Tag: Jack White

Quantum Mechanics.

Like a resolution dieter in late January, the recently rebooted Bond franchise is starting to lapse back into old habits. Marc Forster’s Quantum of Solace, which I finally caught over the Thanksgiving weekend, is probably a better-than-average entrant in the Bond oeuvre, when considered against all the Brosnan and Dalton movies of years past. As a sequel to the promising reset that was Casino Royale, tho’, Quantum feels too rote by half. Daniel Craig is still probably the best Bond to come down the pike since Connery, but the action-heavy, drama-lite Quantum doesn’t really give him enough to do, other than scowl, grimace, and dodge egregious amounts of automatic weapons fire. Meanwhile, the story — credited to too-many-cooks Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis, and Robert Wade — is both more convoluted and less fun than it needs to be. With the brief exception of Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) treading water in the morally-compromised Dubya-era CIA, Quantum mostly foregoes cloak-and-dagger spy games for 100 minutes of considerably less satisfying Stuff Blowing Up. And, however workmanlike as a run-of-the-mill, mostly nonsensical actioner, Quantum suggests the rebooted franchise may sadly be running out of new ideas sooner rather than later. Take the Bourne out of this Bond, and our man at MI6 is left with very little to hang his hat on.

Things start out promisingly enough, with Bond, maybe half an hour out from when we last saw him, evading black hats at 120mph along scenic stretches of the Italian highway system. (As per the norm, we start in media res.) Then we get the usual hyperstylized credit sequence — bare sand, beautiful women, a strange Jack White/Alicia Keys number which may be a grower — and all seems right in the Bondverse. But, then 007 almost immediately gets involved in a parkour-flavored foot race during the Palio di Siena, one not unlike the several we saw in Casino Royale, and a vague sense of deja vu starts to set in. (This is when arthouse refugee Forster also shows off an overwrought habit, later in evidence at an Austrian production of Tosca, of intercutting his occasionally-inscrutable action sequence with whatever high art or culture is taking place nearby.)

Soon, Bond is given his marching orders — go to Haiti and unearth the dastardly machinations of the elusive secret society QUANTUM, as currently orchestrated by a lithe, mercurial French “environmentalist,” Dominic Greene (Mathieu Almaric of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.) Along the way, 007 — still seeking revenge for the death of Vesper Lynd — encounters Camille (Olga Kurylenko), a lovely Bolivian secret agent also hell-bent on doling out retribution, in her case for the grisly rape and murder of her family. Can Bond evade the goons of QUANTUM and discover their master plan? Will he find a way to avenge Vesper and put his tortured soul to rest? And will these two alluring agents relinquish their respective thirsts for vengeance long enough to partake in 007’s once-favorite extra-curricular activity? (Surprisingly enough, the answer to that last question is no: I guess that might interfere with all the moping.)

Now, obviously some allowances must be made when it comes to plotting in Bond films — In fact, it was probably worse back in the day, when you just had to take the existence of a volcano lair or moon base at face value. Still, even notwithstanding some of the decisions that lead to shoehorned-in action scenes (At one point, Bond and Camille get into a plane basically just so it can get shot down), Quantum of Solace is a bit of a mess. For one, the whole B-plot — Camille versus the Bolivian despot — frankly isn’t all that interesting, and ultimately verges on the exploitative. (Is there a lazier way of fashioning a villain than making him a rapist? It reminds me of Dave Edelstein’s discussion of the dead child epidemic come Oscar time.) For another, characters show up or are created merely to add emotional beats to the story. (See: Mathis from Casino Royale (Giancarlo Gianinni), or poor Agent Fields (Gemma Arterton), who seems to exist only as a forced nod to Goldfinger and an extended comment on the danger of getting to “know” 007 — But, hey, at least Bond slept with somebody.) For yet another, the Big Bad’s ultimate objective comes across as seriously anti-climactic, and owes more to John Huston in Chinatown than the likes of Blofeld and Dr. Evil.

