Category Archives: David Thewlis

Temeraire and the Challenge of Ambitious Fantasy

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We here at Shades of Caruso love dragons. We love them so much that both of us independently paid money to see Dragonheart in the theater, a movie that features Dennis Quaid playing a hero with a voice reminiscent of a man in the late stages of emphysema; a dragon played by James Bond who’s saddled with lines like “I merely chewed in self-defense, but I never swallowed”; and David Thewlis honking his way through another cringing, effeminate villain role. It might be a significantly less painful experience on mute, actually. Of course, it’s bad for lots of other reasons too: terrible writing and plotting, corny “comedy” bits, lackluster CGI, muddy production values… Sure, it’s got a talking dragon in it, but let’s face it, a dragon alone can’t save a bad plot (witness Eragon. Or don’t).

The truth is that dragon-related entertainment is hard to come by. Well, scratch that — I should say that good dragon-related entertainment is hard to come by. I have to admit that there are a lot of books about dragons out there that I haven’t read, so for all I know, there are plenty I’d love. It’s just that many of them sound so, well…silly.

I love the concept of fantasy, the incredible range of ideas it has access to. I read A Wrinkle in Time. I watched Game of Thrones like everyone else and I too want to slap Joffrey. I’ve even, God help me, listened to Yes. It’s just that the barrier to entry for fantasy is high, especially for books. Most of the covers could kindly be described as “niche.” The titles usually involve words like “untime” and “rayne.” The heroes’ names sometimes have apostrophes in them (note to fantasy authors: please stop doing this. I don’t want to read about someone named F’lar unless I’m supposed to hate him). The writing is often ponderous, and there are always twenty books in every series, and each one is a thousand pages long.

Perhaps the core audience doesn’t want publishers to pander to what’s considered acceptably mainstream, but I think a lot of genre books get unfairly ignored because non-fans see them and think, “That’s not for me.” Or worse, they’re intrigued, but they don’t know where to start. I edit children’s books for a large company, some of which are fantasy or sci-fi, so I realize the conundrum here: some stories might draw a larger audience, but they also have to appeal to the people they know are going to buy them, and be true to the stories within.

That’s where we come to Temeraire. The thing is, I don’t think I ever would have picked up these books based on the covers alone.

They look like standard-issue dragon fantasy novels. Actually, that’s what the US covers look like. The UK covers are better:

 

I like the dragon-and-boats thing — pretty accurate, and a bit more in the direction of “this might just be serious literature WITH DRAGONS IN IT OMFG” — but the paperback covers look a bit too much like Jane Austen-esque beast-friendly chick lit, which is schizophrenic and sexually confusing. I appreciate what a tough job the designers have, though – how do you make dragons look cool without also making them look defanged? How do you convey a blend of genres? How do you market a series like this? (I’m not going to answer those questions, by the way. Good writers know that asking questions rather proposing answers makes you sound much smarter.)

But I didn’t buy the books because of the covers – I found out about them because I read a review in Entertainment Weekly in which they were described as a kind of Patrick O’Brian with dragons, which, well, do you know me? Soon both my husband and I were both staying up until four a.m. to read them. The first three were published all at once, and at 300-400 pages each, they weren’t intimidatingly long. Neither was the world they described very different from our own. In fact, the only difference was that this alternate universe contained talking, intelligent dragons. Can you imagine anything more awesome? The only thing better would be if the dragons pooped Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

Novik came up with an incredibly clever, simple idea — what if dragons existed, and were used as a line of England’s military defense during the Napoleonic Wars? She also starts us out with a protagonist as green to dragons as we are — Captain Will Laurence (note lack of apostrophes), a seaman in Her Majesty’s Navy, who accidentally ends up with a very valuable Chinese dragon egg when he captures a French ship. The egg hatches some weeks later, while Laurence and his crew are still out to sea, and though Laurence knows almost nothing about dragons except that they need to be harnessed when they hatch (so that they can bond with the person who will become their captain in England’s Aerial Corps), he ends up becoming the choice of captain for the egg who hatches — the dragon he will name Temeraire.

The first book in the series largely concerns Laurence’s gradual acceptance of his new fate — he was a respected captain in a prestigious profession, happy with his life, and he is at first reluctant and resentful of his duty to Temeraire. We follow the pair as they embark on training and learn about life in the Aerial Corps, which is very different from the life Laurence knew. Aviators are the shabby black sheep of the military, treated by the rest of English society as something of a joke, their dragons feared dangerous. In fact, dragons are as intelligent as humans — they show an incredible aptitude for math and science, and Temeraire in particular is something of a savant. At first Laurence thinks his growing bond with Temeraire is unusual and that the other aviators think of their dragons as mere tools, but he soon learns that the bond between a dragon and his captain is one of the closest relationships either of them will ever experience.

When we meet Laurence he could be fairly described as a stiff; he’s full of rigid ideas about what’s right and mannerly, and it’s only when he bonds with Temeraire that he starts to relax. But it’s to Novik’s credit that she doesn’t entirely soften him — though he grows to love Temeraire, he is still concerned utmost with what is good, with being an honorable man, and, above all, with following society’s strictures. Temeraire is his foil – an intelligent innocent who is forever questioning why things are the way they are, much to Laurence’s exasperation and bafflement. This interplay is never didactic; it comes from character and not as a lecture. The push and pull runs through the series as a constant, with each party softening to the other’s argument as they grow to love and depend on each other.

