MY MOVIE SHELF: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 45 Days to go: 34

Movie #395:  Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Let’s be clear: I wouldn’t own this if it didn’t come part of the Indiana Jones blu-ray collection. That’s probably the only way they could get people to buy it, really, because it’s not very good. Or actually, it’s okay as far as action-adventure films go. There are certainly far worse ones out there. It’s just not very good for an Indiana Jones flick.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a great example, actually, of a film that should’ve worked. It had all the pieces, or nearly all the pieces, that made other Indiana Jones movies great. It’s directed by Steven Spielberg, featuring the music of John Williams. Harrison Ford is back as Indy, twenty years longer in the tooth than he was for Last Crusade, but still feisty (when he’s not sounding off like a crotchety old man). They even brought back Marion (Karen Allen), easily the best and most substantial romance of Indy’s any of us ever knew about. She’s older too, of course, as are we all. And this was filmed before Shia LaBeouf went crazy, when he was still considered a good actor. Plus it’s got Cate Blanchett as bad guy Irina Spalko, and she’s usually spectacular. So many great pieces, and yet none of them really fit together.

Spalko, for example, is supposed to be eastern Ukrainian KGB, but Blanchett’s accent frequently drifts back to jolly old England, I don’t think intentionally. And most of the dialogue is stilted and awful. Even the story is awkward. We’re used to Indy battling Nazis, and even though Communists were considered a formidable opponent in the Fifties, to our modern sensibilities, they just don’t stand up. Not only that, but while technically Indy is still dealing in religious artifacts and myths, aliens and legends about Roswell and Area 51 are a lot more sci-fi than the Indiana Jones of yore. Indiana Jones is about the past, about being grounded in our history. That’s why he’s an archeologist. It’s not about futuristic “interdimensional beings” from somewhere not of this Earth. (Even Christian myth is a myth of, about and for our world and our world only.) That sounds like a personal taste thing and a minor quibble, and maybe it is, but when you combine it with the fact that by and large Indy’s friend Ox (John Hurt) is just carrying around a magic crystal, mumbling in incomprehensible poems and riddles, instead of Indy interpreting clues and solving puzzles with his knowledge of history and using his ingenuity to get out of booby traps and to the treasure, it falls incredibly flat. Incredibly. Flat.

I joke around a lot about really wishing I could see across the boundaries of stories I love — to see how a character came about in the past or to see where they go in the future — but often stories aren’t meant to work that way. We’re not supposed to find out who Indiana Jones is in WWII or that he’s a big Dwight Eisenhower supporter who hates Commies, when he’s long outgrown the nickname Indiana. We’re not supposed to think about how Marion wound up pregnant and deserted or how Indiana Jones is an aging man with a grown son. The point of fictional characters is that they can stay forever at the age we fell in love with them, and they don’t have to get old and sore and boring or settle down or die or any of that. They can just stay as they were, and we can leave the unexamined to our imaginations, where it’s always better anyway.

Or maybe I can just say I hate this movie and leave it at that.

 

MY MOVIE SHELF: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 88 Days to go: 59

Movie #352:  The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

Here is where I lose all of you who’ve come on this journey with me, for I hate The Lord of the Rings movies. I think they are tedious and overlong and hard to follow. I think if you didn’t read the books when you were young (which I didn’t), then you can’t possibly understand all that’s happening here. There is too much, and it is too tiresome.

The Fellowship of the Ring, for what it’s worth, is the one I hate the least (or the one I like the most, if that construct better suits you). It starts off with a ton of exposition and there is a lot of getting nowhere going on, but there are some good battles and high drama. (Although, without watching with subtitles on I wouldn’t know who half these people are. And didn’t, the first — and only other — time I saw the film. Even with subtitles on, how the hell am I supposed to know what “Crebain from Dunland” is? Those are not words that mean anything. You might as well speak nonsense at me for three hours.) This being my first exposure to any of Tolkien’s work, too, there was a certain amount of majesty and wonder in the rendering of the different beings from the different worlds. Elves and dwarves and hobbits were all new to me, so I did, once upon a time, enjoy being introduced to them. That time quickly passed, however.

As I said, I did not read the books as a child (or ever), so I had no prior associations with any of the characters. I came at the films completely fresh, which means that I was not predisposed to like or dislike anyone and I did not know any of what was coming and all allusions to events past or present are lost on me. I can only take what the movie gives me, and what I can decipher from it. To be honest, I think it leaves me at a bit of a loss, but that’s a failing on the film’s part.

