That Tim Burton is easily the mainstream Hollywood filmmaker most doggedly devoted to artifice is really saying something when you consider how much of the blockbuster game is now inhabited by folks like McG, Brett Ratner and (of course) Michael Bay who pump out astonishingly flat, empty, wholly unreal material with the efficiency of a Terminator going down the “Connor” section of the Yellow Pages. And yet he is, and the difference is that he does it WELL, with real purpose and is often willing to go all the way. He continues to have a visual fondness… well, fetish really… for expressionistic sets that look like sets, slathered-on makeup that looks like makeup and elaborate compositions that look like compositions. The characters in “Sweeny Todd” don’t wear clothing, they wear costumes. They wield weaponry and own knick-knacks that weren’t manufactured, they were art designed. And when they’re cut, they bleed not blood or even “FX blood” but rather gushing torrents of Fire Engine Red paint.

Given that, it’s somewhat surprising that he’s taken this long to direct a full-on musical, a genre so obviously suited to his above-described talents and fascinations. It becomes easier to understand when one keeps in mind the scarcity of musicals grounded in the realm of gothic horror, particularly the realm of gothic horror movies that informs so much of Burton’s cinematic persona. “Sweeny” does, and so here we have the kind of tremendously wonderful movie that results when a filmmaker and project seem almost frighteningly perfect for one another.

There probably was no “real” Sweeny Todd, but the character (short version: mid-1900s serial-killer London barber) is one of those creations of popular fiction so indelible that no one can really pinpoint exactly where he originated – in print, urban myth or otherwise. Stephen Sondheim based his 1979 musical version around one of the more romanticized variations on the story, casting the Demon Barber as the new alias of one Benjamin Barker, a simple man who was wrongly imprisoned so that a corrupt judge could ensnare and rape his wife. He returns to London 15 years later with his new name, a fully-formed psychopathy and a revenge plan that soon branches out into a murder spree: He slashes the throats of his wealthy customers, then drops the bodies through a trap door so that his accomplice Mrs. Lovett can bake the evidence into meat pies to feed her poverty-class customers.

It’s a “slasher musical,” really, but without the level of smug self-awareness that you’d think would be both inherent and ultimately fatal to it. What it has instead is a sense of self-acknowledgment, an altogether different thing. What ultimately killed, say, “Rent” for me isn’t simply the prospect of a jaunty, dancey musical about faux-hemian transients slowly dying of AIDS, but the fact that it refuses to even slightly acknowledge the incongruity of that description: It actually wants to be taken as seriously as a heart-attack, lisping transvestite in a Santa costume and all. “Sweeny Todd,” on the other hand, suffers no such delusions. It’s infused with understanding and acknowledgement, right down to it’s core, that the staging of a big showy Broadway song and dance show about murder and cannibalism is essentially a big, long morbid JOKE; and the comfortable honesty it has about this bleeds (you’ll pardon the pun) into the characters and story arcs allowing them to have depth and emotion that’s real, affecting and honest… even if it IS all part of the joke.

Having good actors helps, having good actors “in-synch” with their director helps more: Johnny Depp has been Tim Burton’s (human) muse since Edward Scissorhands, and while he’s not quite working at “Ed Wood” levels as Todd he’s about as perfectly matched to Burton’s vision of the material as you could ask anyone to be – he’s not afraid to be scary and largely unsympathetic, which is the key to a role like this. It’s a diffcult trick, finding a way around a lead character who enters the film as a revenge-haunted spectre looking only to slay the Judge (Alan Rickman) who made him what he is but then turns to mass-murder mostly out of impotent rage at his innability to do so… but Depp goes at it with both barrells, giving us a Sweeny Todd who – despite all the singing – comes off a lot closer to Freddy Krueger or Dr. Phibes than the Phantom of The Opera.

Helena Bonham Carter gets Mrs. Lovett, and while it’s easy to roll one’s eyes at Burton once more putting his girlfriend in a lead role the plain fact of the matter is that she’s a fine actress and really well suited to the part. It’s at first jarring to see the character, usually imagined as kind of a worn-down Dickensian “fishwife” type, looking more like a Goth pinup fallen on hard times, but it turns out to be the right move for a movie adaptation: Mrs. Lovett may be, ultimately, every bit the monster than Sweeny Todd is, but her evil carries more tragedy in that she doesn’t share his eyes-wide-open self-awareness – she tempers her insanity with her pathetic schoolgirl crush on Todd, all the way to the ludicrous fantasy that they could form some sort of working family unit along with the orphan waif (newcomer Ed Sanders, and what a find he turns out to be!) they’ve taken in to help with the booming pie business. If ever there was a screen role ideally suited to Carter’s porceline doll features, big haunted eyes and natural skill at filling out the expected corset, this is the one.

