Valkyrie

VALKYRIE is the saddest film I’ve seen in ages.

Had the conspirators depicted in VALKYRIE succeeded, Germany could have thrown off the shackles of Nazi oppression and redeemed itself. It could have saved countless lives in the camps and on the battlefields. It could have prevented millions from living and dying under the boot of the Communists.

But, of course, the conspirators failed. Modern Germans still wrestle with the legacy of Nazism. Memorial walls carry the names of the countless victims of Nazis and Communists alike. Eastern Europe still struggles to catch up with the West.

Amazingly, VALKYRIE infuses this elegy with sympathy and tension, keeping us engaged and hoping, though we know how things end. It does so through the canny use of all-star casting, leveraging the recognizability of players such as Carice Van Houton, Bill Nighy, Kenneth Branagh, and Tom Wilkinson to build instant rapport with and sympathy for a cast so large it might be easy to lose track of who’s who. It does so through the efforts of Tom Cruise, a man who has been criticized for his offscreen behavior but who remains among the most gifted and charismatic stars of his generation. It does so by leveraging our knowledge of the broad outlines of history against our ignorance of the details: we all know things went wrong, but wmost of us don't know how.

This film largely succeeds in portraying its time, its place, its people, though it missteps in failing to recreate the paranoia that the all-seeing Gestapo engendered at the time. Its period details feel right, as does its grasp of German culture. While VALKYRIE, with its serious subject matter and foregone conclusion, may not appeal to everyone, it meets it goals.

If only its subjects had met theirs.

The Haunted Mansion

So I'm working on my sci fi spec script, the one I can't get anybody interested in, and I think I've figured out why. My script, a searing greed allegory about a transvestite interstellar conqueror who preys upon civilizations that don't have flags, is missing the critical element that says "Green Light!" If only I can figure out how to turn my transvestite interstellar conqueror into a transvestite workaholic dad who needs to learn to spend more time with his family, I'm sure I'll have a winner.

How do I know this will work? Why, it's the only reason I can imagine why horrible, horrible scripts such as the one for THE HAUNTED MANSION get made. See, the workaholic dad is the screenwriter's target audience. In the brutally Darwinian world of film production, there's only one way to get oneself into the position to greenlight a movie: one must be a workaholic. Since we're talking about an industry dominated by men, it follows that many of these workaholics are, in fact, workaholic dads. So when one of these workaholic dads reads THE HAUNTED MANSION or JACK FROST or any of a hundred films of their ilk, he thinks, "Hey, there's something about this script that's real. It speaks to me."

In THE HAUNTED MANSION, Eddie Murphy plays a workaholic dad who happens to be a realtor. Since he knows that realty is a boom or bust business, he's making money while there's money to be made. Meanwhile, the guy's getting zero support at home. His wife's all, "I don't want a nice home in a nice neighborhood. Take some time off and let's go live in a van down by the river." His kids are all, "We don't like having our own rooms and health care. Let's go live in a van down by the river." So, fine. He packs the family into the 700-series BMW so he can drive them to the cabin by the lake that he earned through all his hard work, but he's gotta make a detour, do a little business, because you never know when it's gonna be 2008 and you're gonna be Lehman Brothers.

The work involves meeting a potential client in a huge, creepy Louisiana mansion. Even though the mansion has, supposedly, been in the client's family for centuries, everyone there has an English (vice Cajun, or even upper class Cajun) accent. Creepy. And there's this whole backstory about forbidden love between the poncy master of the house and his Creole paramour, who happens to be the spitting image of the unsupportive wife. Naturally, poncy rich guy is planning to seduce unsupportive wife so he can finally be reunited with his lost love because, hey, everyone knows that reincarnation works by making you look exactly like whomever you were in your most pertinent past life (Hey, come to think of it, maybe it's not so bad that I'm aging into Edward Everett Horton!). I say, count your blessings, poncy English-Cajun ghostly rich guy: this chick has no idea how hard a man's gotta work to keep up a creepy mansion like yours. You're gonna be all, "Sweetheart, I must go over the numbers. Something's not right on the plantation," and she'll be all, "Screw that. Let's go live in a van down by the the river," and you'll be all, "What's a van?"
So before you know it, there are zombies and ghosts and a green gypsy woman in a crystal ball and Eddie's mugging like there's no tomorrow and his cowardly kid overcomes his fears and the poncy ghost sees the error of his ways and the good ghosts go to heaven and the bad ghost goes to hell. And, More Importantly, Eddie Murphy Learns an Important Lesson about the Evils of Workaholism and the Importance of Spending More Time with his Family.