But the main problem with Quantum in the end is that, while a lot of 007’s old fun-loving side is AWOL here, the film itself has still reverted to the bad Bond habit of relying entirely too much on wildly improbable action sequences rather than espionage intrigue or character-driven drama. I can only watch Britain’s finest miraculously avoid so many sheets of semi-automatic gunfire before I begin to check out, and Quantum crosses that dubious threshold well before its midway point. Now, we’re not back in the land of exploding pens and invisible cars yet, thank goodness — the only snazzy technology in evidence here is the iBigBrother set-up used by MI6 to stay in touch with their operatives in the field. Still, I’m beginning to fear that the powers-that-be behind the new Bond are starting to fall back on the wrong traditions in their oeuvre. And Craig’s 007 deserves a better posting than another slew of sorry Brosnan-like sequels.

A Hard Walk’s Run.

Charles, Cash, Curtis, Dylan, Strummer…Given the glut of rock biopics and documentaries we’ve seen in recent years, it’s well past time that influential musical chameleon Dewey Cox got his due. Unfortunately, just as James Mangold’s Walk the Line felt too staid and conventional to capture the true appeal of the Man in Black, Jake Kasdan’s Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story — which I saw in the days before Christmas — never really gets inside the head of the Giant Midget. Sure, it covers most of the important facts about his life — the childhood tragedy, the struggle with smell-blindness, the breakout single, the dark f**king middle period, the LSD decade, the selling out. But, while John C. Reilly does what he can as Cox (and the resemblance is admittedly uncanny), I never felt while watching Walk Hard that Kasdan actually “got” the man or his music…or his monkey or giraffe, for that matter. Given his famous father and his earlier affiliation with Freaks & Geeks, Kasdan seemed like he would be the guy to do Cox justice, but this is sadly a missed opportunity. It’s just too bad Todd Haynes was busy with I’m Not There…Once again, nearly fifty years after the fact, Zimmerman will be walking-hard away with all Dewey’s laurels.

Kasdan’s take on Dewey’s story begins just before Cox’s final performance at the Lifetime Achievement Awards — You may remember Eddie Vedder’s memorable tribute speech, and the Jewel/Lyle Lovett/Jackson Browne/Ghostface Killa mash-up of “Walk Hard” got a lot of radio run over that summer — before flashing back to that defining moment in the White Indian’s life as a boy, the famous accidental cleaving-in-two of his prodigy brother. (“I’m cut in half pretty bad, Dewey.“) Rallying to his brother’s fallen musical standard, the teenage Dewey soon finds himself thrown out of the house, married young (to Edith, as played by SNL’s Kristen Wiig), and working as a busboy at a local black club, where he one day wows the crowd with a version of his early hit, “(Mama) You Got to Love Your Negro Man.” Soon thereafter, he lands a band and a record contract, and after the cutting of “Walk Hard,” the rest is history: Cox buys a monkey, lapses into a vicious drug habit, falls for his voluptuous backup singer Darlene Madison (Jenna Fischer), gets clean, lapses into another vicious drug habit…well, you know the rest.

Ok, ok, let’s go ahead and break the fourth wall. As a played-straight parody of the rock biopic genre, Walk Hard is admittedly uneven most of the time. But, it makes for a relatively amusing two hours if you’re in the mood for it. It’s nowhere near as funny as the original Airplane or Top Secret, but I’d say it holds its own with the Hot Shots flicks, and it’s miles above Scary Movie and its ilk. Yes, the film can be unfocused and scattershot (There’s even a decently funny recurring gag involving the kitchen sink.) A lot of the jokes seem like leftovers from the last Will Ferrell script, and, like Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Team America, Walk Hard occasionally follows the beats of its object of parody so closely that the movie loses its edge. Still, there are definitely some quality moments therein, from Tim Meadows trying not to seduce a naive Dewey into a marijuana habit to Cox meeting Buddy Holly (Frankie Muniz, inspired casting) and the Fab Four (Surprisingly, Justin “Mac Guy” Long is far and away the funniest as George, while Jack Black’s Paul is woefully bad and Paul Rudd’s John is just…strange.)