Neither Depp or Carter are singers by profession, and it shows, and they don’t try to hide it. It becomes a sort of extra-level of stylization. The film boils Sondheim’s thundering big-stage ballads down to angry, rapid-fire spoken-word essays set to music. Depp’s Sweeny doesn’t croon, he howls; while Carter’s Lovett has a voice that must’ve been lovely before life beat it into submission, much like her. On the other hand, Sanders has such a strong singing voice that when he actually uses it it’s a little bit jarring – adding the perfect punctuation of “there’s more to this one than meets the eye” to his key scene: Serenading Mrs. Lovett with the closest thing she’s probably going to get to the devotion she wants. It’s essential that this moment turn the boy into the lone member of the principal cast unambiguously worth rooting for, and he makes it happen.

There’s also a more conventional love story going on between a young Sailor and Joanna, Todd’s now-grown daughter currently being kept as the ward/prisoner of the Judge. This is the least interesting part of the show, and the show knows it: The two generic lovebirds aren’t aware that they’re situation only exists to ramp up the stakes and provide deus-ex-machina for the more interesting pack of nutcases at the center of storm – but WE are, which lends the appropriate level of sadism to their otherwise excruciatingly sentimental scenes together. Oh, and Timothy Spall is here too. Because, really, it’d be MORE surprising if he weren’t.

Who knows if this bold experiment in Burton Unbound will actually work as a cinematic success. After all, gorehounds and musical theatre buffs aren’t exactly common bedfellows. It’s easily the most jagged genre-mix since “Fight Club” announced itself as a combination of existential philosophy and pit-fighting, but hopefully it’ll find more immediate fans instead of having to wait for DVD. But, instant-classic or cult-classic-to-be, the point is it’s a major achievement: Tim Burton’s most fully-formed movie since “Ed Wood” and one of the best films of the year.

FINAL RATING: 10/10

Hat-tip: Kotaku, Denver Post

Want to see the future? Want to know now what will be on the lips of every Democrat presidential candidate, along with the whole of the GOP pack except Ron Paul and maybe Giuliani? Read: http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_7760927

Short-version: An unsupervised, dumb-shit 16 year-old girl and her dumb-shit 17 year-old boyfriend got drunk while babysitting her younger siblings and beat 7 year-old sister to death. The 17 year-old, who apparently tried to revive by “breaking an egg into her mouth” (?) claims they were acting out “Mortal Kombat,” a video game which you may recall being (baselessly) blamed for something like 90% of dumb-shit related beating deaths of children over the last decade or so.

Absolutely tragic, horrifying news. The sort of evil that makes me say, “Death Penalty: GOOD Thing.” Not that either of these worthless wastes of carbon are going to get it: They didn’t do it, right? No, a sixteen year-old arcade game is to blame… NOT these two poor souls – who I’m sure were both honor-student paragons of virtue and pillars of their community and most certainly NOT empty, useless, mentally-deficient societal leeches up until the moment the drop of a quarter and push of a button turned them into child-murdering maniacs.

Now, I’m assuming that since everyone here is capable of both reading and operating a computer, they’re intelligent enough to know that this is basically bullshit, right? That it’s highly unlikely that this occured as a result of a dumb-shit “acting out” a video game that’s damn near older than HE is? What happened here is one or both of two things: A.) The girl was killed by them doing something much, MUCH worse and this was the first “don’t shoot my derranged ass on sight” excuse he could come up with, or B.) Their lawyers know that “Sub-Zero made me do it!” is still a prime way to deflect the attention from their clients.

But none of that will matter. We’ll hear about this from the cynical, posturing, power-hungry slime of both “sides” soon enough. “Conservative” politicos (looking at YOU, Huckabee) love these stories because it plays to their paranoid, superstitious religious base; and “Liberals” love them because “fighting obscene entertainment” is the only ‘values voter’ angle they can pander to that won’t piss off one of their OTHER constituencies.

It’s a given that if there’s a Hell, these two kids will be burning in it (hopefully real, real soon and after some serious torment here in the real world first) but if there’s any real cosmic justice to these things, every single scumball “public figure” who tries to use this to push their censorship agenda will be burning right next to them.

Unexpected gifts are nice, particularly when they just seem to happen without a lot of forced impetus. Case in point, thanks largely to “The Golden Compass” tanking New Line Cinema is suddenly all humble and eager to make nice with Peter Jackson, meaning that a Jackson-produced (and potentially Sam Raimi directed?) movie of “The Hobbit” is finally a go deal:
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117977891.html?categoryid=13&cs=1

Meanwhile, thanks largely to my studious recordkeeping in the matters of trivial cash bets made about popular culture over the years, Jodie Foster recently made me about forty-two dollars and change wealthier a few days ago:
http://www.afterellen.com/people/2007/12/jodiefoster

God bless us, everyone.

