SIR ROGER, KING ARTHUR

RIP to Roger Moore, passed on at 89. My pal Barry Graham would roll his eyes whenever I admitted, while fully acknowledging the superiority of Sean Connery and some other 007s, that I always liked Moore, and enjoyed his droll, campy Bond pictures. I also remember liking him in an odd thriller from 1980 called ffolkes (aka North Sea Hijack). So last night I took down this august volume from my shelf...

...and spent some time reading from Moore's adventures on the set of Live and Let Die.

I had skipped the screening of King Arthur: Legend of the Sword a few weeks back, then heard it pronounced the first really big flop of 2017. But a friend of mine who had seen it and given his review ("Meh") nonetheless requested that I go see it, as he wanted my thoughts. So I did.

I suppose wouldn't want to argue too hard with anyone whose reaction to this very, very freely adapted origin story for the legendary King of Britain and his pals was "meh." Purists of Arthurian romance should certainly steer clear of it. The director, Guy Ritchie, has essentially just made another of his cockney gangster pictures, like Snatch or Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, with fractured, forward-lunging, whip-pan-driven action scenes and shady caper planning and bad boy bantering, all dressed up in a vague fairy-tale drag.

This movie's Arthur (Charlie Hunnam) has been found drifting down the river, Moses-like, and grown up as a bouncer in a brothel, unaware that he's been cheated of the throne by wicked usurper Jude Law. When he pulls a certain sword from a certain stone, it gets Law's attention, and also that of a motley resistance and a freaky, Morgana-like Mage (Astrid Berges-Frisbey; Merlin is mentioned but not seen) who try to train him for the battles to come.

Without proclaiming it a work of great art, I have to say that I enjoyed this funky, nervy, defiantly anachronistic and diverse film more than I expected to. Structurally, by making Arthur undiscovered royalty, the narrative insists on perpetuating that same toxic notion on which so much western storytelling is built, from the actual Arthurian myths to the Tarzan tales to Star Wars to The Lion King to the real-life electoral politics of the U.S.: That political power is, and ought to be, a heredity birthright. But when the "chosen one" is the likable, unassuming Hunnam, and he's surrounded by such a jolly disreputable lot, it's easy enough to overlook this.

Plus, the movie is full of cool monsters, from the tentacled sea-horror with whom Law has a Faustian relationship to the giant bats and rats and snakes and wolves against which Arthur must prove his valor to...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...this week's honoree, one of the gargantuan, destroyer-sized elephants...

...that rampage through the battles. Yeah, that's right, giant elephants, in ancient Britain. You got a problem with that, mate?

SUB TEXT

Opening in the Valley this weekend:

 

Black Sea—Submarine pictures almost always work, even the bad ones. There’s something inherently dramatic about that setting, with its inescapable allegorical resonances about the utter hostility of the environment outside the fragile cosmic and social bubbles in which humans live, and the terrible interdependence required for survival even within those bubbles. Corny dialogue and laborious dramatics usually can’t defeat that atmosphere.

When a submarine movie has strong actors and dialogue, so much the better. Happily that’s the case with Black Sea, directed by Kevin Macdonald from a script by Dennis Kelly.

The star is Jude Law, spitting an indignant Scottish accent. He’s Robinson, a sub captain who’s been laid off, with a pathetic severance, from the salvage company to which he’s given his post-Navy career. He gets financing to take a rust-bucket ex-Soviet sub to the bottom of the title body of water, in search of one of the traditional adventure-movie McGuffins: Nazi gold! There’s a sunken U-boat down there, see, containing a fortune in bullion extorted from Stalin just before the war heated up.

Robinson’s crew is, again traditionally for the genre, “ragtag”—a scruffy assortment of Brits and Russians, along with one American, a repellent corporate rep (Scoot McNairy). Weary after years of risking his life to make rich people richer, Robinson is determined that each member of his crew will get an equal share, as all are equally risking their lives. The American creep warns him that this naïve egalitarianism will cause trouble, and alas he’s not wrong. Treasure of Sierra Madre-style greed, suspicion and resentment soon arises, and spirals into violence.

Black Sea is like some freaky hybrid of Clive Cussler and Noam Chomsky, and its overt, rather fatalistic economic didacticism is often in danger of tipping over into heavy-handedness. But it doesn’t, quite. Many episodes—transferring the treasure across the ocean floor from the wreck to Robinson’s sub, for instance, or trying to steer through a narrow canyon—are tense, nerve-jangling showpieces, and the cast is an appealing rabble of grizzled seadogs that keep the drama personal and vivid.

PRO & CONCIERGE

Opening this week:

The Grand Budapest Hotel--Wes Anderson’s latest is set in another of his seamlessly-imagined alternative realities. This time, it’s a fortress-like resort hotel in a mountainous eastern-European nation. At the core of a couple of nesting-doll-like frame stories, the main action concerns the adventures of the Grand Budapest’s hapless but unflappable concierge Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes) and his sidekick, the neophyte lobby-boy Zero Moustafa, charmingly played by Tony Revolori as a boy. F. Murray Abraham plays Zero’s older self, telling the story in the 1960s to a young writer (Jude Law) staying at the now-shabby hotel.