Subsequent books have Laurence and Temeraire being forced to go around the world on various missions – to China, Turkey, Germany, Africa, and back to England to fight Napolean, whose ominous presence runs through the books like a harbinger of impending destruction. It’s an ingenious idea to have the pair travel, not only because there’s only so much you can write about English battles against Napolean’s army but because it allows Novik to explore how dragons are treated in other countries.

This is perhaps Novik’s cleverest invention. By far the greatest strength of genre fiction is the way it refracts all the ordinary issues of domestic drama from unusual angles. Where a straight drama would tell us a standard teenage-daughter-hates-her-mother story, The Exorcist compares puberty to demonic possession. In Ginger Snaps, a young girl getting her period for the first time realizes she is also becoming a werewolf; we watch her coming to grips with her newfound power and sexuality. Buffy, of course, worked on a throughline of a high-school-as-hell metaphor, and Battlestar Galactica got us to sympathize with Iraqi insurgents by having our colonized heroes fight back against an oppressive regime.

Temeraire explores issues of feminism (a certain breed of dragon — Longwings — only accept female captains, to Laurence’s surprise and profound comic embarrassment), racism, slavery, the question of animal intelligence, and dragons as a metaphor for how we treat outsiders and minorities, all without being moralistic. In England, dragons are kept away from society at large, and are generally treated as if they were large, winged horses. Their captains and crews love them, but they have no autonomy. Laurence and Temeraire don’t realize there’s any other way to be, until they travel to China and find out that there, dragons are independent and have their own lives and professions (ferrying people from one place to the other, performing manual labor), eat cooked meals instead of raw cows and sheep, and live in sheltered, warm pavilions instead of making their beds on the ground. And some — like Temeraire, for he is an extremely rare and special breed known as a Celestial — are revered as thinkers and scholars, and spend their time in the life of the mind instead of being forced to defend the country as an unthinking tool of war.

With each book, Temeraire grows more and more anxious about the way dragons are treated in England and feels more and more that he must do something to change it. Laurence wants only the best for Temeraire, and for dragons as a whole, but he knows the harsh reality he’s afraid to confront his friend with; he knows how unlikely the possibility of change is, especially in a time of war. We don’t need to have the point underlined — it’s there, and it shades everything we see.

The most touching thing about the books — in which much is touching, as Novik has a deft hand with melodramatic but never mawkish storylines — is the relationship between Laurence and Temeraire, but also the way Laurence is changed by his love. Temeraire is part precocious child, part confidante, part comrade and colleague — a true life partner — and he gradually opens Laurence’s tightly closed and rigid personality. For me, good drama happens when we as an audience are torn between two points of view — when both sides of an argument are presented as equally valid, and we empathize with the views of those on either side. I find nothing more riveting than this three-dimensionality of character, and good drama always has it, no matter what the genre. And in this series, Laurence and Temeraire are always fascinating, and always people we want to know.

Puppet Angel PWNs Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock…

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…All while being worshipped by his loyal fanbase comprising Daffy Duck, Hugo the Hippo, Remy the Rat, Gandalf the Grey, and Theoden, son of Thengel, First Marshall of the Mark, and King of Rohan.

Yes, we got back from our jaunt and bought another bit of pointless kit for the 360, but how could we not? I wager the 360 feels especially loved lately; after buying it I didn’t use it for a few months as I never had time. Call of Duty 3, Dead Rising, and Viva Pinata sit unfinished either in a drawer or in a totally different house. Now the machine is on most of the time.


Canyon and her “band” Wall of Crazy are currently getting 100% on Cream’s Sunshine of Your Love using her favourite guitar-playing avatar Lars Umlaut, and it’s yet another song I’d begun to take for granted but which is now re-revealed through the illusion of interaction to be an astonishing work of art. That’s another terrific side-effect of playing these games; while they’re pretty much nothing more than a really well-designed rhythm attack game with a brilliant interface, they also make you appreciate music in a new way. I say that as someone with no musical training; I’m sure to musicians that doesn’t apply, but to the skill-less bag of fingerless ears that is myself, I now have a different response to songs I know too well. Even Flow, School’s Out, Anarchy In The UK, Sweet Child O’ Mine and Misirlou from the previous game; I love them all over again, and in a new and deeper way.

That said, I’m still a bigger fan of Guitar Hero II over the new one. The band graphics might be more advanced in this, but the screen was livelier in the second, though they seems to be increasing in intensity as the game progresses. Also, even though the new game has some amazing songs (Holiday in Cambodia! Thank you thank you thank you!!!), the choices are often a little more obvious. It’s a no-brainer to add Paranoid by Black Sabbath, or Rock and Roll All Nite by Kiss, but then it’s ultimate funness to play them, so it seems churlish to complain.

Guitar Hero II had some real oddities; Laid to Rest, Psychobilly Freakout by the incomparable Reverend Horton Heat, Who Was In My Room Last Night?, Tattooed Love Boys, and many more. The new game seems to have less “finds”, but as my knowledge of rock (and certainly more recent stuff) is not perfect, I’m still coming across new favourite songs. After playing When We Were Young and My Name is Jonas, I now want to get into these musical chaps The Killers and Weezer. Oy vey, I am an old fart. And hey, who are Priestess? Their song Lay Down has a very appealing lolloping bass line. My avatar Axel Steel agrees.