Posting a trailer for the “Batman Begins” sequel on the INTERNET, you say? Yeah, I know. Craaaaaaazy idea, but who knows – maybe it’ll catch on…

So, by now we’ve all seen this, yes? By now http://www.atasteforthetheatrical.com/ probably has more hits than a banner ad for custom Foil Hats at the top of a Ron Paul fundraising page (I kid, guys! I kid. No need for the angry emails.)

And if not, JoBlo.com was nice enough to toss an embedable version up on their video site – gracias, fellows. It’s a great trailer, so raving about it is easy… and also a little boring. The raving-about-it, that is, not the trailer itself. Fact is, everything that we already KNOW was awesome about “Begins” is just about everything that seems to STILL be awesome about this trailer – with the possible exception of Heath Ledger’s “holy SHIT”-inducing turn as The Joker, which will be new to you if this is your first day ever accessing the World Wide Web. In other words, let’s get the big broad “yippee!” out of the way – great cast, great score, great look, great trailer – and move on to Movie Geek Ambrosia: Frame-by-frame minutia hunting!!!!

http://www.joblo.com/video/player/mediaplayer.swf
NOTE: You’ve gotta keep hitting the “start over” button on this particular player to start the actual trailer as opposed to JoBlo’s intro animation.

00:12 – Yeah, it’s in there a little bit but I don’t think you can really call Ledger’s “Joker Voice” a full-on Nicholson impression.

00:20 – I can’t wait to find out the context of THIS shot. Bruce Wayne spends Rao-knows-how-much money setting up a super-secret underground lair to hide all his bat-gear in… but he’ll just chill out in his office, surrounded by windows, wearing his costume?

00:25 – Batman, framed as an unmistakable silhouette, standing on the edge of a skyscraper surveying the city through binoculars. Perfect. Gandalf-vs.-Balrog-perfect. Last-two-minutes-of-“The-Mist”-perfect. Threesome-with-Korean-twins-perfect. Moments like this are why I forgave “Begins” for going the armored-costume route and doing that damn Jason Bourne shit with the combat cinematography.

00:30 – Homage to the Burton/Nicholson Joker’s most famous pose?

00:47 – The Joker’s important identifying characteristics (white face, green hair, smile) are so basic that it’s easy to miss just how major of a revamp TDK’s version seems to be, but here’s what looks like the first BIG difference: His hands are the color of normal flesh, seeming to confirm that this version of the Joker is simply wearing makeup. This’d be, unless I’m mistaken, a first – the “canonical” Joker has had “bleached” skin all over since his earliest appearances (though there wasn’t an explanation for it until much later) and nearly every other version has followed suit if it’s brought it up at all. Not sure I’m digging that or not, but it’s interesting.

00:56 – There y’go, the first “official” trailer-closeup of The Joker. Like I said, in the details it’s a pretty radical departure from the Conrad Veidt “Man Who Laughs” design that’s been the standard model for decades, but I like it. Still not clear how pronounced the “smile slits” at the far sides of his mouth actually are, but if he CAN unhinge his jaw like “Ichii The Killer’s” Kakihara (an early rumored inspiration) it’ll be inhumanly awesome.

01:05 – There’s the “Batpod,” aka “Hey! You’d BETTER not call it the Bat-Cycle! Whaddaya think we’re makin’, a comic book movie!??” Dopey name, fun looking vehicle… except those big protrusions on the front had better NOT be guns.

01:09 – Another “official” reveal, another guy in a clown mask standing behind Joker. Confirmation: Joker has some sort of henchmen. So far, they all seem to be guys, so all you guys with the kinky fixation on Harley Quinn, probably time to lower that particular expectation. (all you gals with the kinky fixation on Harley Quinn? Hi, I’m Bob. We should hang out some time.)

01:14 – no (so far) visible changes to The Batmobile… er, Tumbler. TUMBLER! I meant to say Tumbler, honest! Sorry, sorry, don’t be angry, producer guys. I won’t forget again. I swear!

01:16 – Bet that’s important…

01:18 – Bat …sigh, POD again, better look at what had STILL better not be big-ass guns.

01:21 – By Odin, Maggie Gyllenhaal is sexier fully-clothed from the neck-up then most women are buck-naked and fresh out of the tub. 100% improvement as a replacement for Katie Holmes.

01:26 – SMACK! See, if I was playing Joker in this scene, that shot right there would’ve taken about fifty-two takes – assuming she actually slapped him, I mean. I’d be inventing new ways of just-slightly missing my mark. Yes, I have problems, nobody needs to go pointing that out.

01:36 – Crap. Batpod’s frontal offensive weaponry does pretty clearly seem to be guns in this shot. Bloody fucking hell. By no means a deal-breaker, but still… Batman doesn’t use guns. That’s hugely important, and not just in a “thats how it is in the comics” respect – there’s a huge suspension of disbelief element that comes into play here: “Batman abhors firearms” is the only workable answer to the obvious question of why a non-powered superhero operating in a city rampant with traditional street-level crime doesn’t carry a gun. Yes, we know, it’s REALLY because shooting crooks isn’t as cool as taking them out with a Batarang… er, I mean unnamed-bat-shaped-throwing-knife, sorry producer guys… but still, it’s important. Here, if he’s got NO issue mounting a gun on his bike, why wouldn’t he just keep a Bat-Glock in his belt?