I never really cared for the hobbits. They were always sort of gross creepy creatures, if you ask me, and the constant close-ups of Frodo (Elijah Wood) and his nasty fingernails weren’t doing him any favors. Other than the trick of making them so much shorter than everyone else, I have no interest to them. So the main, central sympathies of the film, and the champion relationship between Frodo and Sam (Sean Astin), is lost on me. I don’t care. Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen), is quite interesting, however, and  from the moment he appears as the shadowy figure they call Strider (which does NOT help me follow who any of these billion people are), I rooted for him. I also like that he has some sort of tortured romance with Arwen (Liv Tyler, whose name I didn’t quite catch the first time through because Tolkien likes to use words that all sound exactly alike — I’m looking at you Sauron and Saruman), not that we really got into that at all. It was just kind of teased, hung out there like a carrot for me to follow through three of these damn movies.

There’s a badass scene of Galadriel (Cate Blanchett) imagining her power if she took hold of the ring, and Gandalf (Ian McKellen) sacrificing himself to that fiery thing in the mines was quite moving. I also really like the sort of rise and fall of Boromir (Sean Bean) as he goes after the ring one minute and then defends the hobbits from the orcs the next, dying (as Sean Bean is contractually obligated to do in every role he takes) heroically. But all those are sort of contained to this one film. They exist entirely within it, unlike almost everything else going on. And there’s a lot going on. For all the battles, all the trekking, all the losses and all the triumphs and all the grim resignation to the task, nobody gets anywhere. Frodo is practically stabbed to death twice in this one film, and still nothing happens. They take forever and a day to get to the part where the fellowship is formed, and then by the end of the film it’s completely broken apart. Sam and Frodo are in a boat on their own, Merry (Dominic Monaghan) and Pippin (Billy Boyd) are captured by orcs, and Aragorn, Legolas (Orlando Bloom) and Gimli (John Rhys-Davies) are a rag-tag assortment of warrior species off to maybe rescue them.

And just when you think something’s about to happen, and they’ll finally get on with this journey of theirs, the movie ends. It’s not an end to the story, mind you, just and end to the film. They’ve dragged it out as far as they possibly can, and now you have to wait another year before you find out if anyone ever actually gets anywhere on this quest.

Luckily (or unluckily) for me, I don’t have to wait a year, for the next one is upon us. Let’s see how much more I can hate The Two Towers, shall we?

 

MY MOVIE SHELF: Elizabeth

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 281  Days to go: 273

Movie #96: Elizabeth

Let’s talk about the word “virgin.” As we’re all aware, and as this movie depicts, Elizabeth I was known as the Virgin Queen. But as this movie also depicts, that moniker had nothing whatsoever to do with the queen’s sexual experience.

One of the best and most memorable classes I ever took was a Mythology and Religion course my very first semester in college. Despite what most people realize — or, to be sure, what most Christians advertise — religions dating back far before the advent of Christianity feature tales of virgin births. All kinds of ancient beliefs, from across the globe, present the mythos of the virgin birth as a tenet and foundation of their cultures. What we learned, however, was that the word “virgin” didn’t always mean what it means today. Language, culture, evolves over time. “Virgin,” at that time, meant any woman who was no longer under the rule of her father but not yet under the rule of a husband. So, a single woman, basically. And since religions and cultures the world over have oppressed women and shackled them with a moral obligation not held to men, it was assumed that no woman who wasn’t married would be having sex, which is how the term “virgin” came to mean someone who has never had sex. Hence, the term “virgin birth” really meant nothing more than “unwed mother.” Puts a lot of things in perspective, don’t you think?

Anyway, just as virgin meant unwed there, it means unwed here. Queen Elizabeth I was not sexually inexperienced — certainly not according to Elizabeth the movie, but also suggested by many historical texts — she simply refused to marry.

Elizabeth starts during the reign of Elizabeth’s (Cate Blanchett) sister, Queen Mary Tudor (Kathy Burke), killing off all the heretic Protestants in England, of which Elizabeth is one. (Thus inventing the grossest alcoholic drink imaginable, the Bloody Mary. “Mix my precious vodka with grainy, bitter tomato juice, please. And while you’re at it, stick a plant in the glass.”) Many advisers to the queen are urging her to have Elizabeth executed as well, so she will not ascend to the throne and kill off all the Catholics. (The amount of killing done in the name of one God or another — and honestly, a Catholic God and a Protestant God aren’t all THAT different — over the entire course of human history, I swear. Do we have nothing better to do?) Mary delays and eventually dies of her false-pregnancy-inducing cancer, and Elizabeth succeeds her.

