Monthly Archives: October 2021

Movie Review: Dune (2021)

Acclaimed French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve, whose films include such diverse fare as Polytechnique, a film that explores the events of a mass shooting in Canada, to time-twisted SF film Arrivalhas directed his passion project, an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 SF novel, Dune.

Dune, set in the distant year 10191, tells the story of teenage Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet) the only son of Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac), a lord whose growing popularity with the galactic feudal empire threatens the reigning emperor and in engaged in a generations long feud with a rival noble house the Harkonnens, led by the evil Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgard.) Ordered to take possession of Baron Harkonnen’s prize planet, Dune, the sole source of a psychoactive substance, spice, that extents life, enhances mental capabilities, and makes faster-than-light travel possible. On Dune the Atreides hope to secure an alliance with its native populations, a stern, fierce people the Fremen, before coming war the Harkonnens erupts.

Dune is a deep and complex novel with extensive world building on the scale of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Herbert crafted deep history which even in the novel is only lightly touched on that propels the cultures and characters of his story. Villeneuve serving not only as director but also as one of three credited writers on the screenplay manages this impressive feat of presenting this detailed setting enough that it is comprehensible but without ever letting the story drown in exposition. He has managed to visualize aspects of the novel, such as the Ornithopters, aircraft that fly by beating wings, that when I read the book I found difficult to picture. Because the novel is so long and so deep the story has been split into two movies and this one covers only the first half of the story, though the filmmakers found a logical and emotionally satisfying place to end this section. There is absolutely no doubt that there remains much story to tell but this film also ends at a point that can be an ending.

The production design and cinematography are excellent presenting a thoroughly realized lived-in universe and nearly every shot, every frame is a painting imbued with a deeper meaning that just stark visual information. Dune is an accomplishment well worth seeing on the big screen if you feel safe to do so but even on your home television it should be watched.

My SF/Noir Vulcan’s Forge is available from Amazon and all booksellers. The novel is dark, cynical, and packed with movie references.

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Adaptations

 

Tomorrow I go to see the latest adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic Sci-Fi novel Dune. This work has been adapted twice before in 1984 by idiosyncratic director David Lynch for Italian Producer Dino de Laurentiis. This version was a critical and financial failure. Rumor have reported that the first cut of this film was something like five hours long, but the theatrical release was just two hours and seventeen minutes and that the heavy use of voice over in the final cut was a product of this butchering. Whatever the reasons this film pleased neither those who were new to the story nor the fans of the novel.

In 2000 the Sci-Fi network aired a miniseries adaptation of the novel titled Frank Herbert’s Dune. The expanded time worked in this adaptation’s favor, but the limited budget and production restrictions held the final product back and while better received than Lynch’s strange yet unforgettable film this too failed to catch fire with fans.

Adaptations are tricky beasts. A novel or short story is a very different medium than a film. One of not inherently superior to the other, both have their strengths and their weaknesses, and it is foolish and unfair to expect an adaptation to be fully faithful to its source material. An adaptation can wildly deviate from the source material and still be a good or even great adaptation if it captures the tone, theme, and heart of the source. Sometimes it’s best to throws out the subplot that enrich a novel but only drag a film down to a slow death. The mafia sub-plot that explains why the mayor will not close Amity’s beaches in jaws is an excellent example. It makes the mayor’s actions more understandable, more like what a person who is facing harm or death might do to make sure they have the money the mob wants, but in a film, it would be too many scenes away from our central characters in which we spin wheels waiting for the plot to get moving again.

We shall have to wait and see if Dune captures the tone, theme, and heart of Herbert’s dense novel. We do know that this adaptation is incomplete, covering only about half the novel and if successful only then will we be allowed to have the whole story.

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Scary Season #6: Squid Game (Concluded)

 

Spoilers Ahead

 

 

 

 

 

I have now finished all nine episode of the Korean import Squid Game a fictional setting financially that depicts financially desperate people playing children’s games with the stakes being great riches or death upon losing.

The central character is Seong Gi-hun (Surname first as is traditional in Korean culture.) Gi-hun is a reprobate who whines and gambles and stealing money from his elderly mother’s bank account. In episode one I found Gi-hun thoroughly unlikeable and as other characters whose dire straight were not so directly a product of their own selfish choices entered the game my sympathies for Gi-hun diminished even further.

