreality Companion, but a disadvantageous work schedule paired with the perplexingly delayed publication of my article lead me to hold off on this review.  I wasn't about to let this one go to waste, though.  If I forced myself to sit through Divergent, I sure as Hell was going to make use of it.

When humanity turned on itself, it nearly wiped out the entire species.  Two hundred years after the devastating conflict, mankind has crawled back from the dystopian squalor in the ruins of what was once Chicago.  In order to promote harmony, society has divided itself into five different factions - based on a person's aptitudes and interests - each with a unique social function.  Dauntless are the combined police and military force, Amity are the farmers, Candor are the judiciaries, Erudite are the scientists and Abnegation are the governing body.

A rare few - known as Divergents - do not fit into any one faction.  They represent chaos within the carefully regimented Faction system and will invariably be executed if discovered.  One newly come of age Divergent, Triss, must choose which faction she is to join: a choice made all the more difficult by her infidelity toward any one of them.

A lot of issues that I took with Insurgent had taken root in the series' first installment.  Triss' divergent exceptionality still plays out like the personal fable - in which "an adolescent believes that they are the only super, special, rainbow, sparkle, sunshiny snowflake in the entire world." The Faction system ultimately still feels "like an especially angsty tween’s diary entries about why everybody else at her school is wrong for not let her sit at their table during lunch."  Plus there's still the implicit subtext that intelligence is an inherently corrupting virtue.

Where Divergent wins out over its sequel, however, is that these negative aspect haven't gotten fully out of hand yet.  The Faction system, despite its school cafeteria parallels, is still just a semi-unique twist to the whole sectioned-off dystopia trope.  Divergents don't quite seem like the self-aggrandizing plot device that Insurgent would turn it into.  While Erudite is still the antagonistic faction, it ultimately has less to do with them being too smart for their own good than it does with a Vulcanized rendition of their ideals.

The coming of age story that's at the core of the narrative is a perfectly sound one: emphasizing adolescents' struggle in finding their place in the world.  Triss is an ultimately likable character, even if she's shoehorned into the role of audience surrogate a little too forcefully.  The factions are well conceived and well designed, even if they are a little simplistic (although I admittedly came into the movie with Ravnica's ten-guild system in mind).  The set design was an imaginative blend of futuristic design amid the crumbling skyscrapers of the old world.  I even found myself  caring about who was cut from Dauntless and who progressed through the ranks.

There were only two places where the film dropped the ball.  I did not buy into Four's and Triss' relationship.  Understand that I'm not saying that their relationship would never work, because I really think that it would: down the line, at a different point of the narrative.  Their shared background, faction defection and divergence necessitated their eventual romance.  Their differences in age and rank, however, inherently precluded their romantic involvement during Triss' basic training.

The second point where the movie lost me was its awkwardly tagged-on climax.  Triss' basic training, upward trajectory through the Dauntless ranks and eventual acceptance into the faction should have been the end of it.  Yes, they established that there were increasing troubles between the Erudite and Abnegation factions, but nothing so substantially developed as to warrant as rushed and unfulfilling a climax as what actually occurred on screen.

The fact that the Dauntless were all mind controlled into serving the Erudite felt like a sorely missed opportunity to explore the political dealings between different factions and the conflicting loyalties of the Dauntless to protect everybody while simultaneously following orders.  There's even an evocative parallel to be made between the Dauntless' surprise attack on the Abnegation neighborhoods and the Nazi consolidation of the ghettos during the Holocaust.

But forget all of that jazz: mind control.  Easy.  Simple.  Done.

While far from the best YA franchise to come out of the post-Potter years, Divergent is an interesting addition to the adolescent cinematic landscape.  It's reasonably well acted, reasonably well written and reasonably well directed : serving as a perfectly reasonable coming of age story despite its obvious flaws.  Young fans of The Hunger Games will find a lot to enjoy in this story, even as older fans roll their eyes at it.

Rating:  7/10

Buy on BluRay:  Not if you already own the far superior Hunger Games

So what is your favorite movie adaptation of a YA novel?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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From the Vault: In the Mood for Love

In which I review a randomly-selected film from my collection.