01:37 – Hm. Okay, reflected in Joker’s window here we see some flared object going by, preceded by the “firing” shot of the Batpod and followed by explosions. MAYBE the “guns” are some kind of rocket/explosive launcher? Maybe. Hopefully. Live-with-able, at least, and certainly anything is better than the damn machine guns that kept popping out of the Batmobile and Batwing in the Burton film.

01:39 – Money shot, is what that’s called.

01:55 – Ledger doing his take on the mandatory Joker Cackle. Damn good. Yes, we know, EVERYONE is second-best to Mark Hammill’s version, but that’s still damn good.

01:59 – Wish I knew the first damn thing about musical terminology so I could say “that part of the score right there where the horn-type instruments start slowly rising” is a clear callback to Danny Elfman’s “Batman” score, ultimately still the most valuable and lasting contribution to the character and franchise from the Tim Burton era.

This really is, notably, much more a trailer about Joker than it is about Batman. Not surprising, since we’ve already seen Bale’s Batman and know that he owns in the part, but you get a sense of how clearly the marketers understand the need to REALLY hard-sell Ledger in the role. Hardcore fans may scoff at the idea, but it’s a fact that to the mainstream audience the idea of a “serious/scary Joker” being played by ANYONE other than Jack Nicholson is going to be a pretty big initial moment of resistance.

Possible Spoilers

It goes without saying that every movie deserves to be watched all the way to the end for a proper apraisal, but only a few actually require it. If you saw even the trailer for “Transformers” (or to use an example that DIDN’T suck, “300,”) you essentially saw the movie, and no real profound surprises were going to be had. “Atonement,” on the other hand, DEMANDS that you get all the way to the very end and then chew on it for awhile; as it’s eventual “wrapup” serves as a form of highly-literate “gotcha!” as to why the film starts out so seemingly startlingly typical and derrivative.

A period costume drama, the first act occupies the innevitable Sprawling British Country Estate, occupied by the innevitable Stuffy Rich Folks and their innevitable Jolly Lower-Class Servants. Kiera Knightley is, innevitably, the Eldest Unmarried Daughter of the house; innevitably lusted-after in secret by James McAvoy’s handsome but cut-off-from-her-by-the-class-system Servant Boy (how’d you guess???) Also on hand are Saoirse Ronan as Briony, the thirteen year old younger sister of the house who is, innevitably, a spooky, introverted troublemaker because… well, because in movies like this Sprawling British Country Estates all come equipped with snooping, scheming Spooky Kids to serve as walking symbols of how the pastel faux-innocence of the time concealed dark truths made darker by The Repressions Of The Time.

“Modern” films (and books) seeking to adopt the style of genuine period melodrama innevitably (okay, I’ll stop it with that, you get the point by now) grab some sort of seemingly incongruous “attention-getter” story detail in order to “say something” about our pop-cultural learned-memories of the time. Post-modern racial awareness or 20/20 historical hindsight are the old standbys, but here it comes down to naughty language: Servant Boy fires off a suitably drippy mash note to Eldest Unmarried Daughter, only to realize too late that he’s accidentally sent her another bit of writing – a rather to-the-point celebration of her more… “tangible” attributes – “And THAT’S how Instant Messenger Flirting was invented!” would make a great alternate ending – that was supposed to be just for him. Do-it-yourself pornography? My, but isn’t he resourceful…

Lucky for Servant Boy, it turns out Eldest Unmarried Daughter is way into that sort of thing, and the two of them are promptly going at it in that very proper Costume Melodrama way where they could either be very discreetly making love or very aggressively alinging furniture with the wall. Unlucky for Servant Boy, Briony both reads the note and sees the act, leading her to flip her lid and (following an unrelated bit of profound unpleasantness) accuse Servant Boy of a heinous act that gets him bounced from the scene in a dramatic (and, yes, innevitable) Harsh Realization Of The Realities Of The Class System – because after all what’s a walking-symbol-of-how-the-pastel-faux-innocence-of the-time-concealed-dark-truths-made darker-by-The-Repressions-Of-The-Time SUPPOSED to do?

Semi-lucky(er) for Servant Boy, he’s doing his time in a “modern” period costume drama, which can only mean that World War II breaks out not long after and soon he’s trekking across battle-scarred France trying to get back to Eldest Unmarried Daughter. Meanwhile, Briony has reached adulthood and, just now figuring out that she really screwed the pooch on this one, is seeking the Atonement of the title.