But though the writing displaying Gi-hun compassion for less fortunate players more likely to be eliminated and his willingness to take risks to save them along with actor Lee Jung-jae’s incredible charisma the character won me over as Gi-hun grew exponentially. Even as my sympathies for Gi-hun grew I also rooted for the tragically doomed Ali, a foreign worker abused by his employer, and Sae-byeok a young woman who had escaped from North Korea and now needed cash to save her brother from a South Korean orphanage and her mother still in the North. The most seemingly lost and tragic character was Oh Il-nam, an elderly man suffering from a brain tumor and seeming dementia and to whom Gi-hun develops a friendship and sense of protectiveness that is betrayed when in the final episode it is reveals Il-nam was one of the super wealthy hosting the game with its violence and death to alleviate the wealth created boredom.

While the violence of the series has attracted much attention as well as its commentary on social inequality to me the show’s greatest impact is in the inter-personal dynamics. The personal costs each character accumulates as the dangers and deaths grows, the dependency and betrayals are the emotional heart of the story. When Gi-hun wins but prefers an impoverished life to tainted wealth the show makes its most compelling study of both character and theme.

Squid Game also has a sub-plot as Police Detective Hwang Jun-ho infiltrates the game searching for a brother who has gone missing. The conclusion is somewhat underwhelming but thematically fitting for the show’s dark and cynical view of humanity.

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Odds and Ends

 

It’s mind numbingly stupid that in all likelihood more Americans are going to die of COVID 19 after a safe and effective vaccine is available than before there was such an option.

 

The Internet has performed an artistic trick that a hundred years of cinema could not pull off, making foreign language television and movies popular with Americans.

 

I wonder if any marginal Republican districts are going to change hands because the GOP has successfully convinced their base that death is the way to ‘own the libs?’

 

Colin Powell screwed up supporting the invasion of Iraq, but he was magnitudes less evil and less dangerous that all of those in close orbit with Trump.

 

 

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Ridley’s Rashomon: The Last Duel

 

The Last Duel, set in 1386, from acclaimed director Ridley Scott is about one of the final Trails by Combat in France to determine the guilt or innocence of a criminal defendant.

Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon) challenged and fought his former friend and comrade in arms Jacques Le Gris (Adman Driver) when Jacques denied the charge brought forth by Jean’s wife Marguerite (Jodie Comer) that Jacques had raped her.

The film is structured in three chapters, The Truth according to Jean, The Truth according to Jacques, and the Truth according to Marguerite making the script and film very similar to the Japanese classic Rashomon where a samurai and his wife are attacked in a forest by a bandit, the wife raped and the samurai murdered but the events as recounted from four points of view vary widely in their details with objective truth being obscured by each narrator’s ego and subjectivity. Unlike Rashomon, The Last Duel privileges one account as objectively true while leaving the other two as biased betraying the intent of Rashomon’s device and reducing the film to a mere criminal narrative.

That said The Last Duel is an enjoyable film to watch. Scott is one of the most talented directors working today and none of the cast merely walk through their parts, though in my opinion Jodie Comer is leagues ahead of her costars. While have the least amount of narrative drive, Marguerite’s choices do not drive the plot and her absence from all battle and most of the court political scenes mean we are never treated to an objective version of those events, Comer’s choices as an actor make plain her character’s pain and suffering in a world dominated by violent, cruel, and selfish men.

Dariusz Wolki’s cinematography is stark and cold reflecting a medieval setting that shuns the romantic depictions often found in period adventure movies for one the presents that period as one of ugly dirty squalor where even nobles live far less appealing lives than ours today. The combat presented in the warfare and duel scenes is nasty and hard with Scott disfavoring flamboyant theatrical combat for a more grounded approach of men fighting hard for their lives.

The Last Duel while not Scott’s best work is far from his worst and is worth seeing particularly in theaters should your personal vaccinations and community spread allow it.

 

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Scary Season #5: Lamb

 

Lamb — like the meat — is not to everyone’s taste. The A24 Icelandic folk horror is methodically paced taking its time to reveals its characters, its strange, unearthly conceit, and ultimately its grief-stricken heart.

Maria (Noomi Rapace) and Ingvar (Hilmir Snaer Guonason) struggling under a stifling and unspoken grief are a married couple on a potato and sheep ranch in the isolated and austere Icelandic landscape. In the spring a strange and unnatural lamb’s birth upsets their repetitive life as the couple bonds and adopts the lamb as though it were their own child. Ingvar’s brother and failed musician Petur (Bjorn Hlynur Haraldsson) arrival at the ranch coinciding with Maria’s disposing of the lamb’s sheep birth mother further complicates their lives until in the film’s final scenes mysteries and tragedies are revealed.

