mondojohnson

Legion is the second quasi-religious action flick I’ve seen this week (the first being the far superior Book of Eli). It’s a bit of a clumsy mess, built of shopworn tropes, bad performances and an incoherent theology.

The film opens with archangel Michael (Paul Bettany) falling to the streets of L.A., where he surgically removes his wings and begins assembling a huge arsenal for some upcoming apocalyptic battle.

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The Hughes Brothers‘ film Book of Eli revisits the dusty, well-worn roads of the post-apocalypse — a scifi setting so familiar it’s become cliché. But the movie manages to rise above the predictability of this sand-blasted hellscape by telling a captivating story populated by strong characters.

I’m sure you’ve figured out from the trailers that the book in question is none other than the King James Bible — I don’t think that constitutes a spoiler. The protagonist, Eli (we learn his name from a pre-apocalypse K-mart employee name tag), is trekking across the United States, prompted by a divine voice that instructs him to deliver the very last copy “out west”, where it will be kept safe.

Eli confronts several murderous, grimy road bandits along the way; dispatching them with elegantly choreographed swordplay (well, machete-play). The fight sequences are masterful, particularly one early in the film which is played in silhouette against the bright, scorching sun. In this, and in other ways I won’t mention, “Eli” is an homage to the Zatoichi films and TV shows from Japan.

Eli blows through one Deadwood-esque enclave which turns out to be under the thumb of a tinpot tyrant named Carnegie (Gary Oldman). Carnegie has been looking for the book — but not for spiritual sustenance. He wants it so he can impose a Nietzschean “slave” mentality on the desperate denizens of his empire.

Struggles ensue, and Eli manages to escape with Solara (Mila Kunis), a kind-hearted, illiterate prostitute who is intrigued by all the fuss surrounding Eli and his book. Carnegie and his minions give chase, of course, leading to a surprising and exciting third act.

I found the movie to be quite absorbing, which is interesting considering that I’m an avowed atheist and anti-religionist. While the film was certainly on the preachy side, it did include some fascinating ambiguities about the uses of literature and sacred texts — suggesting that morality ultimately resides in one’s character, not in the scriptures one recites. The “book” is used in the film to justify slaughter and oppression — indeed, it is why all the other copies were destroyed: people thought it had caused all the destruction. But it is also the foundation of Eli’s indefatigable strength, and it inspires his young protege.

The film is also a visual commentary on our economic condition, especially the value of things. There is one particularly arresting sequence of an unhinged woman cowering behind an overturned shopping cart, jealously guarding its meager contents — “lost in the supermarket” taken to a new level. There are other clever visual flourishes as well, including a weather-beaten poster from the cult classic A Boy and His Dog hanging in Eli’s cell while he is a guest of Carnegie.

The performances are all top-notch, especially that of beautiful young Mila Kunis, whose talent is far beyond what you might expect from her well-known roles on That 70’s Show and Family Guy. I must also salute the small but excellent performance of Tom Waits, who has never disappointed me in anything he has ever done (that includes his Tweets, by the way — they rise to poetry sometimes).

From the “better-late-than-never” files:

Roy Edward Disney, nephew of Walt, died December 16, 2009 at the age of 79. He is rightly credited with bringing back the hand-crafted artistic legacy of Disney, and also with bucking the greedy grotesqueries of the Michael Eisner years. It was his vision that brought us the beautiful, classically-animated Princess and the Frog (for instance).

But I think Roy Disney’s greatest gift was resurrection of the 1945 collaboration between Disney artist John Hench and Salvador Dali, Destino. Dali and Hench got eight months into the project before the financial strains of World War II put an end to the ambitious venture. In 1999, Roy Disney decided to have Destino finished, handing the priceless storyboards over to French animator Dominique Monfrey, who along with an army of animators completed the short. It is mostly hand-drawn, with a bit of computer animation. There are eighteen seconds of the original — the bit with the two tortoises.

Here it is, enjoy:

[Source: Wikipedia]

James Cameron’s Avatar has joined the tiny handful of films that evoked in me a unique and thrilling sense of wonder; the sensation that I was seeing something exciting and beautiful for the first time. My earliest memory of such an experience was at the age of four, when Dorothy’s gray, dirtblown Kansas unexpectedly transformed into the technicolor landscape of Munchkinland in The Wizard of Oz. The next was Star Wars — its groundbreaking vision of a sci-fi universe saved the space opera from the cheesy B-movie graveyard it had been languishing in. And an honorable mention must go to Cameron’s other great CG achievement, Terminator 2, which had the audience literally “ooo-ing” and “aww-ing” with its previously unseen digital magic.