So, basically, there’s a lot of the expected Masterpiece Theater/Merchant-Ivory schlock to wade through – none of it unpleasant but none of it especially unique – en-route to a couple of last minute reality-warping shifts that serve to explain WHY everything has seemed so maddeningly akin to a cliche-ridden Book Club offering… and will be regarded by audiences either as brilliantly devious or inexplicably cruel. I won’t give the reveal away (only those with a really keen eye and ear will be able to figure it out ahead of time) but it’s quite a thing. And while it doesn’t explain away every little narrative sin onhand (at least one major surprise is telegraphed embarassingly early) it’s probably the cleverest way for a period piece to write itself a license to indulge in near-camp melodramatics.

Coming to the rescue otherwise is the cast, the expected mix of seasoned British character players (hey, look! Brenda Blethyn!) and rising stars chasing period-piece street-cred (next up for McAvoy: Big Matrix-ish actioner “Wanted” with Angelina Jolie, right on schedule.) For what it’s worth, Knightley is better here than she was in “Pride & Prejudice,” but I still think she’s being incorrectly typecast in these films because of her look and accent. Her most interesting turn so far was in “Domino,” though given how hugely misunderstood THAT was it’s unsuprising she’s not doing more like it.

FINAL RATING: 7/10

(hat-tip: JoBlo, TwitchFilm)

Y’know how I know? Because they just made THIS movie:

http://services.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/1214128517

Title: “The Machine Girl.” Premise: After a Japanese Schoolgirl sees her boyfriend murdered and gets her arm hacked off by a family of Yakuza Ninjas (!!!), she embarks on an ultra-violent revenge killing-spree using a high-powered machine gun mounted in place of her missing arm.

I live for this stuff.

If you’re adapting any sort of previously-created material into a movie and you want to do it properly, you’ve basically got to be beholden to TWO things: You’re vision as a filmmaker and the vision of the original-material’s creator, and not necessarily in that order. Compromising to anyone else will, generally, leave you with a lesser product. Bottom line.

MILD POTENTIAL SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT:

So, here’s how we got here: About seven years ago, the film world got rocked hard by the one-two punch of “Harry Potter” and “Lord of The Rings” being both massively-successful and massively-excellent. Actually making a fortune off something that you’re NOT ashamed to admit you took part is an increasingly rare development in Hollywood (see: “Bay, Michael – career-of”) and everyone wanted in on the party, which amounted to the entire Barnes & Noble Young Adult Fantasy section getting bought up and filed under “greenlight.” Unlike most “me-too!” aquisition frenzies, a fair amount of these projects have actually made it to the screen; some of it good (“Lemony Snicket,”) some of it grand (“Narnia,”) some of it problematic (“Eragon”) and some of it ghastly (“The Dark is Rising.”) And somewhere, among all this, someone either clueless or amazingly optimistic snuck Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy onto the list.

A walking answer to the question “What if Richard Dawkins and Terry Brooks made a baby, and he was a bit of a humorless twit?,” Pullman fancies himself the Bizarro World C.S. Lewis. To that end, he conjured up the “Materials” kid-lit cycle as a kind of atheist/humanist counterpunch to Christian allegory of Lewis’ “Narnia.” The key difference between the two works (aside from, of course, the whole “entire worldview” thing) comes down to that word, allegory: The “Narnia” cycle remains (though not without it’s hiccups) merely evocative of it’s authors beliefs most of the way through, while Pullman opts to toss the “juicy parts” right up front with his narrative of a multiverse-spanning war between free-thinkers, scientists and (just for good measure) psuedo-pagan “witches” and the sinister despotic forces of, well… God. As in specifically the Christian God. As in I-Am-Who-Am. That God. Yes, irony of ironies: For all that time that the Christian Right spent turning itself into a pretzel trying to convince their followers that the much more popular Mr. Potter and his friends were part of a covert assault on fundamentalism; the stuff of their literal nightmares was sitting quietly by itself just a few rows down the bookshelf. Oops.

So, not only are the filmmakers saddled with material that’s (literally) BEGGING for an angry protest, it’s also a profoundly strange creature even without all the “topical” stuff: Starting out in a “steampunk” Victorian fantasy-land of airborne Witches and talking, armor-clad Polar Bears – where everyone’s soul lives outside their body as a shape-shifting animal spirit “daemon” – and getting progessively more bizzare as it starts dimension-hopping in the second two installments. This is the sort of material that requires the sort of uncompromising boldness described above. To work properly, it would need both a genre-appropriate mini-epic running time and a total commitment for better or for worse to the actual themes at play. “The Golden Compass,” unfortunately, has neither of these things… so it’s a wonder it doesn’t completely come apart. This isn’t a bad film at all, in fact for it’s often-problematic genre it’s actually pretty excellent in parts. It just never really works as a whole.

