Reviews Worth Reading
Perhaps The Fly dreamt it was a romance and a horror film and a science fiction film and before it was made, loved living this triple life. Watching them collide with each other is entertaining: this is a really squirmy movie, as difficult to convince yourself to watch as to put down.
Eighteen minutes and thirty-four seconds in, “The Departed” splashes up on the screen to hard Irish rock and you know someone’s probably going to survive this movie, to refer to those who won’t as the dearly dead.
Gene Wilder is Willy Wonka. Depp’s oddball Michael Jackson impersonation never achieves the same eerie uncertainty, an odd discovery given that the new version seems to pride itself in replacing musical camp with veiled horror.
It is a movie with no individual voice and, appropriately enough, it treats language as an impediment to be renounced. Language in It is either an echo or agent of fear. The bullies and auxiliary villains perceive language as intractable from their dominance.
The Thing’s lack of a stable form worked for Carpenter, who was able to squeeze a pure and palpable uncertainty out of never knowing who or what the Thing exactly was. But in Heijningen’s version, it seems to be more a matter of horror tradition than the transcription of a bold idea.
This below-average comedy becomes a disreputable slog by whoring out its cast for a studio’s marketing angle. It becomes socially harmful in the guise of good, a defiler in prophet’s clothing, when it promotes the fair representation of young girls in a film whose feministic prowess never exceeds petty and ill-conceived passes at men, whom Sony counter-marginalizes as comeuppance, as though the playground is the most intellectual arena to which feminism has ever gained access.
From Willem Dafoe approximating a German to Penelope Cruz approximating a maid to Judy Dench stretching no imaginations as a frowsy curd whose gaze would cure mustard, the train certainly carries cargo with the promise of becoming precious. But the cogs it winds up never outgrow their clock: the plot remands wit to the backstage of Branagh’s eyes and the film lulls almost indefinitely as soon as the mystery begins.
Christophe Gans admirably refers to Jean Cocteau’s 1946 La Belle et La Bête while presenting a version of the fairytale that should read as authentic even to those who have only seen the Disney one. What he does not do is capture the original’s symbolic poetry or frame the old pieces in such a way that their retelling is a revelation.
In Spade we find the perennial dark hero, the guy with toughness stitching up all the broken promises and empty bottles. Here’s the lusty dame with her own agenda. Here’s the story-less plot of dialogic violence. A villain like a plaster figure of deadly sins. A night capped by the hardest goodbye of the movies.