I watched this one with my 9-yr-old after we'd put the younger kids to bed. He loved it. It was just scary enough, just funny enough, to press all his buttons. The zombies looked enough like the zombies from the Thriller video to remove any peril they may have represented, and the bad guy had such silly hair that he was clearly not a serious threat to anyone. There were jokes and sight gags and I think he found the damsel attractive in a "Jimmy Neutron's mom" kind of way. But in my inner monologue, I was hanging in Gracie Mansion's belltower, thinking that if Wallace Shawn and Terence Stamp can't save a movie, noone can save a movie.

But hey, at least I've worked out the problems with my script. Now, it's going to be a movie about an executive transvestite workaholic dad. Beware the competing firm that does not have a flag.

Get Smart

GET SMART is a formulaic comedy based on a television series I can barely remember. It also happens to be laugh-out-loud funny.

It's not even that GET SMART is particularly well written. It's just particularly well delivered. Steve Carell is perfect as Smart, the bumbling yet oddly capable analyst who finally gets to be a field agent. He plays the character as a man in tight control of his emotions, but who's always just one cone of silence away from gut-bursting joy. Anne Hathaway is, well, Anne Hathaway, upon whom I now formally bestow the title of Can Do No Wrong. She's tough and vulnerable and funny and dazzling and just a pleasure to watch. Dwayne Johnson is one of those guys who's good in whatever he's in, and his sense of comic timing gets better with each outing. Terry "President Camacho" Crews dials it down (for him) and finds just the right volume, and his partner David Koechner has the "laughable jerk" thing down to a science. And then there's Alan Arkin, the Chief, whose deadpan delivery anchors the production and allows it to soar.

The villains are duly villainous without ever being truly threatening, the third act shift into action territory works quite well, and the whole thing kept DB and me amused throughout. GET SMART is slick Hollywood comedy done right. Color me pleasantly surprised.

The Phantom Menace

Back in 1999, I walked in to STAR WARS: EPISODE 4: THE PHANTOM MENACE with diminished, yet still living, expectations. I'd disliked the Special Editions of the original trilogy, but I thought that Lucas's vision might work better in an original film than it did in the reworks. I was wrong, and I loathed THE PHANTOM MENACE. Was that an honest evaluation, however, or was that the disappointment talking?

Well, I saw the PHANTOM MENACE again this weekend, and I think I can give the picture a fairer shake today.

It's one of the worst major motion pictures ever made.

So many things about this movie are wrong, it's hard to know where to begin. So, how about at the beginning? The opening crawl starts with, "Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic. The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute." That may be a great kickoff for an episode of "The McLaughlin Group," but nothing about it says Adventure. Soon, we're in a road movie. Characters fly, walk, swim, scoot, and otherwise go here and there, and the whole proceedings have the immediacy of an f/x real from a picture still a year out from its release date.

Then, we get to Tattooine and things get really bad. Young Jake Lloyd, who plays Darth Child, is not up to the task. He's horribly bad, elementary-school-recital bad, and he makes his character wholly uninteresting. Not that he had much to work with: how does a movie get an audience to invest in a character that its members hope will wind up a greasy stain on a canyon wall?

And so it goes, until THE PHANTOM MENACE climaxes with a lukewarm rehash of STAR WARS's destruction of the death star that could only satisfy someone who's first SW film this is. It's ghastly, it's creatively bankrupt, and it isn't even entertaining.

But wait, there's more: that's not even the big finish. There's a coup de grace when some retainer in a silly costume delivers the payoff line to the big villain: "So much for your trade franchise, Viceroy!" We began with "The McLaughlin Group" and we end with "Wall Street Week." It's fitting.

When I settled down for THE PHANTOM MENACE, I thought my opinion had nowhwere to go but up. Boy, was I wrong. I used to dislike this movie. Now, I loathe it. What an utter waste of time and talent.