Hoping to head-off the innevitable (and, for a change, not-entirely nonsensical) ire of religious groups, the filmmakers have attempted to cut the “specifics” out of the mythos. Thus, the fascist, heretic-oppressing Magesterium is merely “suggestive” of The Vatican, while The Authority is never explicitly identified as God. Nice effort (though how they’re going to work out the second two volumes where the theology gets REALLY explicit is beyond me) but ultimately a waste: It’s done them no good, as the expected protesters and rabble-rousers are having a cow anyway; and more immediately it’s given them even MORE stuff to have to explain in a movie that’s already way, way too front-loaded with exposition.

At least 2/3rds of the film is taken up just nailing down who all the characters, groups, sides, places and gizmos are; and when it finally DOES pick up real speed in the third act it’s just a bit too brief. Indeed, a pair of climactic battle scenes (a shockingly cover-the-kiddie’s-eyes violent fistfight between two Polar Bear knights and the obligatory “everybody versus everybody else” open-field melee) are gloriously realized… but it’s all too little, too late. Unable to flesh Pullman’s narrative out to it’s needed pace and seemingly unwilling to do a heavy “make this work in the time we have” rewrite, they’ve settled for a bullet-points recap of the book with the big moments all accounted for but no great ressonance connecting them.

It’s all very well-cast, with newcomer Dakota Blue Richards proving herself a tremendous find in the lead role of Lyra. Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig have the main “name” adult roles as Miss Coulter, an icy villianess kidnapping poor children for horrific Magesterium experiments and Lord Asriel, a Magesterium-defying scholar with his own agenda; while the expected who’s-who of stalwart British character talent dutifully fill out the margins as the various kings, scholars, doctors, “Gyptians” and witches needed to deliver heavily-accented chunks of expository revelation every ten minutes or so. Christopher Lee turns up for about 30 seconds, while Ian McKellan has the Bruce-Lee-as-Kato role as Iorek Byrnison, an “Armored Bear” who becomes Lyra’s right-hand ass-kicker.

When it comes down to it, I was never expecting this to be the equal of “Rings,” “Potter” or “Narnia,” chiefly because the material just isn’t quite as good starting out (Pullman IS a fine talent in the genre, make no mistake, but take out the look-at-me Catholic-baiting and this particular series is strictly second-tier) but there’s no getting around the fact that this film just isn’t anywhere near as good as it could have been if they’d just had a little more (sorry, Mr. Pullman) faith in the material. There’s a great cast here, occupying a fascinating and splendidly-realized otherworld and participating in a genuinely intriguing story. But it’s rushing through everything much too fast, and kid-gloving it’s way through it’s most interesting ideas. It’s afraid of it’s own shadow, and thats not where any fantasy movie wants to be.

FINAL RATING: 6/10

I take a fair degree of crap, (along with constructive criticism, not the same thing) here on the interweb and elsewhere, for taking a negative view of humanity as a whole. Some would even go so far as to use the term “elitist,” which (when applied as a negative) used to be an insult meaning “guy who thinks he’s better than everyone else” but now tends to be an insult meaning “guy who thinks.” To be frank, for the most part I can live with either one. I’m far less fond of the various permutations of “hypocrite;” more specifically the question of how a blogger who calls himself a Patriot and plasters a giant American flag at the top of his page can be so “down on” his fellow countrymen vis-a-vi their various voting and filmgoing habits – i.e. the opening paragraphs of THIS review: http://moviebob.blogspot.com/2007/11/review-mist.html

Now, my normal inclination would be to point out that that’s essentially the same thing as asking “how can someone who claims to love hamburgers hate McDonalds?,” but since I’ve got a fairly juicy bit of objective evidence for my discontent to present shortly I’ll entertain the query and offer the best answer I’ve got: I love America because of the ideals it represents, was founded on and on it’s better days actually lives up to. Go actually READ the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Seriously. Then read up on the guys responsible for it on the intellectual side. Read Jefferson. Read Franklin. Hell, want to mainline the good stuff? Read up on Thomas Paine, the guy who helped inspire those fellas. Within all that, the basic fundamental greatness of America is revealed: America is great because there IS an “I” in it – because all of the then-revolutionary ideas in this nation’s inception grew out of a STILL-radical notion that the protection of the rights and freedoms of The Individual were of paramount importance.

That, I’d posit – with only the sum total of human history to back me up – is the reason WHY this country works and indeed works so well: Placing primacy on the individual encourages… DEMANDS, in fact… that said individuals live up to the label, i.e. that they be capable of free thought, independent reasoning and possess a reasonable degreee self-sufficiency. This is how we manage to weather things like Civil Wars, Depressions and mentally-deficient leadership better than most other large-scale nations: A society that derives it’s strength from collectivism (see: Imperial Rome, the Middle East NOW, the Soviet Union) can be devastated simply by striking the “weakest link,” while a society largely comprised of individuals capable of independent thought and strength can endure through major ‘wounds’ because the fates of all AREN’T all bound together.

