The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

The Great War was supposed to end all wars. World War II was supposed to finish the job and put a stop to the Hun threat once and for all. Then the Cold War settled in, like a damp winter day, and it was Germany Germany Germany all over again.

This is the world of John le Carré, of George Smiley, of THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD. It’s always winter here. Disillusionment permeates everything. Spies don’t drive sports cars, win at baccarat, and jump speedboats over islands. In the words of Alec Leamas, the film’s protagonist, “They're just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me: little men, drunkards, queers, hen-pecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives.”

Richard Burton is Leamas, Section Chief of MI6’s Berlin bureau. He keeps losing men to Hans-Dieter Mundt, his opposite number in the Stasi. Perhaps it’s time for him to come in from the cold, to take a nice desk job in, say, the Banking Section back at Headquarters. Besides, George Smiley has an idea …

And so begins two hours of weary, bleary, tension. Of technicians who see the world not in shades of gray, but in varying levels of darkness. Of too much alcohol and too much time, of too much conscience or not conscience enough. Richard Burton, at the center of it all, is a world-weary force, a man who has been so long on the job that he can’t even tell if it’s a job any more. He’s magnificent, and the film is a marvel of care and maturity.

THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD works. It works on every level. I feel weary just thinking about it. I think that’s good.

Mortal Kombat

Recently, a friend asked whether all films I like make me suspend belief. I responded that I hesitate to say that all films I like do one thing or another, but that yes, that’s generally the case.

MORTAL KOMBAT is among the reasons why I hesitated. This film is so poorly acted, so lazily choreographed and shot, so lame in so many ways that it requires an act of conscious will to suspend one’s disbelief for its running time. I love it anyway.

Here’s why: there’s a bit during which Johnny Cage, who is essentially Jean Claude Van Damme, is fighting a villain who can make lizard heads on chains fly from his palms. The fight begins in a beautiful grove, then magically transports to a kickass set that appears to be made of old sailing ship parts, plaster skeletons, cobwebs, and red gel lights. Cage lays down the fu just fine, but then he finds a pullup bar conveniently placed near a platform. He goes on to do a full Tribute to Gymkata, flips onto a platform, then does a nifty jumpkick to the villain’s head. That’s just awesome. Later in the fight, the villain turns into a flaming skeleton, a la GHOST RIDER, which is also awesome. Then Cage finds a way to blow up the flaming skeleton and does a classic “leap away from the rear projection fireball.” Among the debris that comes fluttering down is, you guessed it, an autographed photo of Johnny Cage, inscribed to his “Biggest Fan.” I say that if your biggest fan is a recently exploded flaming skeleton, then your career is going GREAT!

So yeah, it’s lame. Christopher Lambert is a lousy Basil Exposition. Robin Shou spends too much time on his hair. Bridgette Wilson, Talisa Soto, and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa are terrible actors. The fu isn’t good enough to merit long takes. But Linden Ashby (as Cage) acquits himself well; the creature design, particularly for the multiarmed warrior Goro, is quite good; the sets and locations are fantastic and beautiful; and the soundtrack is thumpin’.

All things considered, MORTAL KOMBAT is way more fun than it has any right to be.

Hotel for Dogs

HOTEL FOR DOGS is an innocuous, pleasant family entertainment that will have special appeal for the dog lovers in your clan.

Here’s the setup: two kids stumble into a deserted hotel that they convert into a shelter for the neighborhood strays. While this sounds like a recipe for disaster, one of the kids is a brilliant inventor who comes up with a thousand ways to keep the canines entertained, fed, cleaned, and housebroken.

That’s pretty much it. There are jokes and silly villains and your standard three-act structure. There’s even The Great Don Cheadle, who is clearly there to make a movie he thinks his kids will enjoy.

It worked. My kids enjoyed it just fine. What more do you want?

Inglourious Basterds

Lots of people love INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS. They say that it’s one of Tarantino’s best films. They say it’s one of the best movies of the year.

It’s the first Tarantino film to really bother me.

The inconsistent tone, bouncing between excruciating suspense and neo-‘70s hip, kept me from settling into its groove. The performances, particularly Pitt’s painfully false Appalachian accent, Christoph Waltz’s affected silliness, and Eli Roth’s jarring presence, never felt organic. And most importantly, Tarantino’s imagining of a unit of Ike’s Army as being more despicable than Al Qaeda in Iraq, coupled with his invitation to root for this unit’s tactics as though being “on our side” made them excusable, felt like a betrayal of the American ideal. I got the feeling that Dick Cheney would have loved this movie.

The International Red Cross, the Geneva Conventions, the Law of Armed Conflict, they all exist for good reasons. They exist because of the all too human tendency to see outrages committed by “Team Us” as permissible and even commendable, particularly because “Team Them” has it coming. The reality, of course, is that combatants aren’t masterminds. Often, they’re just guys who got drafted, or who thought that signing up would be a good idea, or who were faced with the choice of putting on a uniform and maybe getting shot or refusing to wear one and definitely getting shot. INGLOURIOUS BASTERDSes ignorance of or contempt for these laws and traditions, its glorification of brutality, was just too much for me to stomach.

Now, there are some great things about this movie. Tarantino crafts an image with smoke and light that may be one of the great shots of movie history. There’s some wonderful misdirection and a refreshing willingness to defy some rules of storytelling economy.

But I just couldn’t get past the film’s ideology. It felt deeply, profoundly wrong. It felt un-American. It really bothered me.

Sense and Sensibility

SENSE AND SENSIBILITY is just plain great. Emma Thompson penned the adaptation and Ang Lee directed it, which is pretty much everything you need to know right there. But take a look at this cast: Thompson, Alan Rickman, and Kate Winslet, all of whom Can Do No Wrong, in the three primary roles; Tom Wilkinson, Hugh Grant, Imelda Staunton, and Hugh Laurie among the supporting players. Patrick Doyle pulled down an Oscar nomination for the music. Thompson won an Academy Award for her writing, and the picture garnered further nominations for Thompson’s and Winslet’s acting, plus nominations for Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, and Best Picture (it lost to THE ENGLISH PATIENT).

Ok, but you knew this was a good movie. I knew it was a good movie: I recall loving it upon its initial release. Seeing it again, however, I was struck by just how good Thompson is in it. Don’t get me wrong: Winslet and Rickman are literally great, but Thompson does so much with her part, conveys such a deep and rich personality beneath her character’s practiced decorum, that she makes herself a marvel to behold.

While watching the film, it occurred to me that Winslet is now old enough to play the Thompson role. Then it occurred to me that Winslet seems to be growing up to be Emma Thompson. A person could do much worse.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension

I remember seeing THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE 8TH DIMENSION when I was a kid. I remember liking it and have always had a special place for it even as I've grown fuzzy on the details of what it's actually about. By the time I fired this film up again last week, all I had to go on was a general feeling of goodwill, Jeff Goldblum in a cowboy shirt, and John Lithgow hamming it up. How would the film stand up to adult eyes?

Quite well, I'm happy to report. BUCKAROO BANZAI is that most difficult of creations: whimsy, pure and simple, that avoids being overcome by itself. The film lines up Peter Weller, Jeff Goldblum, Ellen Barkin, and Clancy Brown on one side and John Lithgow, Christopher Lloyd, Dan Hedaya, and Vincent Schiavelli on the other, tosses a Maguffin between them, and then gets silly. It layers sight gags over character gags over situational gags, keeps the villains just villainous enough to serve as foils for the heroes, and generally invites its audience to sit back, grin, tap its feet, and groove along.

I enjoyed the heck out of it, and I can't wait to see it again in another twenty-five years.