The tense religious divides in England at the time created a lot of political upheaval as well, and the movie focuses largely on the constant pressure on Elizabeth to marry and align with either France or Spain (marriage to an eccentric, orgy-loving cross-dressing Vincent Cassel, perhaps?) to secure England’s safety and the constant threats to Elizabeth’s life and throne (the 9th Doctor, Christopher Eccleston, is here masquerading as the Duke of Norfolk, and he’s out for blood, which is funny considering the 10th Doctor’s preference for Elizabeth).

Blanchett is positively stunning in her ability to downplay her natural beauty in favor of Elizabeth’s hard and stoic face, and yet still charm her court with quick wit and a sharp mind that is almost playful at times. I love Shakespeare in Love and I adore Gwyneth in it, but I really really really wish Cate had won the Oscar for Elizabeth, and not just because she wore that outstanding sheer black John Galliano dress that year, with the unbelievable hummingbird and floral embroidery across the back.

Elizabeth in the film is pulled apart emotionally by the stress of reigning over England, of making sound decisions, and of her desire to be with her favorite (and lover) Lord Robert Dudley (Joseph Fiennes). She eschews a lot of marriage pressure from advisers like the lovely and recently departed Richard Attenborough as Sir William Cecil in favor of spending time with Sir Robert, but when she finds out about Robert’s wife, she discards him (leading him to accidentally kill one of Elizabeth’s lady maids played by Kelly Macdonald by having her put on the queen’s dress so he can fuck the queen vicariously, I guess, but the dress was poisoned, so he also kind of accidentally saved Elizabeth in this instance, although that didn’t stop her from cutting him off but good. “You love me so much you’d have me be your whore?!”) and starts following the council of Sir Francis Walsingham (Geoffrey Rush), who is loyal as fuck, going so far as to sex-murder the French threat Mary de Guise (Fanny Ardant) and torturing the holy hell (haha) out of an unfortunately coiffed Daniel Craig as a vicious, murderous priest. Eventually treason is committed by Norfolk and slew of others and Elizabeth has them all beheaded except for the fallen, traitorous Dudley “to always remind me of how close I came to danger,” because Elizabeth was a badass and better than all of them. She had the heart of a lion.

To further state her point (in case the heads on spikes didn’t do it), she has lady maid Emily Mortimer cut off all her hair and gussy her up in a wig and all her queenly trimmings with heavily caked white makeup on every inch of her skin, and pronounce her marriage to England. She will have no other master. It’s just about the ballsiest thing ever done, and I can’t properly express how much I want to be Elizabeth in that moment — strong, confident, powerful, and does not give a fuck.

It’s been a really long time since I’ve seen Elizabeth — it’s not really one of the most rewatchable films ever made, great and deserving of your respect as it is — but I enjoy the hell out of it. Even with all the players and all the plots, the movie never loses its way and manages to be full of intrigue and suspense and betrayal. It’s a commanding film about one of history’s most revered and influential leaders of all time — a woman who, at the age of 25, took the highly contested throne of a country in turmoil and reigned for 44 years, turning England into one of the richest and most-influential kingdoms in the world, LIKE A BOSS — and I absolutely love it.

MY MOVIE SHELF: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 295 + 4 (I’ve started receiving additions from other people now) = 299  Days to go: 284

Movie #78: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

A lot of people scoff at Benjamin Button, at least in my experience, but I think it’s a beautiful film. In every way. Directed by David Fincher, it bears his signature richness and depth of color, of striking images. And yet it’s unlike anything else he’s ever directed in its utter stillness and lack of tension. Like water lapping easily against the shore for centuries, it feels peaceful in the moment and then you step back and realize how great an impact that water has had. That’s how it is for me, at least, watching this movie of singular, ethereal beauty, of love and of life and of the things that stick with you, when suddenly I find myself crying at the end as Daisy (Cate Blanchett) holds that young baby in her arms, 85 years after Benjamin was born.

Based on the short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button tells the story of a clock that was installed in New Orleans at the end of WWI and was made to run backwards so that maybe time would reverse and the boys lost to war might return home to live their lives. And by a bit of mysterious magic, Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt) was born the night the war ended, and though he was small like a baby, he was born old — with cataracts and arthritis and all sorts of ailments of the elderly. As time passes, Benjamin gradually gets younger in body and older in mind. His life follows these two paths at once, through war, through friendship, through deaths and births and through the love he holds his whole life for Daisy.