Individualism, of course, has it’s drawbacks; chiefly that it’s HARD. Making your own decisions, living with them, having to offer folks you don’t agree with the courtesy of coexistance… these aren’t easy tasks. Not everyone is up to them. Some would rather sacrifice liberty and individuality for an easier route… a “greater good.” They would prefer that a State – or perhaps a Church, or a Dictator – simply tell everyone exactly what they are and are not allowed to do or say or think, thus taking the terrible burden of decision-making and responsibility off of them. There’re a lot of words, historically, to describe such people; but I prefer the most direct: They are weak, and they are COWARDS.

In our current world, the greatest illustration of this basic conflict comes on the question of Government Censorship – because it cuts to the very heart of the question: Do you have the fortitude to be an individual where living in a free society means having to frequently endure the doing and saying of things you find distasteful in order to ensure that YOU may do and say things others find distasteful? Or are you weak in mind and spirit, and thus willing to not only discard your freedom but steal the freedom of others in exchange for a more “mellow” state of things? Do you want expression to be free and unfettered, accepting the “Survival of the Fittest” prolonged slugfest that comes from such? Or do you want expression to be controlled by The State in order to avoid any feathers getting ruffled or tummies being made upset? Just about every great “social issue” of our time comes down to that essential pair of choices.

Now, then. The reason I tend to get so down on “the folks” sharing America with me is that, looking at the broad societal trends of our time, I can seldom escape the mounting dread that Americans in that first category, i.e. the folks who actually value freedom, was slipping into the minority. It’s a fast-paced, scary world, and that tends to make people wobbly and more eager to throw freedom away in order to feel safe or pretend to right some percieved wrong. But I never had a hard number to attach these impressions to.

Until today.

“The Escapist,” the really wonderful online Video Game news organization currently best-known for hosting the brilliant “Yahtzee” Croshaw’s “Zero Punctuation” game reviews (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/zeropunctuation), carried with it a poll by the Opinion Research Corporation regarding how American’s were feeling about the idea of the Government stepping in to regulate violent/explicit video games. Lots of numbers in there, but here’s the big one: 51% of those surveyed “believed the government should be regulating the actual content of the games.” Not just the SALE of the items, or the application of a rating system. 51% of Americans, apparently, want the Government telling artists what they can and cannot put in their work.

You can see it HERE:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/79582-New-Survey-Shows-Majority-of-Americans-Want-Government-Regulation-of-Games

51%. A margin wide enough to win an election. 51% of Americans do not want to be free, and do not want others to be free. 51% of Americans want The Government to curtail individual rights, the very foundation of our country, in order to make them feel safer and comfier. Because they are weak. Because they are cowards. Because they don’t have the spine to deal with making their own decisions. They want the Government to do it for them, and for you.

In other words, folks, 51% of Americans have no business calling themselves “Americans.”

Yeah, so… busy as hell week. Lot’s of morning hours. Not enough sleep. Not a damn thing came out this weekend to review. So, if anyone missed me… sorry. More stuff to come this week.

However, I couldn’t let this go by without adding my voice to the chorus on at least one matter: F*ck “Gamespot” and the horse they road in on: http://www.joystiq.com/2007/11/30/rumor-gamespots-editorial-director-fired-over-kane-and-lynch-rev/

Also, please enjoy this funny-ish banner mockup, probably to start showing up whenever I post a bit relating to business in any way:

Attention: American Moviegoing Public: You do not deserve great movies. You do not even deserve GOOD movies. Have you looked at a boxoffice listing lately? You should be ashamed of yourselves. Pure, freshly-prepared brilliance keeps getting laid out right in front of you (Grind ::cough:: House ::cough::) and you keep tripping all over one-another in a mad rush past it en-route to the bottom of the bell-curve. It’s enough to make any Film Geek worth his salt wonder if it’s even worth the continued effort at this point – after all, it wouldn’t seem that hard to simply make like the good guys in “Atlas Shrugged” and just cut our losses: Head off for some secluded self-made paradise, take all the unappreciated greatness of moviedom with us and just wait it out until Michael Bay, McG, Tyler Perry and the (depressing) majority that somehow finds them tolerable innevitably naturally-select themselves into oblivion.

But, since I don’t see John Galt hanging around anywhere yet, I suppose we’re still stuck with one another which means the usual routine is still in effect: Good movies continue to come out, and movie geeks do their part to TRY and alert the rest of the populace to them in the continued hope that they’ll turn decent business and get MORE good movies made. So on with it then: “The Mist” is a hundred times a better movie than a moviegoing public that just gave Michael Bay’s obliteration of the “Transformers” 300 million bucks deserves, but here it is anyway. Lucky you. Now go see it. Seriously. Go. NOW. Don’t finish reading this, because it might spoil parts of it for you. Just get to the damn theatre as soon as possible so you can say you did something worthwhile with your ten bucks for a change.