As you might recall from last week's Date Night, I've gotten into a really bad habit of blind-buying movies and then simply never watching them.  Although I was recently able to cross off Zodiac, the list was never-the-less extensive: the Three Colors trilogy, Reservoir Dogs, Dr. Strangelove, Infernal Affairs, Lawrence of Arabia and In the Mood for Love.  In light of this, I opted to bend the rules of this series and randomly-selected one of those eight films to review.  And because of a slight mix-up concerning when tonight's episode of Gotham aired, I found myself with a little bit of extra time on my hands to hammer something out.

When Secretary Su Li-zhen and her husband move into the same building as Journalist Chow Mo-wan and his wife in 1960's Hong Kong, it seemed like a brave new chapter in both couples' lives.  But with Su's husband always away on business and Chow's wife always working late, their happiness soon deteriorates into isolation and longing.  Drawn to each other's company, Su and Chow begin to suspect that their spouses are having an affair with one another.  But despite their partners' infidelities and their growing romance, they know that they can never act on their mutual feelings for one another without repeating their spouses' cycles of lies an betrayal.

Having been exposed to director Wong Kar-wai through Chungking Express, In the Mood for Love was not the follow-up that I expected.  Whereas Chungking Express was erratically paced and edited - lurching eagerly from shot to shot with no consideration for how it would get there - In the Mood for Love is slowly paced, methodically strung-together and constrictively shot.  Abandoning an aesthetic of enthusiasm over experience, the film expresses an insightful maturity towards its subjects that its predecessor would have lost in its youthful exuberance.

Chungking Express: a constant blur of action and movement. 

In the Mood for Love is a perfect case-study of cinematic cohesion.  From conception to execution, every facet of the film - writing, acting, shot composition, score - fits together like pieces of a puzzle, forming a greater picture than its components parts could ever manage on their own.  Every fragment of dialog, lingering silence and subtle motion builds upon its central themes of social confinement and impossible desire.  You don't watch In the Mood for Love, you experience it.  Wong Kar-wai's singular, driving aesthetic inserts his audience into the narrative so subtly and so completely that it is impossible to leave without living through the heartbreak and dejection of its protagonists.

More than anything else, the film shows off Wong Kar-wai's flair for cinematography and shot composition.  Scenes involving the supporting cast are crowded and uncomfortably closed-in.  Shots are framed by windows, doorways, stairwells and curtains: closing off the natural scope of the camera to a mere fraction of what audiences - especially Western audiences - have come to expect from a contemporary film,  Character's bodies are often segmented into mere bits of anatomy - feet, hands, shoulders, back, head - or speak from off-camera entirely, reinforcing the impression that there is not enough room for them in the world in which they find themselves.

Su and Chow pass each other in a confined alley.

When either Su or Chow are shown in isolation from the rest of the cast, however, the cinematography changes.  They are shown in more familiar medium close-ups, from far greater distances and free from the obstructions that clutter the more claustrophobic group shots.  The spaces that they find themselves in alone at night are broad and expansive, emphasizing their isolation in a vast, lonely world that seems to be populated exclusively by themselves.

What is most striking however, is the manner in which the audience views the protagonists.  While supporting characters are often shown directly, Su and Chow are rarely scene front-on.  They are viewed through their mirrored reflections and kaleidoscopic refractions.  Even when not shown through an intermediary, they are often either shown from behind or with their faces otherwise obscured.  It is as if their true selves - their longing for meaningful relationships and personal connections - are so isolated from the world, that they refuse to show them even in solitude, with only the camera to bear witness to it.

In the Mood for Love is the kind of film that stalks the recesses of your conciousness long after the credits stop rolling and the screen fades to black.  If I would have been asked even a day ago what I felt about it, my opinion would be far different from what it was the day before and even what it is today.  Its a romance veiled in smoke: twisting tendrils parting to reveal new meaning even as it shifts to obscure others.  I am confident that it is a film that will only grow more signifigant and appreciated with time.  Overall, I would give it an 8/10.

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From the Vault: Oliver & Company

In which I review a randomly-selected movie from my collection.