You can believe the hype about Avatar. It does indeed represent the next stage in evolution for digital artistry and 3D cinema, and I believe it has breathed new life into the movie exhibition industry — this is a film that simply cannot be viewed in a home theatre or PC, no matter how tricked out it is. You must be semi-reclined in a state-of-the-art, 3D auditorium with pumping, zillion-channel audio. I cannot emphasize this enough: the TV promos, even in the biggest, best 1080p do not even hint at the texture and pulse of the film. The planet Pandora is a new, immersive Eden that you will never forget.

Most other reviews I have read so far would shift gears at this point, to make the snotty observation that the story isn’t on par with the dazzling visuals. I strenuously dissent from this point of view: James Cameron is a passionate, political, and intelligent sci-fi auteur, and he continues this forceful tradition with Avatar. Lest you forget: the man writes screenplays that are awesome popcorn polemics. He is a radical feminist — see Sarah Connor’s “menstrual envy” tirade in T2; or the ass-kicking Ripley and Pvt. Goldstein in Aliens. And the director’s cut of The Abyss explored the strange new territory of post-cold war sci-fi — pretty revolutionary when you consider that fear of the Soviets was the entire underpinning of the whole genre.

Avatar nicely captures the current zeitgeist and its anxieties: the fragility of ecosystems under the boot of military-industrial greed machines. (The corporate dipshit is played to comic perfection by Giovanni Ribisi, in an echo of Paul Reiser’s turn in Aliens.) Cameron’s writing should also be applauded for its obsessive thoroughness — Pandora’s literary existence is drawn with the same mind-boggling resolution as the CG imagery.

James Cameron has surpassed Spielberg as the master storyteller of the American cineplex blockbuster. “King of the World” indeed — long live the King.

This past week I drank deeply from the 2012 Kooky Kool-Aid Kauldron, which was brewed up and served hot thanks to the release of Roland Emmerich’s mega-disaster movie. TV, print and the wacky world wide web served up all kinds of apocalyptic nonsense in hopes of riding the paranoid tsunami generated by the cheesy blockbuster’s cannonball jump into the media pool.

I started the week by re-watching Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which does not directly reference the 2012 myth but does employ the same sort of imperious insult to “the Mayans” that pervades the doomsday theories. (i.e. “the-Mayans-couldn’t-possibly-figure-out-how-to-sculpt-a-piece-of-quartz-on-their-own” trope.) Despite this silliness, I found the movie a lot more fun to watch on the second viewing. I think my initial viewing was disrupted by my inability to get over how old poor Indy has become. But this time out I went along for the ride, enjoying its byzantine, paranoid plot and the arch-camp performance of Cate Blanchett as a Soviet dominatrix.

Next up in the doomsday cavalcade were the numerous “documentaries” that turned up on various cable channels. Most of these were dominated by “experts” on the 2012 scenario, such as Richard Hoagland, the former NASA consultant who clearly went off the rails a while back. These shows tend to be fun, and I can take them at face value (especially if they’re on the SyFy channel, which is truth in advertising). But I get very irritated when they give short shrift to real scientists, such as the one History Channel doc that selectively edited Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Seth Shostak to make it seem as though they were warning of an alien invasion (the snippets were clearly part of a larger conversation about life in the universe, taken wildly out of context).

A long and tedious cross-country round trip led to my next 2012 selection, and it was the most entertaining of the bunch. It was Whitley “Communion” Streiber’s 2012: The War for Souls, which I picked up in the airport bookstore when I realized my other book was packed away. Streiber’s take on the legend is a paranoid epic. He stitches together a crazy-quilt of “Mayan” predictions, UFOlogy, alternate universes and centuries-old Reptilian scheming, straight outta David Icke. And he does this with his winking, “is this fiction or autobiography?” technique that made the otherwise boring plot of Communion so fun. (For the record, I think he’s having us on, and I salute him for it.)

And finally, yesterday I capped off the week by seeing Mr. Emmerich’s big movie. I concur with pretty much every review I’ve seen of it: it’s pretty dimwitted, but the lavishly generated end-of-days is quite amazing to watch on the big screen. Major props to the army of CG artists who brought this about — the resolution of the destruction is remarkable. Every corner of the screen is filled with remarkable detail: far from the explosive focal point in these sequences you can pick out realistically rendered people clinging to collapsing i-beams or running inches ahead of the onslaught.

But in the end it was dragged down by the very formulaic plot and characters. I would have paid just to see a show reel of all the destruction. However, I will give the writers credit for one thing: they played down the “Mayan calendar” aspect quite a bit. It felt more like a global warming parable along the lines of Emmerich’s other garish feature The Day After Tomorrow.

Phew. I am overstuffed by this super-sized apocalypse value meal. Let us not speak of it again, at least not until December 22, 2012, when we will wake up to a world as dull and annoying as it ever was.