Lamb’s pace in deliberate and steady making other slow-burn horror films, such as Robert Eggers The Witch, seem frenetic and hurried in comparison. Director Valdimar Johannsson and Cinematographer Eli Arenson build Lamb out of long take that linger on the characters, their silent reactions, unspoken pain, and the majestic, foreboding, mist-shrouded mysterious mountains thar encircle the ranch, isolating it from the world and its rationality. The landscape presenting Iceland in stark, unforgiving, and yet beautiful images rivals the grandeur John Ford’s work in Monument Valley.

Rapace, who also executively produced the film, plays Maria with an ever-present sense of loss and the choice to present the acclaimed with little make-up displaying her natural freckled face further reinforces the stark cold reality of the film as it embraces a folklore like fantasy at its heart.

Lamb is not a film for someone seeking high adrenaline bloody ‘kills,’ but rather for those inclined for a sedate but steadily a growing sense of dread.

Lamb is currently playing in select theaters.

My SF/Noir Vulcan’s Forge is available from Amazon and all booksellers. The novel is dark, cynical, and packed with movie references,

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Scary Season #4: Angel Heart

 

There aren’t very many films that blend horror with film noirbut 1987’s Angel Heart is one of them.

In Post-war New York Private Detective Harry Angel is commissioned by French Client Louis Cyphre to discover if pre-war Big Band Singer Johnny Favorite, who has debt to Cyphre, is alive or dead. Angel’s investigation leads him from New York to New Orleans and at seemingly every turn vital witnesses are brutally murdered implicating Angel. Johnny’s trail leads Angel into a web of Satanism, Black Magic, sensationalized and sexualized depictions of ‘Voodoo,’ and the truth behind Johnny’s mysterious disappearance.

Angel Heart fails to fully realize its premise and never succeeds at either its Noir nor its Horror aspirations. As a Noiris doesn’t provide enough twists and turns in the narrative with each link in Angel’s investigation leading to the next without much detecting or discovery required by Harry. Rather than key pieces coming together after his diligent work the solution to Johnny’s disappearance to given as an expository dump by the final witness. Speaking to its horror aspect the story again fails to lay out a foundation prior to the reveal that recontextualizes the murders and the truth that had been hidden. The very same expository dump that explains the mystery also serves to reveal the black magic at its heart and that is simply too much for one scene of exposition to lift.

The greatest failing of Angel Heart is that until the very final moment of the film it is all plot and not story. Harry is hired to find a missing singer. This is just another job for Harry without emotional and personal importance. The dangers become personal as the murder pile up and he becomes more and more implicated but that seemingly has little or nothing to do with Harry’s character. When a story involves a character enacting their profession it needs to transcend those requirements of the job and become personal to have emotional weight. A doctor working to save a patient’s life is a plot, a doctor who has become hopelessly in love with his patient and cannot live without them and now must save them is a story. To price of failure rises above the routine. Harry, until the final scenes, has no personal stakes in the investigation and thus has no personal story to tell.

With the film’s flaws there are reasons to watch Angel Heart. The cinematography is luscious capturing the grime and grit of New York city equally well with the heat and humidity of New Orleans. Director and screenwriter Alan Parker leans into symbolism and a fractured narrative that foreshadows Lynch’s own exploration in Noir horror with his Mulholland Dr. giving Angel Heart an almost dreamlike logic.

I watched Angel Heart on my own Blu-Ray Disc.

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Scary Season #3: The Raven (1935)

Poe has for a long time been a source for Hollywood to mine in search of new horror properties. 1935 the year the production code went into full effect Universal released The Raven very loosely adapted from Poe’s poem and starring the two biggest stars at the time in horror, Lugosi, and Karloff.

Lugosi plays Dr Vollin a brilliant but vain and arrogant surgeon. After saving the life of a daughter of a local judge Vollin becomes infatuated with the young woman and then mad when his ‘affections’ are not returned. In a plot contrivance of convenience Edmond Bateman, played by Karloff, an escaped convict under a death sentence attempts to force Vollin to perform plastic surgery so that he might escape the law. Vollin turns the tables on Bateman and intends to use him as part of his revenge on all who have denied him his true happiness.

The Raven (1935) is not very good but with a runtime of just one minute over an hour it doesn’t take up much if your life either. Karloff delivers a surprisingly nuanced performance that has echoes of his portrayal of the creature in 31’s Frankenstein. Lugosi, in the calmer more deliberate moments of his character is quite good however when the final act rolls around and he goes big his performance turns comical and appears even more so in contrast to Karloff’s in the same scenes where his understated delivery steals the moment. The movie may be unique for its second act interpretive dance of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven, but that itself is not enough to save this picture.

The Raven is currently stream in on The Criterion Channel as part of their Universal Monsters Collection.