There are other things I’ve noticed:

  • Choosing to include The Seeker by The Who over their more famous songs is a nice touch, though the CSI fan in me is a little annoyed.
  • While a lot of the regular songs seem longer than the previous game, there don’t seem to be any marathons like The Allman Brothers Band’s Jessica, a personal favourite. How great it would have been to follow the Slash boss battle with November Rain instead of Welcome to the Jungle? Having everything around the same length is less interesting than the variation of the other game, but it’s not a deal breaker (so far, none of my little complaints are. For God’s sake, they’ve got Kool Thing by Sonic Youth on there! Woooord up!).
  • The co-op career mode is great, but I think we’re already on our way to completing it on Easy. I get that it only really works well with a fraction of the songs, but even so, if half an hour gets us to the final level, then it’s a real shame.
  • The Star Power phrases are generally much longer, which would probably piss off the first-time player but is good news for addicts as it rewards the higher skillset.
  • I love the predominance of master material over cover versions, but often the song has a bad mix (Paint It Black) or seems too muted (Cherub Rock).
  • Canyon hates Black Magic Woman by Santana, apparently. She’s still got 100% on it, though.
  • As psyched as I am that Tenacious D’s The Metal is included, part of me weeps that the Godlike face-melter Master Exploder isn’t included. There’s a custom version out there, but God knows how to get hold of that.
  • While playing the co-op career section (our joint name: Professor XS), Canyon chose Xavier Stone as an avatar and I swapped to Midori, the J-Popster. As I spent most of the mode playing bass, I was thrilled to see that Midori is programmed to dance just like Tina Weymouth from Talking Heads. It was like watching a Japanese remake of Stop Making Sense.
  • Where’s the surf guitar??!?!?!
  • For that matter, where’s the blues? The Stevie Ray Vaughan song is a fantastic inclusion, but some BB King or Robert Johnson would have gone down a treat, especially seeing as how the story arc of the game involves a deal with the Devil. There’s a real gap in the game ready to be filled by other guitar genres. What about some Tito Larriva for a start? Hopefully some future download packs will deal with that.
  • Actually, this version is weighted more towards the more recent songs, but then the previous versions did a lot of the old standards, so it’s to be expected. It’s just a shame that an opportunity to edumacate those dang youngsters shouldn’t be passed up, is all.
  • Easy is not as Easy as Guitar Hero II‘s Easy, not by a long shot. I heard people complaining about the difficulty of Barracuda, and thought it was the final song, but it’s in the second level. I would have scoffed, but when we played it we realised it was way harder than anything in the corresponding spot in the previous game. As a beginner it would have really pissed us off.
  • What is with Heart? In the previous game their Crazy On You drove me to Bruce-Lee-style knuckle-cracking distraction. I had thought they were nothing more than a ballady bland-rock band but by Crom, their arrangements are hellishly complicated and asynchronous.
  • I’m not too sure about the boss battles just yet, but then that might be just because I don’t really enjoy listening to Tom Morello’s screechy gimmicky feedback nonsense, and never have.


An aside: we just watched him appraising air guitar as a judge at a contest in the mostly annoying but occasionally sweet documentary Air Guitar Nation, and it’s hard to take him seriously now. And yes, I realise how ridiculous it is to compare an air-guitar-appreciating Tom Morello to a digitised boss-battle-having Tom Morello, but that’s what the world has offered up to me, and I must make lemonade with it. It reminds me that the reflexively mean-spirited nodules posting on the Holy Moly talkbacks were complaining recently about Guitar Hero fans being useless for not trying to get a guitar of their own and learning to play it so that they can become creative instead of slavishly following notes on a screen. Firstly, at least we’re not just playing air guitar in Finland (seriously, I got so angry at the absurdity of that frigging movie, even though it was nothing to get steamed about and the documentary itself was not bad), which is a good thing. Secondly, I can’t hate on Holy Moly too much because another poster brings his angry typing guns to bear on those frigging Picture loan adverts that pollute TV like so much elephant poop.

Thirdly, Guitar Hero players are at least learning skills that might eventually translate into an artistic ability. Salon’s Farhad Manjoo wrote an entertaining post recently claiming that it was an accidental teaching aid.

I’ve interviewed several guitar teachers about the game, and some speak of it as the most revolutionary thing to hit the world of guitar since Jack White learned his first scale. “Guitar Hero” is introducing millions of young people to the possibility of playing the instrument, and it’s also teaching them important skills they’ll need to play… I discussed “Guitar Hero” with a half-dozen guitar teachers across the nation; all said they’d never played the game, but many had heard of it from their students. “Personally I’ve made hundreds or maybe even a couple thousand dollars on it, just because kids see the game and they want to go do the real thing,” says Rob Caviness, who teaches at Backbeat Music, a studio he co-founded just outside of Denver. “I think a lot of kids listen to music and they don’t know what it is — the game lets you pick out one particular instrument and it says, ‘Hey, this is what you can do with it.’”

I also agree wholeheartedly with this:

Red Octane’s Ted Lange argues that “Guitar Hero” instills two important guitar-playing fundamentals: sensitivity to rhythm as well as mastery over “independent hand usage — the fact that you have to do something different with each hand.”

I’m the least ambidextrous person in the world, and I’ve noticed Guitar Hero has changed that. I’m much better at that confounded rub-the-belly-pat-the-head thing, which is surely the official test for ambidexterity. And yes, I walked past a musical instrument shop the other day and stared longingly at a guitar for the first time in my life. I know it’s hard because I’ve tried it before and sucked at it, and I don’t expect to be able to play like Hendrix just because I played along with a game, but I honestly think that now, after months of using training frets, I can make another attempt at the real thing. Whether I do or not is another thing, partially because of the cost of guitars, and partially because I always figured I’d be better at keyboards. Where’s Air Keyboard Nation? Or Air Drumming Nation, which would be right up my street?

