Tag: Ian McKellen

It Happened One Night.

What do stars do? Well, apparently, they mince around in petticoats. Although, like Knocked Up, Matthew Vaughn’s well-meaning but uneven Stardust is probably best enjoyed as a date movie, preferably with a large crowd of similar Princess Bride-leaning folk, I went ahead and caught an empty matinee of said fantasy yesterday afternoon, as it’s the last mainstream summer outing (with the possible exception of Ratatouille) I had any interest in seeing before the fall film deluge.

And, well, I wanted to like it, being a fan of both the genre and of Vaughn’s first feature, the sharp Brit gangster flick Layer Cake, and Stardust has its moments, scattered here and there — In fact, I think it eventually even comes off better than the sum of its parts. But, for most of its run, I thought the film overshot its intended target of whimsy and landed on the far side of twee. The movie’s two leads — Charlie Cox and Claire Danes — are affectionately engaging, and Michelle Pfeiffer chews up the scenery with aplomb as this fairy tale’s most wicked witch. But, to be honest, there’re just too many notes, and the film barely hangs together as a whole. If anything, Stardust reminded me of Terry Gilliam’s (superior) The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, an ambitious and episodic attempt at high fantasy that doesn’t quite work. But, then again…as the Dylan song goes, true love tends to forget.

Much of the action of Stardust takes place, Ian McKellen’s authoritative voiceover informs us early on, in the enchanted realm of Stormhold, which happens to be connected to our mundane world via a hole in the wall near the sleepy English village of…uh, Wall. In said village, eighteen years after his father indulged in a happy dalliance over on the Other Side, a shopboy named Tristan (Cox) decides he will woo the town beauty (Sienna Miller) by tracking down a fallen star for her in what he first presumes is a nearby field. (Would he feel the same if he knew about her Steve Buscemi daddy issues?)

The problem is, this star isn’t the hunk of smoldering space rock one might expect, but a delicately shimmering and seriously annoyed girl named Yvanne (Danes), who’s just been randomly pelted out of the sky by a large, translucent ruby. This magical gemstone, recently sent aloft by the spirit of King Peter O’Toole (still looking like Berkeley), holds the key to the kingdom, so to speak, and thus all of the monarch’s living (and dead) heirs are mercilessly tracking it down. But Stardust is much too complicated for only one MacGuffin — Three wicked witches (most notably Pfeiffer) also seek out this fallen star, in order to cut out her glowing heart and restore their vanished youth. So, by the time our hero arrives on the scene via a teleporting “Babylon Candle” (as with a lot of fantasy, there’s a lot of setting up of the ground rules here), he discovers he’s now in a much bigger pickle than he bargained for…and, eventually, that love has a funny way of sneaking up on you when you least expect it.

As I said, Stardust‘s problems are myriad. For one, a lot of what should come across as sly, understated British humour a la Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, or (naturally) the author here, Neil Gaiman, is instead telegraphed and overdirected to feel like a poke in the eye. (See, for example, the poisoning of the archbishop scene.) For another, the film aims to be wryly dark at times — there’s quite a bit of fun with reading entrails — but we’re still in Belle & Sebastian, Lisa Frank lunchbox territory a lot of the time. (I’m looking at you, unicorn.) For yet another, Stardust is burdened with one of the most bombastic and intrusive scores in recent memory. (Ilan Eshkeri did great work with Layer Cake, but this is just bad.)

And then there’s De Niro, preening in a supporting role as the cross-dressing buccaneer Capt. Shakespeare. I know De Niro is lauded as one of the greatest actors of his generation, and I’ve got Raging Bull sitting on my coffee table at the moment to prove it. But, lordy, is he terrible here. Making Elton John seem as in the closet as Larry Craig, De Niro’s wildly over-the-top performance is a flat-out cringeworthy embarrassment. It plays like he’s never met a gay person in his life, or as if some abrasive guy at a party was doing an impression of De Niro doing an impression of Liberace. (Along those lines, The Office‘s Ricky Gervais, in an extended cameo, seems like he’s playing his character in Extras here — he even gets in Andy’s unfortunate catchphrase. Waking Ned‘s David Kelly and the Lock Stock boys are hanging around too, but the funniest cameo is probably Mark Williams, a.k.a. Arthur Weasley, as an ornery old goat of an innkeeper.)

All that being said, I thought the movie did manage, somehow and despite itself, to stick the landing: However caustic and subversive Stardust pretends to be at first, it’s ultimately turns out a rather staid and traditional fairy tale about the enchantment of true love. And, with that in mind, I found myself willing to forgive the film most of its substantive flaws — and there are many — by the time the inevitable coronation coda rolled. However cynical I get as the years go by, it seems, like Fox Mulder, I want to believe.

Compass Golden?