Pitt is a chameleon, fully inhabiting the bodies of men young and old. His slow, settled way of being fits Benjamin well, and he embraces the role in such a way that it’s easy to see Benjamin as one who has accepted who and what he is and is simply experiencing life as it comes, with no expectations or regrets. His mother Queenie (Taraji P. Henson), who raised him from the moment he was left on her back porch stairs, instilled him with love and faith and the knowledge that “You never know what’s coming.”

It’s a theme the movie holds to, encouraging us all to live our best lives and if we aren’t, “to have the strength to start all over again.” Benjamin seems to live so many lives inside his one. He grew up in the old folks’ home where Queenie lived and worked, and despite his apparent age, was always up for learning new things. He worked on a tugboat, went to war, restored a motorcycle, learned to sail, had a family and traveled the world. As every unfamiliar experience presented itself, Benjamin simply rode the tide along, accepting where it took him and knowing it would eventually lead him where he wanted to be — back with Daisy.

Blanchett is a vision herself in the film, going from a young, lithe spirited dancer to an older, wiser, wearier woman. She, too, lives many different lives, from dancer to lover to mother to caregiver, and while the movie urges its characters and audience to change their lives as they see fit after Benjamin leaves Daisy, the most encouraging part I find is that Daisy and Benjamin, having loved and longed for one another almost their whole lives, did not actually realize their great and epic romance — did not achieve it — until Benjamin was 44 and Daisy was 38. Having loved and lost and loved again, and having started over once or twice myself, I find their long-delayed relationship to be a testament to one’s life never being over until it’s over. There’s always something new around the corner.

Tilda Swinton’s character, Elizabeth Abbot, is a prime example of this. She was a failed swimmer in her youth who in her sixties managed to swim the English Channel. You never know what’s possible until you try. Or take the movie’s backdrop, the imminent landfall of Hurricane Katrina as Daisy’s daughter Caroline (Juliette Binoche) reads Benjamin’s old diary to her. Katrina is a powerful real-world symbol of having to rebuild everything after whatever disasters befall us. You never know what’s coming.

I turned 30 not long after my first marriage had blown up and I’d just started living on my own again in an awful, tiny sublet. I was working again for the first time in two years, having stayed home after the birth of my son, and I had nothing to speak of. I remember feeling very lost and very much like I had missed any chance I’d had at being someone or at finding love again or at anything, really. My whole life felt like a massive failure, and I didn’t know how I’d get on. My salvation came to me in pieces as I realized, through a couple of highly unlikely sources, how much more time and how many more opportunities lay ahead of me if only I open my eyes to them.

My son was definitely a motivator, as I had no intention of failing him like I felt I’d failed myself, but the places I learned to find value in myself were much more out of the ordinary. One, was, of all things, Sex and the City, which I’d never watched during its original run because I hadn’t had HBO, but when I moved into that sublet the first thing I did was subscribe to Netflix and put that series on my queue. In one episode, Miranda is making a list of her past lovers and her number wound up in the thirties. I was shocked at first, because when I was in college it was generally agreed (never overtly but always in a sort of unspoken prudence) that a woman’s number could be as high as seven or eight, perhaps — total throughout her lifetime — but never really more than that. Well here I was 30 years old and getting divorced and my number was already higher than I would’ve liked. It seems silly to look back on that now and remember how upset I was at the prospect of my number needing to increase in order for me to ever find love again, but I was quite upset indeed. It weighed on me. So Miranda’s number shocked me at first, and then I realized that the character was an unmarried woman in her thirties, and that even if she’d had two months-long monogamous relationships each year for the past fifteen years, she’d be at thirty. And suddenly it didn’t seem like such a high or unreasonable number. Suddenly I realized that the number itself was irrelevant, and that only the nature of your relationships really mattered.

The other was the website Television Without Pity, which I’ve written here before about how it introduced me to a whole world of people who cared about the types of things I cared about and where I encountered one woman in particular who inspired me then (and still inspires me now) to be better and smarter and stronger and more confident in myself every single day. I think I thank her for that at least once a year, though I’m sure she still doesn’t quite understand the magnitude of my appreciation.

So, you see, second chances and second lives can come from anywhere, at any time. Even a movie like Benjamin Button, who some find heavy-handed or trite, can be the source of inspiration. It’s not something I watch a lot — the movie is long and densely packed with Benjamin’s adventures — but it’s a film that moves me to tears every time, that reminds me every time that my life isn’t over, that my opportunities are still out there. You never know what’s coming.