 

My SF/Noir Vulcan’s Forge is available from Amazon and all booksellers. The novel is dark, cynical, and packed with movie references,

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Scary Season #2: Squid Game (2 episodes in)

 

The new Netflix sensation, from South Korea, is Squid Game a television series where desperate people play games from childhood with failure meaning their deaths and a promise of great financial reward.

There certainly are a lot of varied and interesting film and tv projects coming out of South Korea from the Academy Award winning film Parasite to perhaps the best zombie movie ever produced Train to Busan the creative cloud from that peninsula has been fruitful. Squid Game promises tension, suspense, and graphic violence with the right amount of social commentary blended into the story.

Two Episodes into the 9 we seem to have settled on to five principal characters:

Seong Gi-hun: A gambling addict and petty thief whose irresponsibility has cost him his daughter and threatens his mother’s health.

Cho Sang-woo: Primary schoolmate of Gi-hun. His family and the neighborhood believe that Sang-woo escape the poverty of their neighborhood by a college education and business success, but embezzlement and fraud has placed him deeply in debt.

Kang sae-byeok: A young woman who escape North Korea with her younger brother and is now desperate for fund to smuggle her parent into South Korea.

Abdul Ali: A Pakistani worker who has been exploited by an unscrupulous employer and has a wife and child to support.

Jang Deok-su: A mid-level gangster on the run from his criminal gang because of stolen funds to feed to gambling debts to foreign casinos.

Of these five characters I have the most sympathy for Sae-Byeok and Ali who seem to have the least responsibility for their dire plights. Gi-hun was the character we met first but his constant whining, refusal to take responsibility, and stealing from his mother’s bank account made the character wholly unlikeable.

That said Squid Game is a series centered on character and though the violence perpetrated is graphic and on-screen the central question is how far will these people go for cash and how much responsibility does the system bear for their plights? The production values are high with the series displaying talent in front and behind the camera. If graphic violence is not a dealbreaker for you then Squid Game on Netflix is worth a shot.

My SF/Noir Vulcan’s Forge is available from Amazon and all booksellers. The novel is dark, cynical, and packed with movie references,

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Movie Review: No Time to Die

 

Ever since the release of Dr. No in 1962 there has been a new entry in EON Productions James Bond film franchise every two and a third years culminating in this year’s No Time to Die, the fifth and final film to star Daniela Craig as the cinematic superspy.

From Dr. No thru The World is Not Enough there has been a very loose, nearly non-existent, continuity to the franchise. Two films that I recall make direct references back to a central and tragic moment in the series’ long run, both to Bonds marriage and loss of his wife on the same day, The Spy Who Loved Me and For Your Eyes Only. After the change from Moore to Dalton there was never again any attempt to maintain the fiction that this was the same person but rather his history was left unexplored and unspoken of.

With Craig’s Bond beginning in 2006, just 2 short years before the juggernaut of the MCU transformed filmed franchises, this run was treated differently. Everything that came before was abandoned and the character began fresh, even earning his 00 status on screen before our eyes. The five films of the Craig Era made a seriously, if sometimes flawed, attempt at maintaining internal consistency and continuity for this version of Bond and with No Time to Die they have ventured where no Bond film has gone, recognizing the actor’s departure, and giving his character an emotional close to this five-film arc.

No Time to Die opens with Bond and his new love Madeline, (From the previous entry Specter) enjoying their freedom on the shore of the Mediterranean. In the longest pre-title sequence of the franchise Specter attempts to assassinate Bond who survives but his trust in Madeline is shattered. Years pass and Specter in a daring raid steals the movie’s McGuffin. The retired Bond is recruited by his old Friend Felix Leiter to recover to stolen tech working against her majesty’s government. The mission brings Bond heartache and ghosts as he discovers the truth long hidden and faces the consequences of his life.

Despite four credited writers director Cary Joji Fukunaga and Producer Barbara Broccoli kept the film fairly tightly focused and even a running time of two hours and forty-three minutes there isn’t a lot of fat in the plot and the pace is quick without becoming confusing. Hans Zimmer as the scores composer makes fin use of previous Bond themes including from what is in all likelihood the least seen Bond on Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The films actors are all in fine form with Craig radiating on his face the weariness and hurt that Bond’s life has taken on him. He is a man close to breaking but not yet fully broken. He is fractured and knows that this mission may finally allow him redemption and absolution.

My ranking of the Craig Bond movies run in this order.

1) Casino Royale

2) Skyfall (A very close second)

3) No Time to Die

4) Quantum of Solace

5) Specter (Which I had forgotten nearly all of the film.)

 

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