Even more Comic-Con riches: A new, extended, walk-you-through-the-plot trailer for The Golden Compass is now online, and it looks…well, to be honest, it looks pretty darn good! Big ups to the art direction and casting people — Iorek (the polar bear), the daemons (particularly Miss Coulter’s twisted golden monkey), and the main players (Lyra, Lord Asriel, Mrs. Coulter, Lee Scoresby) all look note-perfect.

Lyra, daemons, and bears, oh my!

Another big fantasy trailer comes in the wake of Harry: New Line plays the LotR card to help sell audiences on the new teaser for Chris Weitz’s take on Phillip Pullman’s The Golden Compass. Well, the actors and the polar bears look pretty good…I’d like to see more of the daemons.

Venom and Stardust.

Venom (Topher Grace) comes to the fore in the final, very spoilerish, and Comcastic trailer for Sam Raimi’s Spiderman 3 — really, it seems like more of an executive summary than a preview. And, also up this weekend is the trailer for Matthew Vaughn’s version of Neil Gaiman’s Stardust, featuring, among others, Charlie Cox, Sienna Miller, Claire Danes, Michelle Pfeiffer, Robert De Niro, Ricky Gervais, Jason Flemyng, Rupert Everett, Ian McKellen, and Peter O’Toole. Not a bad cast, that, and with Layer Cake‘s Vaughn at the helm, I’ll go see it, even if this trailer is a mite underwhelming.

Mona Lisa Frown.


So, I was one of the minority of people out there who had not already read Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code when I ventured into the theater last week for a look-see at the film version (although various people had filled me in on most of the major plot points over the years.) This was partly because I had been told a few times that the novel read like a piece of cinema anyway, so I figured that, contrary to my usual m.o., I’d just wait for the movie. Well, unfortunately, Ron Howard’s film plays at best like a book-on-tape, one that might’ve made for a good airplane listen if the people involved hadn’t taken this enterprise so seriously. As it is, unless you relish usually likable actors spouting forth clunky, Akiva Goldman-penned chunks of exposition at you for two and half hours, leave this Code undeciphered.

Like I said, I’m really late to this party, so you probably don’t need me to summarize the basic gist here. In any case, world-renowned symbologist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks), a Harvard professor prone to monologuing and/or gasping in awe when confronted with ancient relics (thank goodness, or otherwise he’d have nothing to do here) is thrust into a murder mystery after a colleague is found dead at the Louvre, his body bloodied by his own hand and laid out like Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. (As we saw in one of the movie’s creepier scenes (also in the trailer), this fellow was killed — under the watchful eyes of countless mournful Madonnas — by the albino monk Silas, an operative of Opus Dei with some serious body issues.) Soon, with the aid of the dead man’s painterly granddaughter, Sophie (Audrey Tautou), Langdon embarks on a quest to uncover the meaning behind the man’s murder, and, while puzzling and ciphering away, inadvertently stumbles onto a two-thousand-year-old conspiracy involving the divinity of Jesus and the Holy Grail, one that certain conspiring cardinals (Alfred Molina) and their pet monks will kill to keep under wraps…

That’s the upshot, and, as you can see, this has all the makings for a decent potboiler. And, at times, watching Hanks and Tautou puzzle away or seeing the film flashback to the Cecil B. DeMille days, one gets the sense that the Da Vinci Code is probably a thoroughly enjoyable beach book. But, as a film — or at least as this ponderous, too weighty-by-half film — it’s a total non-starter. Howard, Hanks, and Tautou can’t seem to stop treating this movie as an epic, when what it really needed was a slapdash of Raiders of the Lost Ark tongue-in-cheek. (In fact, I thought Nicolas Cage’s campy Da Vinci knock-off National Treasure came closer to the unapologetic B-movie tone needed here.) On the bright side, Ian McKellen (as a wry Grail historian, gleefully chewing his way through yet another bad summer movie), Molina (himself an Ark alumnus), and — briefly — Jurgen Prochnow (as a shifty Swiss banker) seem to have a better sense of the proceedings here, and they add some much-needed levity and narrative kick whenever they’re onscreen. Still, their best efforts aren’t enough to recommend Da Vinci, a film that needed less clumsy exposition and a jauntier sense of fun throughout. As it is, The Da Vinci Code is a rather staid canvas.

Eccch, Man.

Mutie alert: Despite a few all-too-brief glimpses of a better (or at least more enjoyable) movie scattered therein, Brett Ratner’s X3: The Last Stand is, as the fanboy nation suspected, a truly terrible film. In fact, with the possible exception of Ian McKellen hamming his way through Magneto, it’s hard to think of anyone who brought above their C-game to this woeful project — the directing is workmanlike, the effects look cheap, the shots have that Canadian backlot look to them, the score is hamhanded and distracting, the actors seem bored, and, worst of all, the script is flat-out embarrassing. What’s more, if you harbor any affection for the comic (and particularly the Dark Phoenix arc ostensibly in play here, although it’s been cross-wired with Joss Whedon’s early run), you’ll probably just leave irritated. In short, X3 is just the type of lowest-common-denominator, dumbed-down rush job that gives both summer movies and comic movies a bad name: Think Fantastic Four.

