..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..RJ Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

Tropic Thunder
plus reviews of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Henry Poole is Here, and Lola Montes
Plus Quick Hits On This Week's DVDs

..MCN Critics Roundup ..MCN Review Vault

Tropic Thunder Three stars
U.S.; Ben Stiller (Paramount/DreamWorks)

Tropic Thunder, Ben Stiller’s big hip satire of war, movies and war movies, almost looks like a great comedy when you watch the trailer.

But, as the ’80s proved, trailers aren’t movies.

Still, you think, how can this one miss? Consider the material: the perils and snafus of a big malfunctioning Vietnam epic, kind of like Apocalypse Now, squeezed though Missing in Action. Caught in all that action, filming that mega-budget battle extravaganza that later suddenly, supposedly turns into a cinema verite shoot with hidden cameras and a missing director (but really doesn‘t) is a dream team of current movie comedy. Ben Stiller as Tugg Speedman, imitating Sly Stallone as Rambo! Robert Downey, Jr. as Kirk Lazarus, or Russell Crowe imitating Fred Williamson! Jack Black as himself, imitating maybe Will Ferrell or possibly Dom DeLuise! Nick Nolte playing both Strother Martin and L. Q. Jones!

There’s more! Steve Coogan as director Damien Cockburn, a skinny Francis Coppola -- or maybe a tweedy Michael Bay! And, the piece de fucking resistance of the entire movie, a bald Tom Cruise boogying in a fat suit, playing….Who? Joel Silver? Louis B. Mayer’s illegitimate grand-nephew? Does anybody really know? (I’m sure some blogster has doped this one out.)

Stiller’s Speedman is a sub-Stallone type, fresh from a disastrous Forrest Gumpish sweet idiot Oscar troll, who’s now trying to make a more formula war movie with big stars, but endowed with phony significance. Black is Jeff Portnoy, a big-league comedian (and complainer) unhappily trapped in the movie, and Downey‘s Lazarus is Oscar-happy star Lazarus, such a brilliant actor that, De Niro style, he‘s made himself over for the role, by medically altering his pigmentation,

Downey cracked me up during the trailer for this one -- and he has the intonation, the rhythm, the attitude, down just right. -- not for a real black actor, but for an incredibly clever white mockup. In the trailer, he looks and sounds fabulous, and he does for most of the movie too.

That’s the problem. Tropic Thunder has a preview that’s really better than the movie. (Pineapple Express also has a great trailer, but the movie’s just as good.) And the main reason Tropic falters, for me at least, is the faulty premise.

How can we accept three superstars so dumb they can’t tell whether they’re really shooting a movie, even during a drug battle with local smugglers? The whole art of screwball comedy or satire lies in making loony premises acceptable, or in putting the audience in such a giddy state that they’ll accept almost anything. Tropic Thunder never had me in that state -- and little things kept annoying me all the way through. For example, even though the fate of Coogan’s Cockburn is a great fast gag, it’s over too soon and has the bad effect of robbing the rest of the movie of Coogan. And, seriously, the picture could use more women. Weren’t Cameron Diaz or Janeane Garofalo available?

Stiller’s movie is about how Hollywood wrecks art and vice versa. And it’s about the follies of war the gung ho mentality that makes a near-myth of carnage, and the follies and pitfalls of big budget moviemaking. I’m ready to laugh at all that, but Tropic, despite an excellent production (cinematography by John Toll) never seems really on target until we get to Cruise in another of those asshole roles at which he‘s really, really good (as in Magnolia). Grossman makes sense, while the boys’ behavior in the jungle is on The Three Stooges level of plot mechanics. (As a matter of fact, this is perfect material for Larry, Moe and Curly. Or even Shemp.)

But I don’t mean to be a killjoy. Millions will laugh at Tropic Thunder, and it deserves every last titter and guffaw. Maybe it even deserves Tropic Thunder 2 (The boys, or their identical sons, go to Iraq and bump into Ferrell as George W. Bush and Chris Rock as Condoleezza Rice.) As for Downey, he‘s on a roll. Let’s just hope he doesn’t pull a Kirk Lazarus on us.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars Two and a half stars
U.S.; Dave Filoni (Warner Bros/Lucasfilm)

This movie is better than it seems. Of course, it doesn’t seem like much: the first episodes of George Lucas’ new animated Star Wars TV series, strung together into a big teaser that throws Annakin Skywalker and Obi-wn Kenobi (here voiced by Matt Lanter and James Arnold Taylor) into a star battle against the perfidious Count Dooku (Christopher Lee), the pulchritudinous wicked Asaji Ventress (Nika Futterman) and the persnickety Ziro the Hutt (Corey Burton), the evil relative of Jabba the Hutt (Kevin Michael Richardson), and a blob of a guy who looks and talks like Truman Capote squashed into a mud pie. The events here, which take place sometime during the span of the most recent three Star Wars prequels, involve a complex plot to kidnap Jabba’s repulsive little tot, the aptly named Rotta the Huttlet (David Acord), who is the kind of infant that, like Eraserhead, might discourage procreation altogether.