In short, please buy the forthcoming debut album by Carusonic: Get Behind Me, Thewlis, featuring a 20-minute jazz version of The Future’s So Bright, I’ve Gotta Wear (Crime-Fighting) Shades, with Ornette Coleman on sax and, in a gamble on my part, non-jazz player Philip Glass on keys. It will either be A Love Supreme for the 21st Century, or Jazz Odyssey all over again.

How did I not know this existed?

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I only just found out that this film, Shim Hyung-rae’s D-War, opened in the US this weekend. Until now I had not heard about it (even though it’s massive in South Korea). It looks like the best movie ever made.

Quick disclaimer: Canyon and I love the dragon. I love the dragon lots, Canyon loves the dragon lots and lots and lots. And yet, we are continually frustrated at the quality of dragon movies. Dragonslayer might be the best one yet, and that’s not saying much. It’s flat and humourless, though Phil Tippett’s Vermithrax Pejorative is a go-motion marvel. Dungeons and Dragons might be an excellent game, but the movie is an abomination, criminal for conducting a big finale dragon war in the background while the camera focuses on Jeremy Irons and Thora Birch throwing their careers and reputations on a bonfire. It’s so bad and yet I tried to record the straight-to-DVD sequel three weeks ago, saved only by the fact that our PVR memory was at a terrible low (as usual). Dragonheart is not quite as bad, and at least this time we get more dragon. The post-Jurassic Park effects on (::sigh::) Draco are very good, though having him voiced by Sean Connery is half-brilliant, half-lazy casting. Marks against it are the miscasting of Dennis Quaid (nothing against him, but he was not good in this) and the egregious amounts of Thewlis clogging up the action. His fey noncery is not exactly threatening, though he gets extra points for his Robert Plant hairdo. We’ve not yet seen Eragon, mostly because Irons + dragon = infinite suckage. It’s a rare thing, but I do sometimes learn a lesson from seeing bad movies.

While films get it mostly wrong, there are thankfully other media which flirt with dragonicity. Our beloved firebreathing reptiles are the only things that are going to make me break the bank to get a Playstation 3. The launch has been terribly mishandled, and there don’t seem to be any unmissable games (though Heavenly Sword looks pretty), but Lair features lots of dragon battles and might sway me, even though critical opinion is mixed. Who cares? It’s the closest I’m ever going to get to living out the events of Naomi Novik’s magnificent Temeraire series. If you’ve not yet read them, get the first three now and then get the fourth, Empire Of Ivory later this month. You will not regret it, especially if you even vaguely like either dragons or Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey/Maturin series.


So you can see I will see D-War even though it has been received very badly by critics. Plus, the director’s previous film, Yongarry, was widely hated. His response to the critical dismissal and subsequent public embracing of D-War is amusing. From Wikipedia:

The positive reaction among the Korean population is widely attributed to the film’s appeal to Korean nationalism. At the end of the film in its Korean print, director Shim delivers a message, “D-War and I will succeed in the world market without fail,” accompanied by the Korean folk anthem Arirang.

It somehow makes him sound like the Korean Uwe Boll, though Uwe Boll never appeared in a movie whose English title was Slap On The Cheek Several Times (Hyung-Rae was an actor before becoming a director). I don’t care. Anyone who has seen The Host knows Korean filmmakers know how to make good monster movies. Plus, it looks too awesome to comprehend, and sounds like a cross between Lord of the Rings, Gremlins, and Transformers. That’s got to be worth something. However, knowing my luck, it’ll actually be a cross between Hawk The Slayer, Ghoulies, and Transformers – The Movie starring Orson Welles.

Even so, how can you beat the cast? Yes, it stars Jason Behr apparently imitating Milo Ventimiglia, so that’s a strike against it, but besides him there’s Chris Mulkey, Robert Forster (Alligator was obviously a dry run for this film), and OMG, Craig Robinson aka Darryl from The Office! Suck on that, Krasinski! Fighting dragons beats working with Robin Williams and Mandy Moore.

Movie Face/Off! Biblical Horror Edition (Results)

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The reckoning is here! The scoring is very arbitrary and specific for these films, but the last set of figures represent things I’ve found I look for in every movie. Production values are something that often mean nothing (the best looking movie can still be shit), but it’s where I’ll give bonus points for nice photography or an excellent score. Unique selling points account for cool moments that cannot be classified otherwise. Oh, and sorry for using an obnoxious corporate phrase.

As for liveliness, a degree of coherent energy can make up for a lot of other failures, and by that I don’t mean crazy pace. Something slow-paced, e.g. Jonathan Glazer’s widely hated Birth (off the top of my head), barely moves at all, but there is an intelligence and plan for maximum effectiveness to that film that many films lack despite the frenetic editing or stunt-packed explosiveness or otherwise skillful filmmaking. It’s just apparent there’s some attention to pacing beyond making individual scenes work in a certain way, something that extends from committed and thoughtful performances on set down to the arc of the movie, and whether it works as a progressive ebb and flow from the first moment to the last, i.e. has the director figured out the movie’s parts and whole from a God position instead of just focusing on the money shots, for lack of a better word. It sounds silly and nitpicky, but I’m always surprised at how many talented or untalented directors nowadays can’t be bothered to figure that out. ::shakes cane at whippersnappers on their skateboards::

Ugh, it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while, and hope to explain better in the future, as well as come up with a better word for it. Not right now, though. We’ve got facing/off to do.