Compounding the aggravation, X3 seems like it might turn out reasonably decent for the first ten minutes or so. The film begins with two flashbacks: The more interesting one, although it steals much of its subtext from Raimi’s Spiderman, involves a teenage Angel trying to clip his wings (the other features not-quite-ready-for-primetime de-aging CGI.) But then we’re thrust into a really clunky Danger Room sequence, involving Sentinels that have all the terrible grandeur of an industrial-strength flashlight and a Corman-esque Colossus that screams straight-to-video. (Apparently, the Danger Room was built in Professor Xavier’s Bargain Basement.) And, from there, it’s just down, down down. As it turns out, Worthington industries (run by Michael Murphy of Tanner), with the acquiescence of the President (a man who’s prone to looking into the camera and exclaiming “God…help…us.” whenever needed) has, as per Whedon, created a “cure” for mutants, prompting outrage (Storm, Halle Berry), confusion (Beast, Kelsey Grammer), relief (Rogue, Anna Paquin), and righteous megalomania (Magneto, McKellen) among the varied facets of mutantkind. Meanwhile, as tensions mount and the timely metaphors fly thick, a bedraggled Cyclops (James Marsden) ventures out to Alkali Lake — site of the climax of X2 — where he, surprisingly, encounters Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) alive and well. Ok, maybe not well…

As you can see, X3 is playing with at least two quality story arcs out of the X-Men canon here, so you’d think it’d just have to ride them through. But, alas, screenwriters Simon Kinberg and Zak Penn — who, make no bones about it, deserve the lion’s share of blame for this drek — go crazier than Chris Claremont in his post-Mutant Massacre burnout phase. (Speaking of mutant massacres, no less than [Major Movie-Ruining Spoiler] SIX major characters — Cyclops, Xavier, Mystique, Magneto, Jean Grey, Rogue — are eliminated by the end of this flick, which, even given the lax standards one must accord this universe, seems both ridiculously brutal and exceedingly lazy writing.) Virtually everybody here — and particularly Xavier and Magneto — has at least one speech, quip, or action that seems totally out-of-character. (For her part, Halle Berry plays Storm as if she were Halle Berry.) Neither the good guys nor bad guys’ plans make one lick of sense. And, even despite all the X-Men on hand here, the film is overflowing with undifferentiated throwaway characters who all look and act like tattoo-riddled redshirts.

By the way, did I mention this film looks cheap? Oh, hell yes. Beast looks like a cross between a Metallica roadie and an alien on a Sci-Fi channel miniseries. Dark Phoenix — who, by the way, not once exhibits a phoenix flame — instead occasionally unleashes the terrifying cosmic force of scrubbly bubbles (a la the distintegrating vampires in Blade.) And the wire-fu…oof, it’s just plain sad. So, is there anything good here? Well, very briefly, Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page), Juggernaut (Vinnie Jones), Madrox (Eric Dane), Moira (Olivia Williams)…that’s about it, and it all totals about ten minutes of screen time. In short, after the surprisingly delectable heights of Bryan Singer’s X2 (Nightcrawler in the White House, Magneto’s escape), this film is at best a tremendous disappointment, and at worst an insult to the fan base. If this and FF is how Avi Arad and Marvel have decided to treat their best (non-Spiderman) properties from now herein, make mine DC.

R&R, X&X&X.

Today’s trailers: Crockett & Tubbs reunite as Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx respectively in the full trailer for Michael Mann’s film version of Miami Vice (This isn’t much of an improvement on the teaser, frankly.) And, Dell offers seven minutes of clips from X3: The Last Stand, of which all but 90 seconds or so (thanks to Ian McKellen, who’s clearly at home scenery-chewing his way through this badly-written drek) looks and sounds cringeworthy. From this, it seems the real problem with X3 may be less Ratner than the so-far really clunky script by Simon Kinberg & Zak Penn.

Code Red.

As Dan Brown’s copyright case closes in London, the full trailer for The Da Vinci Code premieres online (and as if the McKellen voiceover last time wasn’t a deliberate enough ploy to crib some epic gravitas from LotR, now we’ve got the Two Towers Requiem mix to boot.)

Two for III.

In today’s movie bin, the full trailer for Brett Ratner’s X3: The Last Stand shows up online. Hmm, I’m still not feeling it. To quote an AICN talkbacker, “Too much wire fu makes Homer go something something“…although I did kinda dig the scene with Juggernaut chasing Kitty Pryde. (Insert your own I’m the Juggernaut, b***ch joke if you’d like.) Also out today is the new Japanese M:I:III trailer, now with considerably less Philip Seymour Hoffman.