The action ranges all around the usual Star Wars post-Searchers deserts and post-Metropolis cities, and it includes a stellar job for Ahsoka Tano (Ashley Eckstein), as Annakin’s feisty intern. Some other veterans of the movie besides Lee pop up as voices, including Samuel Jackson as Mace Windu, and the eternal Anthony Daniels as C-3PO. And what can you say: The good guys win. Unless you want to stare into Annakin’s dark, Darth future.

After a shaky start, I liked this. Basically, it’s a movie for 12-year-olds, or guys who want to remain 12 years olds. But it’s less mammoth and elephantine than the more recent movies, and it really rips along. There are worse galaxies to spend a few sandy hours in.


Henry Poole is Here Two stars
U.S.; Mark Pellington

Holy smoke. Director Mark Pellington, hitherto a specialist in post-modern noir (The Mothman Prophecies,Arlington Road), tackles the big issue of whether a messy looking stain on the outside stucco wall of apparently dying malcontent Henry Poole’s (Luke Wilson) house, is actually the face of Jesus Christ. (Personally I thought it was the face of Robert Downey Jr. or Jack Black, but what do I know?) Eventually, Poole -- whose relationship to Hal Hartley’s Henry Fool is one of the big mysteries here -- is drawn into a Lourdes-like miracle religious crusade that involves his blissed out neighbor Esperanza (Adriana Barraza, who‘s fine) and the bombshell-mom-next door, Dawn (Radha Mitchell), leading to a surprising paltry gathering of seekers after miracles and the haunting question of whether the face, whosever it is, has curative powers, and whether the dying Poole shouldn’t give it a shot.

In a way, it’s a shame that Pellington is so good with actors -- not just Barraza -- because it makes the movie look somewhat sensible and it’s not. It’s as preachy and unlikely a parable as Swing Vote or Red Planet Mars. The ending is completely unsatisfying. I’m not hard of heart here; I prefer religious movies by Robert Bresson or Carl Dreyer -- or, for that matter Frank Capra and Leo McCarey. But I guess you have to take these things on faith.



Lola Montes Four stars
France; Max Ophuls, 1955

I think I know the reason why
Producers tend to make him cry.
They inevitably demand
A stationary set-up and
A shot that does not call for tracks
Is agony for poor, dear Max,
Who, separated from his dolly,
Is plunged in deepest melancholy.
One day they took away his crane.
I thought he’d never smile again.
- James Mason

Max Ophuls’ Lola Montes is a movie romance par excellence, one of the most visually sumptuous of all the great European film classics. It’s almost swooningly beautiful, a nearly peerless example of its seductive genre: literate dramas about love affairs in elegant surroundings with sophisticated dialogue and first class, beautiful actors -- in this case Anton Walbrook, Peter Ustinov, Oskar Werner, Ivan Desny, and, as Lola, Martine Carol, the reigning French movie sex kitten goddess of the age (though she was just about to be replaced by Brigitte Bardot).

Adapted by Ophuls, Jacques Natanson and others, from the real-life history of the legendary dancer-courtesan and the book by Cecil St. Laurent, shot in color and Cinemascope by master cinematographer Christian Matras (Grand Illusion) in settings of incredible theatrical plushness, this film makes for a nearly intoxicating entertainment. It can do for you what James Agee claimed for Marcel Carne‘s and Jacques Prevert‘s effervescent masterpiece Children of Paradise -- make you happily drunk. But only until the climax, the morning after, the last sad act, until the curtain shot with clowns.