Minor but TONALLY-IMPORTANT Spoilers from here on. Go see THE BEST DAMN THEATRICAL AMERICAN HORROR MOVIE IN POSSIBLY A DECADE FIRST, then come back here and read it. You have been warned.

“The Mist,” both in it’s original form as a short story and a feature-length film, can be easily summed up as “Stephen King doing H.P. Lovecraft,” which calls to mind nothing so much as a large cast of tragically-flawed characters dodging otherworldly tentacle-flailing monsters somewhere in Maine. That’s essentially the case, but like all the best of Mr. King’s output it’s at once much MORE but never anything LESS than what it seems: Most bigger-scale entries of the horror genre can only ever manage to be either visceral crowd-pleasers or subdued intellectual exercises, but this Stephen King adaptation (from legendary “serious” King adaptor Frank Darabont) actually manages to carry-over it’s author’s signature knack for being both – it’s as good when it’s about societal microcosms breaking down under stress as it is when it’s about man-eating bugs and giant killer octopi; and it’s great when it’s about both.

The setting is another of King’s small Maine coastal towns, specifically it’s local supermarket. Following a freak storm, a pale, soup-thick mist engulfs everything in sight and shortly reveals itself to be a mere harbinger of bigger problems: An apparent legion of horrible monsters have come with it, using the inclement weather as cover. Soon enough, a cross-section of humanity is stuck in the market fending off the unexplainable threats outside; and it isn’t long before social decorum breaks down factions start to form. It boils down to a Disaster Movie, really, though one where the disaster is an assault by creatures of ever-increasing size and hostility.

The whole point of any disaster movie is to observe the actions of humanity as a whole under stress through a collection of individual examples, so the fact that the gaggle of Cthulu-chow-to-be that turns up here is largely the same that shows up for every cinematic disaster doesn’t so much indicate lack of overt-originality on the movie’s as it does lack of tremendous change on humanity’s part: When George Romero more-or-less originated this subgenre with “Night of The Living Dead,” an unpopular war was raging abroad while clashes of Civil Rights and Social Values were tearing the homefront apart. Today, well… you get the picture. Art reflects the world in which it’s created, so here we are once again with a diverse group of people trapped by the boogeymen and choosing up sides: The stubborn rationalists work their nerves raw denying the obvious, the cowardly and the easily-led turn to religious zeal and the level-headed problem-solvers try to keep themselves alive… and find a way out before the first two groups start getting everyone killed.

Thomas Jane has the Gene Hackman “Poseidon Adventure” role as the defacto leader of the “good guys,” a movie poster artist (in alarmingly athletic shape all things considered) who’s brought his son along. Andre Braugher has the “bah, monsters!? Nonsense! And let me walk out into the mist to prove it!” role… which come to think of it is the same part he had in the remake of “The Poseidon Adventure.” Heh. Marcia Gay-Harden has the showy part as Mrs. Carmody, the villian of the piece: An unstable holy-roller for whom the mist and it’s monsters MUST mean the End of Days – i.e. time for her to get about the business of saving the sinners… at knife-point, if necessary.

There’s been a bit of carping in the critical in regards to Mrs. Carmody as a character, or rather the film’s unsubtle implication that The Faithful can be a lot more hateful and deadly than even the creepiest-crawler. To those folks, I reccomend that they hit up Google and take a fresh look at that big freaking crater in the middle of Manhattan. Yeah, Carmody is a being of one-dimensional evil, a “human” entirely void of humanity thanks to their singular devotion to spiritual self-righteousness… and the world is crawling with them. What makes her scary is that she’s entirely recognizable – even if you don’t want to admit it. What makes her possibly the best Bad Guy of 2007 is that Harden pulls it off.

Aside from telling you the important stuff – that the movie is slam-bang terrific, that the monsters are legendarily cool, that the gore is sublime, that it’s scary-as-hell, that it offers one of the most expertly-cathartic “hell yeah!” moments of the year, that it’s the best (scary) Stephen King adaptation since “The Shining,” that it’s going to kick your ass like almost no theatrically-released American movie has been willing to kick your ass in a looooong time – you’re not gonna get much more out of me. There’s a lot of surprises to be had here that I wouldn’t dream of spoiling… including The Big One. Just please trust me that “The Mist” is boasting what will likely become one of the most talked-about endings in horror movie history and you owe it to yourself to see it the right way before some jerkoff ruins it for you.

This is the best horror film to run in theatres in decades, the best horror movie PERIOD of 2007 and (after “Gone Baby Gone”) the #2 Best Movie of The Year. It’s playing near you, it’s damn-near-perfect, and when you see it on HBO later you’re going to wish you’d made it in theaters. You NEED to see “The Mist.”

FINAL RATING: 10/10