The Omen

Cast:
Liev Schreiber: -10
David Thewlis: -10
Julia Stiles: -3
Pete Postlethwaite: +2
Michael Gambon: +4
Mia Farrow: +7

Total: -10

I will admit, kneejerk dislike of the leads didn’t help here, but as much as Schreiber and Thewlis get on my nerves, I’ll admit they’re talented, intelligent actors (cursed though they are with sinuses that function as reverb chambers). Here, though, they just give up, sleepwalking through the movie with just enough awareness to point their faces in the right direction. Gambon and Farrow bring it back through sheer insane effort, but John Moore really wasn’t paying attention to some of the performances, and thus we get a mixture of apathy and shrill annoyance.

Plot elements specific to these films:
Elegant transmission of exposition: -5
Crazy deaths: +4
Ridiculous character names: +3
Grasp of London geography: -5
Fair treatment of women/reproduction: -10
Avoidance of lazy dream sequences: -4
Survival of ethnic sidekick until final frame: N/A (Thewlis doesn’t count)

Total: -17

Yes, Thewlis’ death was great fun, but once cinema has offered the sight of someone sliced into pieces by a flying wire fence (as in Final Destination 2), or a skull chopped into pieces by a dislodged engine (as in Final Destination 3), you’ve got to try hard to top it.

Miscellaneous:
Originality: -10
Liveliness: -7
Enthusiasm for project: -8
Avoidance of cliche: -10
Unique Selling Points: -10
Production values: +1

Total: -42

Lowest scores possible for originality, as it’s pretty much a Van Santing of the original movie. As for cliche, perhaps it’s a bit unfair to judge the script on that, but Moore offers nothing directorially that could sway me. Everything is filmed exactly the way you would expect it. As for offering something you can’t get elsewhere, you’ve got the superior original and the macabre Final Destination trilogy, which not only loses the religious guff (a secular horror movie about fate!) but presents pregnancy as something positive and hope-inspiring. That those movies are horribly bleak is both an unfortunate side effect and a USP. ::sigh:: I really like those movies.

Omen overall total: -69

A truly appalling, cynical cash-in movie, and further casting doubt on the ability of John Moore to create anything memorable in his career, other than the awesome plane crash scenes in Behind Enemy Lines and Flight of the Phoenix.

The Reaping

Cast:
Hilary Swank: +6
David “Elvis” Morrissey: +1
Idris Elba: +1
AnnaSophia Robb: +3
Stephen Rea: -4
Andrea Frankle: 0

Total: 7

For all the film’s faults, Hopkins did get a bunch of talented actors and didn’t get in their way too much, as opposed to Moore’s higgledy-piggledy approach. Swank especially tries hard. I just can’t hate on her. Her taste in projects is often way off, but she commits to it, at least. Andrea Frankle, playing Robb’s mother, was in the movie enough to register, but was given nothing to do other than be a red herring. She might be good given something to do, but here she was ill-served.

Plot elements specific to this film:
Elegant transmission of exposition: -2
Crazy deaths: -2
Ridiculous character names: 0
Grasp of London geography: N/A (If you could see the London Eye above the bayou, it would win hands down.)
Fair treatment of women/reproduction: -10
Avoidance of lazy dream sequences: -7
Survival of ethnic sidekick until final frame: -7

Total = -28

If only this film had a Bugenhagen, or death by satellite-crashing, it would register more. Instead the earnestness swamps anything, with only the staging of the locust scene making an impression. It’s the only proof that the crew were awake during the planning of the movie. However, see below.

Miscellaneous:
Originality: -7
Liveliness: -8
Enthusiasm for project: -7
Avoidance of cliche: -8
Unique Selling Points: -2
Production values: +5

Total = -27

Not as cynical as The Omen, and certainly the dour atmosphere tends to suggest Hopkins thought he was making something more than a silly potboiler, but it doesn’t hide the lack of imagination, not to mention the derivative script. It rips off many better movies, and the best scene in it, i.e. the locust attack, is nowhere near as emotionally affecting or dramatic as the locust scenes at the end of Days of Heaven. Completely different film, but infinitely more compelling. Some nice photography and effects, though.

Reaping overall total = -48

Bland to the point of barely existing. It looks a lot better than it should, but it’s a film that just didn’t need to be made. Not that that’s a bad thing; lots of films don’t need to be made, but they can still transcend that and become something great. A half-hearted rehashing of better plots without the wit or imagination to rework them, play homage to them, or push them to an insane level of melodramatic hysteria, is not what I have in mind, though.

So, in a fairish fight, The Reaping wins through superior acting and some nice production values. But as you can see from the score, it’s a Pyrrhic victory. In fact, here is an accurate representation of the Biblical Horror Movie Fightbot Face/Off, from Stuart Gordon’s massively entertaining Robot Jox.

Oh, the humanity! Those final shots show what me and Canyon’s brains were like once the movies were over. Damn you biblical horror movies! We should have rewatched Exorcist III. And pooed ourselves with fear.

Movie Face/Off! Biblical Horror Edition (Round Two)

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I blame the Reaping trailer. From the first moment I set eyes on its finely edited, momentum-packed, locusty goodness I was sold. Also, I’m one of the few who doesn’t think Hilary Swank is a punchline to a joke, and have a thing for bibli-horror, so it was a no-brainer. Even though reports were coming in of less-than-10% ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, and people leaving the cinema wailing and gnashing their teeth at the awfulness, and the direction being handled by long-time moviemaking failure Stephen Hopkins, still I held out hope. What, I ask you, is wrong with my brain that compromises my judgement so completely? Is there a medical condition out there that explains why fast-editing gets past my internal censor? I should ignore trailers for life. They’re responsible for so many wasted hours.