Released in 1955, two years before Ophuls’ death (at 55), it’s one of the most gorgeous and heartbreaking examples of its type -- even though the central title character, the irresistible dancer and scandalous inamorata Lola Montes (as played by Carol)-- is hard to love, or even at times to like; and though instead of just one great amour, we see her engaging in numerous affairs and liaisons all across Europe, an irresistible seductress of the elite of music, art and government. Finally, in the film’s brilliant framing story, we see Lola peddling her amours for the price of a ticket in an American circus, guided by an urbane and cynical ringmaster (played unforgettably by Ustinov) who endangers his star’s failing health by demanding that she perform perilous stunts -- and yet adores her as much as all her other stunned admirers. (Or so he says)

More than that great all-consuming love that is usually the stuff of movie romance (something Ophuls himself had shown with rare perfection in his 1948 Hollywood classic Letter from an Unknown Woman), it is the idea of romance in general, of public romance that Lola Montes explores so beautifully, so profoundly. You can get drunk watching this movie, carried away by its brilliant technique, it matchless images, its richly colored décor and entrancing performances -- all those elements that make Ophuls, as much as Orson Welles or Ophuls’ own idols, F. W. Murnau and Ernst Lubitsch, one of the cinema’s supreme visual stylists. And finally you’re seduced by Lola's over-arching vision of the grand, impermanent, evanescent flow of beauty, love and life itself.

Lola Montes is a movie in love with romance, but savvy about its pitfalls. Ophuls shows us something of the real Lola, whose list of conquests included musicians Franz Liszt (played in the film by Will Quadflieg), Richard Wagner and Frederic Chopin, and a string of politicians and leaders, topped by Ludwig of Bavaria (played by Walbrook) -- but who ends much like the Lola of the movie, selling her scandals for a dollar a kiss in an American circus.

That’s the ingenious frame of Lola Montes. We learn of her life and loves in the circus show in which Lola appears, riding horseback, dancing on a high wire and on the high trapeze, while her life is recounted (and sometimes distorted) by the ringmaster. Circus master Ustinov romanticizes Lola in a conventional way, surrounded by an avalanche of clowns and circus performers tumbling all around him, as they guide us through the circus pageant of her past, undercut by the irony of his voice and delivery.

Ophuls, presenting the key events in flashback, with Lola’s memory, romanticizes her in a different, more moving way. We see her past life as she recalls it, triggered by he show: see her bittersweet parting from Liszt at a country inn, where the two have grand carriages reminiscent of a Sergio Leone western; see her youth and the start of her femme fatale career, as she steals the lover (Desny) of her own mother (Lisa Delamare). Then we follow her quickly through a series of affairs, until she finally reaches the pinnacle, or as the ringmaster lusciously announces it: Lola in Bavaria!

Bavaria is where she meets and becomes the mistress of Ludwig, excites the enmity of the establishment and finally flees, thanks to a young leftist student (Werner, the Jules of Truffaut’s Jules and Jim) who is both the first and last man she meets in the country, and offers her a last chance at romance. Such is love. Such is life. Such is….Lola.

Ophuls’ framing device is not unlike the main structural trick of Citizen Kane, which guides us through Kane's labyrinthine past by using the investigations of the faceless reporter Thompson, as he seeks to unravel the mystery of Kane’s dying word Rosebud. But here the roses are in bloom. The décor of the circus, boudoirs, ships, theaters and palaces against which Lola‘s amorous history plays out, become symphonies of color, as stunning as Toland’s black and white fantasias in Kane. Even if you quibble about parts of Lola -- and many critics and audiences won’t accept Carol -- you cannot sensibly deny Ophuls’ genius for imagery, and especially his great forte, the moving camera shot, as celebrated by his admiring actor, Mason (star of Ophuls’ two 1949 American film noirs Caught and The Reckless Moment) in the legendary doggerel that prefaces this review.

For Ophuls (born Max Oppenheimer, a German Jew in Saarbrucken on the French-German border), movement in a movie was life itself, an expression of both its excitement and evanescence, the way it thrills us and then vanishes before our eyes, all caught in the same reckless moment. No one, not Kenji Mizoguchi, Murnau, Miklos Jansco, Theo Angelopoulos, Alexander Sokurov (in the phenomenal Russian Ark), or Welles -- who filmed the great Magnificent Ambersons ballroom scene in a single shot -- ever wrung such beauty out of the moving camera as Ophuls. (If Welles is the Beethoven of the long take, Ophuls is its Mozart.) No one followed and preceded his actors with a camera so wondrously, or so fully conveyed life as a dance of love -- and death.

Lola Montes was once described by Andrew Sarris as the greatest film of all time. Well, not quite. Personally, I wouldn’t rank it above Citizen Kane, The Rules of the Game Vertigo, Singin‘ in the Rain, The Searchers, Seven Samurai or Fanny and Alexander. But it belongs among them. And so does Ophuls‘ Unknown Woman and his other French masterpieces La Ronde and The Earrings of Madame de…

No other film is quite like Lola Montes. Few are so mesmerizing beautiful and well-made. It is a movie that is just not watched enough, even by the aficionados who are among its greatest champions. Yet, Like Kane and Rules of the Game, it can be seen over and over again without losing any of its poetry and passion. As we take our seats in the sawdust and tinsel, and watch the ringmaster tell us the life of Lola the danseuse, the world dances before our eyes.