Everybody has their own pick for "most criminally-underrated Disney film."  When you've been churning out feature-length animated movies for 77 years, with nearly 100 theatrical releases and over half as many straight-to-video releases - not to mention 9 Academy Awards and 20 nominations, including a nomination for Best Picture, across three associated animation studios - it's understandable that a few might get lost in the shuffle.  While the concensus favorite "lost classic" appears to be The Great Mouse Detective, I believe that 1988's Oliver & Company is the most overlooked and underappreciated Disney film.

In a loose adaptations of Oliver Twist, a kitten named Oliver (Joseph Lawrence), finds himself abandoned in New York City.  After helping a Jack Russel Terrier named Dodger (Billy Joel) steal some hotdogs from a vender, Oliver winds up joining his affectionate gang of con dogs and pickpockets.  Fagin (Dom DeLuise), the kindly, down-on-his-luck owner of the gang, has three days in which to repay the money he borrowed from ruthless loan-shark Sykes (Robert Loggia).  While assisting Fagin's gang with a con, Oliver winds up being adopted by seven-year-old Jenny Foxworth (Natalie Gregory) and has to choose between life with her and life with the gang.

Despite its lower profile, Oliver & Company easily holds it own alongside the much more celebrated Disney classics.  Rather than choosing a cast of established actors and praying that they can actually sing - like Gerard Butler's cringe-worthy turn as the alleged "Angel of Music" in The Phantom of the Opera - director George Scribner chose established musicians to voice his characters.  Pop star Billy Joel lends his sly, laid-back voice to street-smart Dodger and belts out what is easily the catchiest song of the film.  Bette Midler, best known for singing "Wind Beneath My Wings," voices the prima donna poodle Georgette.  Disco / Electric singer and Tony Award-winner Sheryl Lee Ralph voices the almost-motherly Saluki Rita and Huey Lewis - of Huey Lewis and the News fame -  headlines the utterly heartbreaking "Once Upon a Time in New York City."

The film's sleek, minimalist art style, with its palette of sunset oranges and midnight blues, is something that you'd expect to find in an Upper West Side art gallery instead of an 80's Disney movie.  It captures the manic energy and rapid tonal shifts that encapsulates New York.  The city is presented as a sprawling, overcrowded ecumonopolis which can transform into a completely different setting just by darting down the right street.  Posh 5th Avenue just a stone throw from the crooked alley where Oliver was chased by feral strays (which look identical to the wolves from Beauty and the Beast), itself caught somewhere between the middle-class streets where he was abandoned and Fagin's dockside shack.

While "Why Should I Worry" is the scene-stealing song that everybody always walks away singing to themselves, the true heart of the film is captured in its opening sequence.  As Huey Lewis sings "Once Upon a Time in New York City," we see Oliver get passed over time after time as smiling boys and girls walk away with his siblings until he's alone in a water-logged cardboard box with a sign that says "free."  The coreography, done with the same under-stated style as the rest of the film, plays with and compliments the song's lyrics, creating just as agonizingly sad a scene as anything from The Lion King.

Oliver & Company's greatest pitfall is its scant seventy-four minute run-time, which is just enough to establish its characters and their conflicts, but not enough to develop them.  Oliver is just a cute, orphaned kitten in search of a home; we get that he's plucky and determined, but we never really get to see him grow into anything more nuanced.  While we understand why Dodger is so hurt when Oliver chooses Jenny over him and the rest of the gang, we don't see enough of Oliver with the gang in order to feel like the choice is as deep of a betrayal it obviously is.  We see the pressure that Fagin is under to repay Sykes, but he's around only long enough for us to merely sympathize with him.  Relatively minor characters like Tito, Einstein, Francis and Rita are given so little development that they can simply be referred to as "the gang."

Despite its shortcomings - shortcomings which would largely be fixed in the Disney films of the 90's - Oliver & Company features a spectacular combination of great music, a compelling story and a unique, hazy art style all its own.  It is as engaging and emotional as the best of Disney's animated canon, even if it lacks the same level of sophistication.  Overall, I would give the film a solid 7.5.