At any rate, I’m not going to give all the jokes away here, suffice to say that Cox’s black-and-white Dylan period tickled my funny bone the most. Dewey does two Dylanesque ditties here: The first, “Royal Jelly”, is a gloriously inscrutable poetic epic a la “Desolation Row” (“Mailboxes drip like lampposts from the twisted birth canal of the coliseum, rimjob fairy teapots mask the temper tantrum, O say can you see ’em?“) [See it live.] The other, “Let Me Hold You (Little Man)“, is an un-PC The Times They Are A Changin’ screed directed at the injustice faced by all the, uh, little people. (“Let me hold you, midget man, pretend that you’re flying in space. Let me hold you, little man, so the dog will stop licking your face.“) High art it’s not, and I can’t recommend rushing out and seeing it or anything. But, for a few solid chuckles over the course of two hours, Dewey Cox and Walk Hard deliver the goods decently enough. Someday — perhaps soon, given that Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Pineapple Express, and Drillbit Taylor are all due next year — the helium will probably leak out of the Judd Apatow comedy factory’s balloon. But Cox, thankfully enough, isn’t the canary in the coalmine just yet.

Bob, Woody, Dewey.

Speaking of I’m Not There, the Todd Hayne’s new Dylan biopic has a teaser out, where you can catch brief glimpses of all the varied permutations of Bob. (Blanchett, Bale, Ledger, Gere, Whishaw, et al.) And, also in the trailer bin, Woody Allen ventures back into Match Point territory with Ewan MacGregor, Colin Farrell, Tom Wilkinson, and newcomer Hayley Atwell in the new (French-subtitled) preview for Cassandra’s Dream. And John C. Reilly brings to life one of Dylan’s formative influences in the parody-heavy trailer for Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, brought to you by the Freaks & Geeks team of Jake Kasdan and Judd Apatow and also starring Jenna Fischer, Kristen Wiig, and Tim Meadows (as well as Jack White as Elvis and Paul Rudd, Jack Black, Mac Guy, and Jason Schwartzman as John, Paul, George, and Ringo.)

A Frigid, Starry Peak.


Well, I haven’t read the Charles Frazier novel, but I’d say “Cold Mountain” is an apt and colorful metaphor to sum up this film, its stars, and even its director’s entire body of work. For like Nicole Kidman and Jude Law, and as with The English Patient and The Talented Mr. Ripley, Cold Mountain is beautiful but distant, occasionally breathtaking but often chilly, and not so much high as just plain stilted. In fact, the hike up and down this Cold Mountain includes definite moments of grandeur, but more often than not it feels like a bit of a slog. At times, it’s even glacial.

I should say up front that this is a far better Confederate-centered Civil War film than the vile Gods and Generals. The chaos and carnage of the Battle of the Crater that opens the film seems much more real and visceral than anything in the godawful G&G. Whatsmore, the historical aspects of Mountain generally feel right (In fact, much of the film seems like a fictionalization of Drew Gilpin Faust’s Mothers of Invention, which vividly describes how the lives of Southern women were transformed by the war experience and the collapse of the Confederate patriarchy.)

Unfortunately, the respectable versimilitude of the film keeps getting undermined by the wattage of its star power. From Stalingrad to Petersburg, nobody in the business does starving-but-handsome-and-resolute-warrior as well as Jude Law these days, and he’s quite good here despite the frequent accent-slippage. But, frankly, Nicole Kidman feels all wrong here. It’s not that she’s bad per se, it’s just that, like her ex-husband in 19th-century Japan three weeks ago, she never seems like she fits this milieu at all. (It doesn’t help that she spends most of the end of the film in an outdoor outfit that looks Banana Republic-coordinated.) Finally, others have noted the lack of chemistry between Law and Kidman, and I too thought the central romance here was rather uninvolving.

