Life's a movie, life's a dream, I love you baby, things are always what they seem
300 (Zack Snyder, 2007). I was an admirer and defender of Robert Rodriguez's highly stylized adaptation of Frank Miller's graphic novel Sin City. But, by taking the same approach with Miller's 300, a fictionalized account of the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C., former Green Bay resident Zack Snyder (Go Pack!) has made a film that comes across as garish and silly. Sin City worked as a film because Miller's original concept was a highly exaggerated version of a classic, distinctive film style, taking the stark shadows and hammer-blow dialogue of film noir to its illogical extremes. Transplanting that drawn-and-inked imagery to the movie screen was simply bringing the concept full circle. While there's plenty of precedent for sword-and-sandal epics in Hollywood history, they didn't look like they were airbrushed in bronze or stiff with the burden of heavy importance. More than Sin City ever did, 300 looks like nothing more than a fanboy dream of seeing a favorite comic story manipulated into motion. Beyond that, it has very little reason for being.
A Scanner Darkly (Richard Linklater, 2006). Have no fear: Robert Downey Jr's trademark style of fidgety overacting can survive the process of being rotoscoped into animation. He's as distracting as ever in writer-director Richard Linklater's adaptation of the Philip K. Dick novel A Scanner Darkly. It maybe unfair to lead with that bit of snark since Downey is hardly the biggest problem with this well-intentioned but sadly inert drama of paranoid science fiction. For one, it hardly seemed necessary for Linklater to return to the animation technique he employed in his excellent 2001 film Waking Life. In that film it helped him to create imagery with the fluidity of a dreamscape, merging his philosophical meanderings with visuals that were as casually exploratory. Here, beyond realizing a couple of concepts in a way that would have difficult to believably pull off with the most advanced CGI, there seems little reason to have taken the steps beyond using the filmed footage of the actors. The story itself is grim, probably more faithful to Dick's original vision than is usually the case and a bit of a bore.
Becket (Peter Glenville, 1964). This adaptation of the Jean Anouilh play about the crumbling relationship between King Henry II of England and Thomas Becket was a powerhouse contender on the awards circuit upon its release, which largely meant that it gave lead actors Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole each one of their many chances to applaud for someone else at the Oscar ceremony (in this case, they both lost in the Best Actor category to My Fair Lady's Rex Harrison). The film is literate and heady, taking full advantage of the imposing castles and landscapes that serve as the setting. The earliest scenes are the most effective, generating a bubbling frisson in their loose energy. As the king, O'Toole strides triumphantly through scenes with gleeful, spirited combustibility and Burton plays Becket with an amused ease. As the movie gets more serious it gets less fun and more plodding, suffering most from lengthy stretches where Burton and O'Toole no longer have the luxury of playing off of each other. It may be great fun to see John Gielgud play French king Louis VII with a petulant wit, but no apparent effort was made to mold his precise British diction into a French accent. It drains some of the impact out of those scenes, giving them the air of play-acting instead of grave authenticity, a point I note even though I realize it's sacrilege to criticize the late, great Sir John.
The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973). Man alive, was Robert Altman productive. Between the twin triumphs of M*A*S*H in 1970 and Nashville in 1975, Altman was in the director's chair for six different films. That's one more than Altman disciple P.T. Anderson has made in the eleven years of his feature-film career. The Long Goodbye is from the middle of that era. It's an adaptation of a Raymond Chandler novel starring Elliott Gould as private detective Philip Marlowe. As opposed to the more iconic depiction of Marlowe, Gould's version is not a hard-boiled gumshoe, but is a mellow ambler, murmuring to himself and facing down opposition with a lackadaisical "fine by by." It's film noir transplanted to early 1970's southern California with all the sunshine seediness that entails. Significant chunks of the film are distinctively, beautifully Altman. it's hard to conceive of another filmmaker opening a film with a ten-second sequence that primarily revolves around the lead character's efforts to provide a 3:00 a.m. feeding for his hungry cat, and it's beyond imagining that anyone besides Altman could actually make it oddly compelling. The ever-distractable Altman loses his way somewhat in the middle portion as a Hemingway-esque author played with vigor by Sterling Hayden begins to overwhelm the proceedings. Overall, though, it's a fine product of most maverick filmmaker of the maverick filmmaker era. On the casting side, my significant surprise over the presence of Jim Bouton in small but key role was dwarfed by the jarring realization that Arnold Schwarzanegger has appeared in an Altman film.
Body Heat (Lawrence Kasdan, 1981). This is what film noir looks like in the early 1980's, right at the point when 70's grit was giving way to 80's high-gloss. Teetering on the precipice of the two styles was Kasdan's directorial debut (a debut undoubtedly engineered in part due to the fact that he was the screenwriter of choice for George Lucas when the Star Wars films had titles instead of episode numbers, Indiana Jones was cracking his whip for the first time and a certain anthropomorphic waterfowl hadn't yet taken a wrecking ball to the non-Wars clout of the Ewok-faced impresario). Kasdan's film is a classic concoction of femme fatales, impressionable men and big, alluring piles of money. His dialogue is lush and beautifully constructed and he demonstrates a way with actors that would serve him well in the following years. William Hurt is marvelous as the shaky lawyer at the forefront of the story. He seems to have taken his cue from the famous line "You're not too smart. I like that in a man," an important choice from the actor whose career would eventually falter in part because he would never meet a role he couldn't out-think. The true MVP is Kathleen Turner (in her film debut), an actress with the dark-voiced presence of Lauren Bacall and the acting chops of Barbara Stanwyck. She was made for this sort of role and she commands the screen with a smoldering authority.