Last week we wasted two on The Reapening. Many apologies to Canyon who was wise enough to stop me from seeing the damn thing at the cinema, but unable to stop me hiring it via Amazon. Tellingly, it was the first brand new DVD I’ve ever put at the top of my rental list that didn’t indicate any waiting time. Even The Number 23 has a Short Wait marker. This should have been a warning. In my defence, I will say I thought the negative reviews were easily ignored. Horror movies are notoriously ill-served by critics eager to distance themselves from a genre they think is beneath contempt. So we watched The Repeapening immediately. And verily it did suck, enough to bring down the walls of Jericho and scourge the city of Sodom even unto the ending of the world, amen!

Swank plays a professional miracle-debunker, zipping around the world in a effort to disprove the existence of God, like Richard Dawkins crossed with Indiana Jones but 100% less exciting than that, though admittedly 100% more attractive. Considering the amount of Swankbum close-ups, I think Stephen Hopkins agrees. She is approached by David Morrissey, all rumpled and tortured after the death of his only child, whose hometown of Haven is being plagued by, well, plagues. Biblical plagues! Right up Swank’s alley.

She enlists the help of her colleague Idris Elba, wearing an egregious handlebar moustache, at which point I placed my bets as to when he would die. Because it’s the rule in movies that the black sidekick dies before the end, usually to signify the raising of the stakes or the evil of the antagonist. It’s so common that I unconsciously make predictions even while feeling nauseated by the whole insane cliched horseshit of it all. I plumped for one hour in, and settled back as the team leaves to go meet Morrissey back at his town, way down in Louisiana.

Morrissey, famed for undergoing auto-erotic asphyxiation during sex in Basic Instinct 2: Kink Addiction, is one of those actors that is obviously talented, but is most famous for appearing in films where there is no evidence of such. It’s very frustrating. There is also the problem that he looks a bit like a smug potato, something that The Nesbitt also has trouble with.

Here he is charming the pants off Swank with his erudition and earthy, Southern swagger. It’s a serviceable performance, hamstrung by the decision to use his dialect training to improve his Elvis impression, and we spent the entire movie finishing every one of his lines with an impassioned, “Uh huh huh!” This joke refused to get old, despite my efforts. He tells her of a murder of a boy in his town, and the young sister who may have committed the murder and then turned the river to blood (AnnaSophia Robb, who does sinister child-staring very well). He’s pissed because, while investigating it, he ruined his best pair of Blue Suede Shoes. Uh huh huh.

With barely any delay, our team of Mythbusters get to work testing the bloody river for the presence of sciencey stuff. Biblical scientists (those who tally biblical tales with verifiable historical events) were consulted for the film, which accounts for one of the few good moments of the film, where Swank is confronted by a bunch of scared yokels whose cows are tipping themselves (by dying horribly). After listening to their theories of plagues and whatnot, she snaps and reels off the ten plagues that hit Egypt after the Old Testament God got pissed off at something the Egyptians did. Exploring their sexuality, or getting body piercings, or exercising their free will, or something equally heinous and plague-worthy. All ten plagues are accounted for by science: bacterial contamination of the Nile killed all the frogs, which created an increase in flies, which coincided with a terrible sandstorm, and more spreading of illness, and the poorly fed firstborn children of the area couldn’t fend off the disease, and thus died (there was more, but I can’t remember the ten plagues now. Baldness? Giant rabbits? My biblical knowledge is very basic). It’s a very convincing argument, and the yokels immediately ignore it. Except Morrissey, who is all shook up by her brilliance.

Or so it seems! The town really is being hit with a series of biblical plagues, usually heralded by an appearance of the weird girl. Even if she was the meanest girl in town, why is this godly place being hit with the same plagues visited upon the godless Egyptians? It makes no sense, something that anyone with a suspicious mind would spot. So someone at some point says, “The Devil likes to borrow God’s tricks,” which is great misdirection, and totally fools everyone, oh yes (except for me who had totally spoiled for the finale for myself months earlier).

I know what you’re thinking. “Why is Swank so anti-religion? There must be a very serious reason, because a natural belief in rationality and an interest in scientific objectivity just isn’t good enough.” The film responds thusly. She is phone-stalked by a priest from her past; Father Costigan, a name nowhere near as likeable as Bugenhagen. He’s played by Stephen Rea, obviously killing time until Neil Jordan gets in touch. This was bad news for Canyon, who reacts to the appearance of Rea in much the same way I do when Thewlis and Schreiber show up.

During his various conversations with Swank, we slowly (and I do mean slowly) find out that Swank was a nun whose husband and son were killed in the Sudan by superstitious villagers suffering from the effects of a severe drought. Those crazy primitives! Beyond the offensiveness of the stereotype, it paints the scientific sceptic as someone hitting back at religion as vengeance. God (literally) forbid she might just be an unbeliever. Who’d sympathise with one of those? I’m sure it fulfils some McKee doctrine rather too literally, and ticks a box from a script meeting, having the heroine face the demons from her past, but it bugged me, especially as she is shown to have tried to commit suicide, which is ripped off heartily from Carl Schultz’s far-superior The Seventh Sign. Anyway, her scepticism soon fades in the face of her many many dream sequences, mainly of her family being killed, though with the occasional kitchen mishap involving eggs filled with blood and kettles that don’t just boil, but boil in italics with multiple exclamation marks after it!!!! She reacts badly to this, as you would.