But, even if the two leads’ remarkable frigidity wasn’t distracting enough, Law and Kidman are just the tip of the iceberg. In fact, in the spirit of the film, I’ll go ahead and torture this metaphor even further…Perhap sensing that the romantic low burn here might be too dim a fire to heat the screen for 150 minutes, Anthony Minghella has packed Cold Mountain so full of stars and cameos that it starts to feel like It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. From Lucas Black getting bayonetted in the opening minutes to Jack White procuring cider at the very end (in yet another of Minghella’s quintessentially ham-handed symbolic moments, but I’ll get to that later), famous faces keep appearing around every corner of the poor, white backcountry South, and it took me out of the movie almost every time. Basically, I found it hard to become engrossed in the film when I kept thinking things like “So, that’s what Kathy Baker‘s been up to…she got married to the manager from Major League,” “James Rebhorn‘s his doctor? He’s toast,” “Well, Jena Malone didn’t last very long,” “and “Hey, that’s Cillian Murphy. Between him and Brendan Gleeson, this is like a sequel to 28 Days Later…um, except it has no zombies and it’s set in the Civil War South.”

Ok, perhaps that’s an unfair criticism, but I’d think even people who don’t go to the movies much are going to be distracted by all the Hollywood faces flitting about. I should say while I’m on the subject that Brendan Gleeson is very good (as always) here – Not only does he handle the accent like a champ, but he conveys more emotion in one winsome smile or knowing grimace than many of the central characters do the entire film. As for other good performances…Despite lugging around a baby that’s as big as she is, Natalie Portman proves here that she can still act when not forced in front of a bluescreen. (By the way, after the Portman episode, why didn’t Inman take one of the Union horses?) Giovanni Ribisi moves into the frontrunning for the Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel biopic. And, Renee Zellweger…well, she moons and mugs through this film like a Best Supporting Actress award was her birthright, but she still gives Cold Mountain a very-much-needed jolt in the arm every time she shows up. (She’s particularly energetic when compared to the staid Kidman.)

On the flip side of the coin, somebody should’ve told Donald Sutherland that different parts of the South call for different accents…he sounds miles away from a Charlestonian. And Phillip Seymour Hoffman, perhaps the best thing about Minghella’s Ripley, is perhaps the worst thing about Cold Mountain. Completely unconvincing in his role here, he’s a walking, talking anachronism.

All the unnecessary star voltage aside, of course, this movie eventually rises and falls on its director, and all of Anthony Minghella’s strengths and weaknesses are present here. (I should say that I loathed The English Patient and enjoyed Ripley until Jude Law was killed, after which the film meandered to its conclusion.) Both Patient and Ripley have some very beautiful and striking moments, but more often than not the imagery is so “artfully” composed as to become hamhanded. The same goes here for Mountain…we’ve got a lamb running around in wolf’s clothing, we’ve got a dove trapped in a church until Jude Law sets it free (you do the math)…in fact, we have enough fluttering, portentous birds on a wing here to make John Woo blush. Perhaps these capital-S Symbols are in Frazier’s novel too, but I’d still think a subtler director could have mined them more dexterously. And, while I didn’t know the ending coming in, Minghella foreshadows the conclusion so laboriously (even having Kidman break it down step-by-step to Zellweger) that I spent the last twenty-five minutes just waiting for the other shoe to drop, which killed any real emotion I might’ve felt about the denouement.

Looking back, I’ve been pretty harsh here, so I should repeat that Cold Mountain is not a bad film at all. In many ways, it’s quite good. But, Oscar buzz notwithstanding, it’s definitely not great…in fact, I even found it less involving than The Last Samurai. In the future, were I looking to recommend a film that captures the despair and devastation afflicting the Confederate homefront in the waning days of the war, I just might pick Cold Mountain. But, as for attempts to give The Odyssey a Faulknerian palmetto-and-spanish-moss recasting, give me O Brother Where Art Thou? any day of the week.