Lola Montes is being re-released by Rialto.
 

MW on DVD
Picks of the Week

NEW RELEASES

Kirikou and the Wild Beast Three and a half stars
France; Michel Ocelot/Benedicte Galup, 2005 (Kino)

Right now, we’re in a golden age of ultra-computerized movie animation, of the voluptuous sights and fantastic shapes of Wall-E and Finding Nemo. But that doesn’t mean the older style can’t still summon up its old charms -- especially the splendid Japanese fairytales of Hayao Miyazaki and the wonderful Kirikou films of French animator Ocelot.

Based on West African folk tales, Ocelot’s films revolve around a diminutive tribal tyke named Kirikou, who, in Kirikou and the Sorceress and here, spends much of his time battling an evil, sexy sorceress who likes to harass and imperil his village. Tiny as he is, the amazingly ingenious, resolute and brave Kirikou always comes out on top, especially in one lovely tale where he flees, by giraffe, from the sorceress’ annoying wooden robots.

The four episodes of this seemingly minimalist, brilliantly designed and richly colored film are simple-looking, old style, and an unqualified delight. This is an ideal movie for families with kids. The soundtrack includes Youssou N' Dour and the film was produced by Didier Brunier (The Triplets of Belleville) Bravo to them all. In French, with English subtitles. Warning for those offended by cartoon nudity: In these stories, as in some of real life, the tribal women are in topless sarongs and the children, including Kirikou, wear nothing.

CLASSIC RELEASES

All My Good Countrymen Four stars
Czechoslovakia; Vojtech Jasny, 1968 (Facets)
 
Censored and seemingly lost for years, this is the major dissident Czech classic, about a beautiful rural village beset first by World War 2 and then by the Communist government and collectivization, made by the great writer-director whom Milos Forman calls the spiritual father of the Czech New Wave. He and his film are too little known. All My Good Countrymen won the Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival, but almost immediately became a casualty of the fall of the Prague liberals.

Both realistic and whimsically fantastic, it’s a film that easily ranks with (or outranks) the best work of Forman, Ivan Passer, and Jiri Menzel. One can see why it got Jasny in trouble with the Commie Czechoslovak establishment though. It’s a celebration of traditional village life and eccentric community spirit that pokes too sharply for comfort at the dogmas of collective farms and the old Eastern European bloc, sending them up with gentle, poetic scorn.

Jasny’s village fresco stretches from the ‘40s through the mid-‘50s, and gives us a dazzling, charming little rural ensemble: the farmers, the politically reverent organist, the rebel, the outlaw, the town femme fatale. Speaking as the native of a village of 1,414 (Williams Bay, Wisconsin), I think its one of the best films ever made about small town life. Czech critics and filmmakers thought so two, Countrymen placed third on the all-time best Czech films poll. In Czech, with English subtitles. Extras: Interview with Jasny, booklet with critical essays.

- Michael Wilmington
August 15, 2008

 

August 8: Pineapple Express, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Hell Ride, and Brideshead Revisited
August 1: The Mummy 3, Swing Vote, Step Brothers, and X-Files
July 25: A Superhero Summer, American Teen and CSNY Deja Vu
July 17: The Dark Knight, Space Chimps, Mamma Mia!, Encounters At The End Of The World
July 10: Hellboy II: The Goilden Army ,Journey to the Center of the Earth, Kit Kittredge, Wanted, The Wackness, The Heartbeat Indicator, Monsieur Verdoux
July 3: Hancock, The Mother of Tears
June 26: Wall-E
June 19: Get Smart, The Love Guru, The Duchess of Langeais, Glass: A Portrait of Phillip in Twelve Parts, Up The Yangtze, The Passion of The Mao
June 12 : The Incredible Hulk,War Inc., Shotgun Stories, It Always Rains on Sundays
June 5 : Kung Fu Panda, You Don't Mess With The Zohan, Mongol, 'Tis Autumn, At The Death House Door
May 29: Sex & The City, The Strangers, Irina Palm, The Fall
May 22: Indiana Jones 4, Postal, Contempt
May 15: Prince Caspian, How The Garcia Girls Spent Their Vacation, DVD: Indiana Jones Collection
May 8: Speed Racer , Redbelt, What Happens In Vegas
May 1: Iron Man, Son Of Rambow, Flight of The Red Balloon
April 24: Tuya's Marriage, Chapter 27
April 17: My Blueberry Nights
April 10: Shine A Light, Plus Young @ Heart, Smart People, and The Forbidden Kingdom

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