|
The Darjeeling Limited
October 5
Directed by Wes Anderson
Wes Anderson is one of the most distinctive voices in Hollywood. His movies have a bent sensibility to them that is right in my wheelhouse. Rushmore. The Royal Tenenbaums. The Life Aquatic.
One of the main themes in his movies is the idea of family. Skewed, messy, loving (though how that love is communicated is always the question)—he has a lens that says there’s no such thing as a normal family unless you take dysfunction as the norm. Then his movies become an experiment in how dysfunctional relationships can get and still be relationships.
In The Darjeeling Limited, Adrien Brody, Owen Wilson, and Jason Schwartzman are estranged brothers who come together after the death of their father. They go on a “spiritual journey” on a train through India, all the while pushing one another’s buttons.
But at its emotional core, the movie is about brothers and family. Family isn’t just about blood ties, it’s about a community of love and acceptance. Sometimes it takes a “spiritual journey” to realize that.
Read more…
The Golden Age
October 12
Directed by Shekhar Kapur
Maybe I’m getting cynical, maybe I’ve suffered through too many summers of needless sequels, prequels, and three-quels and presumed franchises, but I never saw Elizabeth as the kind of movie that could become a franchise. Yet, here comes Elizabeth: The Golden Age.
The first Elizabeth propelled Cate Blanchett from an interesting talent from Australia to global star. She portrayed a queen in the making, learning to accept the weight of responsibility and sacrifice and the importance of an icon.
The entire creative team from the first movie has reunited for this one. While the movie will undoubtedly take creative license with the facts of history, I want to see what sort of contemporary overtones will resonate within it.
Plus, I’m a sucker for palace intrigue.
I’m going to presume that this one won’t have more car chases, more special effects, and a needlessly convoluted storyline in order to appease our supposed need for bigger and better in our sequels. If we’ve learned nothing from James Bond it should be that stand-alone sequels can go on for a long time, and are best when they have the feel of being episodic; and when they try to go bigger with more special effects, we get Moonraker. I guess I’m also presuming that should they do a third installment of Elizabeth (Elizabeth: The Dark Queen Returns?), that she won’t be toting laser rifles.
Read more…
30 Days of Night
October 19
Directed by David Slade
I don’t know if there is any movie I’m looking forward to more this Fall than 30 Days of Night. Based on the hit comic by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith, 30 Days of Night has a premise so obvious that I’m surprised it hadn’t been done before: Barrow, Alaska is a town with no sunlight for 30 days each winter so a bunch of vampires descend on the town so that they can walk around at will.
Vampire lore always has an inherent spiritual connection. Bram Stoker created Dracula to be the perfect anti-Christ. This rich and dynamic lore is the prototypical case of the negation of the sacred creating the evil. This fact also explains why the sacred becomes a part of the solution to the problem of vampires. Vampires represent a resurrection to darkness. In vampires you see the perversion of the idea of blood being necessary for eternal life. Resurrection into this life occurs after three days. The evil of vampires is dealt with by images of the cross, baptism (holy water), or the sun’s (Son’s) light.
There is more to the story than unbridled carnage. It’s actually a very human story as we follow the tales of the unlucky locals who attempt to survive. Here’s hoping this film breathes new life into the tired vampire genre.
Read more…
American Gangster
November 2
Directed by Steve Zaillian
Denzel Washington. Russell Crowe. Cuba Gooding, Jr. (in a grown-up role). Ridley Scott. There are few movies with a cast of talent that generates more excitement. Ignoring the comedy A Good Year (which apparently most of us did), the last time Crowe and Scott teamed up was for the movie Gladiator.
In a lot of ways, American Gangster re-visits many of the themes from Washington’s Training Day, in terms of moral ambiguity. Its two main adversaries: a self-made drug kingpin vs. incorruptible cop. Washington vs. Crowe.
There is a war on the streets with citizens on one side and drug dealers on the other with the police somewhere in the middle. The moral guidelines that the police draw for themselves get blurred as they are faced with the harsh reality of investigating and fighting street crime. They have to re-calibrate the lines they have drawn for themselves as they face certain intense daily temptations.
What price are we willing to pay for safe streets and what does it cost those whom we ask to deal with society’s garbage? As they deal daily with the worst humanity has to offer, what does it do to their psyche, their conscience, their marriages and family? And let’s not forget, their soul, as right and wrong no longer seem so cut and dried, and they become lost in the quagmire of their reality.
This is what I’m looking forward to seeing explored in this movie.
Read more…
Beowulf
November 16
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
It is no secret that I’m a Neil Gaiman fanboy. I’ll put it to you this way: I paid money to own a copy of MirrorMask. On a much happier cinematic note, on the heels of Stardust, based on his eponymous graphic novel, comes Beowulf. He and Roger Avery (co-writer of the seminal movie Pulp Fiction) co-wrote the movie together.
Okay, I know what you’re thinking: wasn’t Beowulf a poem that we were supposed to read in English Llit? Yes it was. It’s the poem English teachers trick you into reading because it has a warrior and cool monsters (like Grendel and Grendel’s mother). It’s the prototypical heroic journey, one of our earliest ones. It’s one of our oldest English stories and it has stayed around for a reason.
Joseph Campbell, in his landmark work The Hero With a Thousand Faces, outlined the prototypical path of the hero’s mythological adventure. Campbell defines the journey this way: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”
Put another way, the essential story, the monomyth, echoes the story of Christ. We see Campbell’s pattern—separation (the reluctant hero taken from the world that he knows), initiation (the hero tested), and return (the hero returns as conqueror) in many of our great heroic epics.
I’m curious to see how this plays out in Beowulf.
Read more…
I Am Legend
December 14
Directed by Francis Lawrence
How do you celebrate Christmas? I know that I celebrate by looking forward to the latest Will Smith movie, I Am Legend. Nothing says “Happy Birthday Jesus” like watching the last man on Earth hide from vampires.
Now, I’ve been looking forward to this movie for a long time. I was a fan of the original novel by Twilight Zone legendary writer, Richard Matheson. I watched the 1964 Vincent Price version (The Last Man on Earth) and the classic 1971 Charlton Heston version (The Omega Man). Not just that, I’ve been hanging on every stray rumor about its latest incarnation, like when Ridley Scott and Arnold Schwarzenegger were supposed to bring it to the silver screen around 1997.
Sole-survivor movies always intrigue me. In this case, Robert Neville is the sole survivor of a man-made plague, reducing what’s left of humanity to vampiric mutants. Like in Tom Hanks’ Castaway, this sort of movie has an existential aspect to it as one is forced to contemplate one’s identity and purpose. And it’s exactly that sort of meditation, between the action, that I’m looking forward to.
Read more…