See her pain? This scene made me wish I was watching Poltergeist. You know, the bit with the crawling steak, and the maggots, and the torn-up face. That was proper horror. The trouble with this scene is that a fairly important moment happens before this one. Morrissey decides Swank is probably feeling lonesome tonight. Cue much rutting, though at least this time we don’t have to witness Morrissey’s twitching buttocks and neck-harness enhanced O-face, a la BI2:RA. Despite this wonderful omission, the scene is filmed in such a way that you can’t tell if it’s actually happening, or if it is, is Swank in control of herself?

(I don’t have a screen capture of the sex scene, for decency’s sake, but I do have a picture of Idris Elba, topless. You can’t see his back, which has a huge tattoo on it. He’s a Christian in the movie, so I guess the tattoo is probably Jesus, but I was convinced it was Bob Marley. Hopkins has lit the scene so badly you can’t tell what’s going on. This is nothing new.)

Re: Swank’s possible loss of control, I don’t mean, “Phwoar, I’d do Morrissey as well, cor!” Until that moment she appears to be a hard-headed woman, but suddenly she’s all swoopy hair and sweaty back with the potato man. If you know what happens at the end (hint: it involves evil pregnancy, as lots of bibli-horror movies do), this dramatic plot-swerve comes across as obviously paving the way for the big reveal, and if you don’t know the ending it’s needlessly creepy and unerotic, perhaps not as much as the rape scene in Rosemary’s Baby, but similar in tone if not extent. Either way, it’s ambiguous, because as soon as that ends, she’s in the kitchen, and things are going bump, and the ghostly mysterious child returns, and then she’s in the Sudan. Was the sex a dream a la Rosemary’s Baby? Or is Stephen Hopkins a really shitty director with an appallingly bad track record? Oh, I answered my own question there. Never mind.

By this time there are more plagues, including a lice infestation among the children. This spells T-R-O-U-B-L-E for our intrepid scientists, and B-O-R-E-D-O-M for the audience. A series of plagues hitting a small Louisiana town should be fun, right? Well, perhaps it’s the presence of Hopkins behind the camera, or budgetary constraints (it’s made by Joel Silver and Robert Zemeckis’ medium budget horror factory Dark Castle), or maybe plagues just ain’t what they used to be, but it goes nowhere real fast. We ended up entertaining ourselves by inventing alternate endings. Our favourite involved the Lice King, who lives in the sewers and send his lice soldiers out to rummage around in hair. Here is Canyon’s sketch of the mighty and fearsome Lice King:



And yes, that ending would have been better. At around this point (where we were both surfing the net or washing the dishes in terror), Stephen Rea phones Swank to blurt out a ton of exposition about an ancient cult that sacrifices every child except its firstborn. Oh my God, more sacrifice! Swank’s backstory has matched up with the A-plot! But what’s this? More exposition tumbles out of Rea, heralding his imminent death, of course. There’s an unnecessarily complicated prophecy involving second born children and a chosen one who will become the Anti-Christ! So it must be the young girl, right? She was a second born. But God doesn’t actually seem to be targeting her. And there’s supposed to be an angel involved. Whuh? That doesn’t make… Oh, look, a big effects sequence involving billions of super-deadly locusts!

Swank regains her faith in about four seconds flat after getting the call from Rea (who then dies, for no real reason), and surmises the mysterious child is going to be killed by her crazy hillbilly family, and while looking for her gets caught up in the 7th plague, known as The Enlocusting. Actually, this is apparently what The Reaping is, perhaps because locusts eat/reap crops, though I doubt they can kill people, which is what they do here. Are they poisonous? Do they fly into your lungs eww? Maybe I missed something from my vantage point in the kitchen. Ignoring our sudden compulsion to switch the movie off and watch A Bug’s Life instead, we stuck around to see, oh teh noes! Idris Elba killed in mysterious circumstances! At an hour and twenty, so I lost the bet with myself. This movie is obviously full of surprises.

Like the first big shock of the finale; it wasn’t just the hillbillies that are evil, it’s the whole damn town! And the kid is not evil, but sent by God to trigger the plagues, or something. And David Morrissey, while not actually being the devil in disguise, might as well be, that pig. And Swank is the angel, because she was once a nun. God unleashes his final horrifying plague; the CGI Fireballing! The townsfolk are rent asunder in a shitload of digital flames, and Morrissey tries to mess with Swank, but God says nuh uh bitch and hits him with all of his fancily rendered wrath. Booyah, potato man! God obviously likes his spuds roasted.

With everyone else in the film now dead, Swank drives off with the holy child, which would have made a tolerable end, but then the child reveals that The Shagging that happened mid-film got Swank pregnant. That virile bastard! Turns out it counts as her second child and his second child, and basically, thanks to the risible rules the movie has written for itself, the kid is the Anti-Christ. All along she was a puppet on a string, and woooo big shock ending. It’s totally superfluous and adds nothing to the movie. In fact, it just complicates matters greatly. Very silly stuff, but of course the film has to portray sex and pregnancy as being the end of the world. That’s what this shit always does.

Needless to say, I hated it. The able cast is wasted utterly, obviously trying desperately to breathe life into a movie edited into flatness in post. I really do have a big problem with the continuing employment of Stephen Hopkins. Again and again he pummels good or indifferent material into empty, momentum-free film-chaff. With The Repeapeninging Hopkins proves yet again he has no idea how to pace a movie or create atmosphere; it’s one of the least effective horror movies I’ve ever seen. Nothing in it works, which is surprising as it borrows plots from far better movies: Rosemary’s Baby, Exorcist III, The Seventh Sign, etc. Yes, the script (which he is not responsible for) is horribly derivative and silly without his help, but that doesn’t change the fact that everything he touches turns to grey paste. Only the first season of 24 and The Life and Death of Peter Sellers rise above his usual level, and they’re for TV. Perhaps he should stay there.

Right, I’m in the middle of inventing a hugely complicated scoring system to see which Fightbot will triumph in this Face/Off, but until then, see how many Elvis references you can find in this post. It should give me time to work out my film algebra.

Movie Face/Off! Biblical Horror Edition (Round One)

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In a not-really-very-odd coincidence, over the past couple of weeks we watched both The Omen remake and The Reaping, two low-wattage horror movies tapping into the religious paranoia fad currently sweeping the world. Of course, this being the real world, that semi-coincidence did not signal the imminent birth of the Anti-Christ, or bring about a series of plagues that range in severity from mildly inconvenient to just plain deadly. Which is good, I guess. However, it begs the question, if The All-New-No-Actually-Pretty-Much-The-Same-Omen and The Swankening were downloaded into the bodies of giant robots and then sent to battle it out inside an enormous futuristic arena, which flavour of film-inspired Fightbot would triumph?

The original Omen isn’t that great a movie, but it is a lot of fun, and was directed with an entertaining OTT conviction by Richard Donner. The remake, on the other hand, is utterly flavourless and pointless. Other than the rubbernecking attraction of seeing Mia Farrow play a crazy nanny (she’s very convincing), there is nothing to recommend. It doesn’t help that it features the two most adenoidal actors on the big screen, Liev Schrieber and David Thewlis. Their scenes together sounded less like exposition-heavy blithering about Revelations and more like two adjacent hornet’s nests exchanging hostilities.


I’m not a fan of either actor, finding them to be deeply unwatchable, what with their numerous acting tics, relentless nasality, and humourless approach to their craft (though Schreiber did a lot to erase that image with a brilliant appearance on Conan O’Brien taking the piss out of Studio 60. I’d link to it but Satan himself took it off YouTube). The film also erased any good will The Bourne Ultimatum had generated towards Julia Stiles. Perhaps that’s a little harsh. After all, it can’t be much fun playing that most unpleasantly misogynistic of bibli-horror staples; the mother whose womb and maternal instincts are used as a battleground and weapon in the war between God and the Devil. Still, like Schreiber and Thewlis, she looks like she’s counting the money in her head for long periods.


However, it’s all well and good seeing actors you don’t give a crap about turning up in dreary biblical horror movies, but when it’s someone who you think is an acting hero, i.e. Michael Gambon, it gets less funny. Thankfully he’s only in one scene, as the memorably named Bugenhagen. The name is whispered dramatically throughout the movie, usually by deformed or insane priests, often during thunderstorms. The dramatic effect this should achieve is undermined by the fact that Bugenhagen sounds like the creator of a popular ice-cream brand. Gambon gives it his all, bellowing various expositionary ravings with a conviction the movie doesn’t deserve.

It was also a shame to see Pete Postlethwaite turn up as a priest who tries to encourage Schreiber to kill his kid. Quick pointer; telling someone their adopted child is borne of a jackal is a quick way to alienate them. I mean, I assume so. It’s not like I’ve ever done it. Second thing to remember; if the hounds of Hell and all of Satan’s minions are trying to stop you from killing Damien the demon child and will use the weather, twisted probability, and various possessed animals to do it, get to the point. Starting conversations with such information-lite ravings as, “When the Jews return to Zion, and a comet fills the sky, and the holy Roman Empire rises, then you and I must die. From the eternal sea he rises, creating armies on either shore, turning man against his brother, until man exists no more,” just obscures the important facts. A simple, “Kill your jackal child with a bunch of daggers owned by Fred Bugenhagen of Megiddo City or we’re all screwed,” should suffice.


The most frustrating thing about it is that, as has been commented upon by many, the film was rushed out to capitalise on the date 6.06.06. Knowing that, and sadly without the ability to verify this, I was unable to determine any difference between David Seltzer’s script for the new movie and the original. Is it the same movie with contemporary references? It certainly seems like it, with only a couple of the death sequences altered, seemingly just to punch them up. Patrick Troughton got impaled by a church spire in the original, but Pete Postlethwaite gets impaled to the power of eleventy by a church spire and multiple shards of stained glass. A damaged sign swings down and clips off Thewlis’ head in a shot that is probably less dramatic than David Warner’s outrageous death by sheet-of-glass, but is maybe a touch more elegant, if you can call demonically-inspired decapitation powered by mystical contrivance elegant. Whatever. It was the only moment of the film that entertained me, and not just because it meant no more Thewlis, so it gets bonus points.

But I cruelly take those points away for the worst crime in modern cinema; misuse of London landmarks! It’s a stupid thing to be pissed about, and I’m sure it happens in movies set in all the major cities, but having the US Embassy downriver from the London Eye is nonsense. Plus, where is the Saatchi Gallery? And the Aquarium? And the Royal Festival Hall? There is nothing. Just a landmark digitally patched into the background. Later, there are several scenes with Stiles and Schreiber driving miles out of London to get to their enormous estate, and yet over the tops of the trees you can still see the Eye. Perhaps it’s possessed by Satan, and is following them around. In the final breathlessly boring chase sequence you can see Czech signs on shops in the city centre. I know the movie is a half-hearted, cynical exercise in cashing in on a frigging date, of all things, but surely someone somewhere could have made a bit of effort. I guess if effort’s what you want, director John Moore is not your man.

So, in a Face/Off between this and The Reapening, surely the latter will triumph. Have I ruined the suspense by slating this movie so badly? Well, anyone who has seen Swank battle evil plagues with little more than science and not-science will know it’s probably going to be a photo finish.