Gustave sees his duties as including gigolo services to the hotel’s wealthy, elderly—in some cases octogenarian—female guests. When he is implicated in the murder of one of these ladies—who has left him an impressive legacy—he and Zero are chased across “Zubrowka” by the sinister agent (Willem Dafoe) of her rotten son (Adrien Brody).

This is, I think, about as simply as the plot can be explained. There are dozens of characters, all manner of intrigues, subplots, chases, gun battles, romances, delicious-looking baked goods, and eccentric characterizations by a cast that includes Tilda Swinton, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Murray, Harvey Keitel, Saoirise Ronan, Bob Balaban, Edward Norton, Mathieu Amalric, Jason Schwartzman and others, all in good form. Fiennes gives maybe his funniest and most endearing performance. It’s the usual Anderson shtick, and if, like me, you buy into his visions, you’ll probably find The Grand Budapest Hotel a delight.

Or mostly a delight, anyway. Grand Budapest is slightly marred, or at least was marred for me, by odd touches of violence—fingers severed by a sliding door, prison guards massacred during an escape, a casually murdered pet—that feel jarringly out-of-key with the general atmosphere of stylized whimsy. Other Anderson films have shown this trait—the arrow killing the dog in Moonrise Kingdom, for instance, or the fatal helicopter crash in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. I’ve always guessed that it’s Anderson trying to force some dramatic gravity into his fictions, to keep them from seeming too trivial.

He probably felt even more pressure in this direction with The Grand Budapest Hotel, because of the setting and the period. On the whole, Europe in the mid-20th Century was no picnic, and since there are no Nazis or Fascists in the movie, the gruesome touches in The Grand Budapest Hotel may have been the director’s attempt to reassure the audience (especially its older members) that he knows this.

But this doesn’t seem any more substantial than anything else in the film—just less good-natured. F. Murray Abraham’s magnificent voice, narrating from weary decades later, carries all the poignant melancholy the movie needed to offset its lightness. The Grand Budapest Hotel is the work of mature master confectioner; its violence seems self-consciously scribbled on its surface, by Anderson’s adolescent inner vandal.

Raze—Violence is also the issue in this exploitation melodrama, opening today and playing this week at Filmbar Phoenix. It stars the marvelous actress and stuntwoman Zoe Bell, best known for Tarantino’s Death Proof, as Sabrina, one of a bunch of women who have found themselves abducted and imprisoned in an underground bunker and forced to fight each other, mano a mano, to the death, in an elimination tournament.

They’re told that if they die, their loved ones will be murdered, and the survivors are shown videos to prove it. Running this vile spectacle is a husband-and-wife team (Doug Jones and Sherilyn Fenn) of unctuous sickos; the audience, watching on video monitors, are rich scumbags.

I sat there watching this film, directed by Josh C. Waller from a script by Robert Beaucage, wondering why it seemed so toxically more vicious than innumerable action films with very similar premises, in most of which the combatants were male—just last year, for instance, I enjoyed the Keanu Reeves-directed Man of Tai Chi, the plot of which, in bare outline, is close to identical. Was my reflexive revulsion to Raze just cultural Victorianism because the cast was distaff?

It can’t have been only that, because while I don’t much like the Hunger Games flicks, which also employ this idea and a warrior heroine, I’m not appalled by them in the same way I was by this film. Perhaps it’s because the fight scenes in Raze are so furiously savage and concentrated, and the actresses—among them Tracie Thoms, Bell’s costar from Death Proof—give off a despairing sense of empathy for the opponents they have little choice but to pummel. Anyway, while I found the first two-thirds of Raze more grueling than fun, it doesn’t seem fair to censure a movie for making hideous violence seem hideous.

Based on this description, your own tastes should tell you if Raze is for you. I wouldn’t quite call it torture porn, but it carries some of that genre’s dismal stink. In any case, on its own terms, it’s effective. When (spoiler alert!) Sabrina at last gets around to some vengeance against her captors, I can’t claim I’m sufficiently pure-hearted not to have enjoyed it.

FROST HIT

Given his abstract-impressionist’s brush on window glass, you might imagine Jack Frost would be the artsy, snooty sort. But according to Rise of the Guardians, Jack’s a friendly, mischievous boy, eager for acceptance, dismayed that the kids who have him to thank for snow days and sledding fun can’t see him.

Jack, voiced by Chris Pine, is the hero of the computer-animated flick, conflated from William Joyce’s series of children’s books. The title characters are the legendary or allegorical figures who watch over childhood wonder, hopes and dreams. The others include Santa Claus, voiced like a radio-comedy Russian by Alec Baldwin, the Tooth Fairy, a winsome half-woman/half-hummingbird voiced by Isla Fisher, and the tough, Aussie-accented Easter Bunny (Hugh Jackman), who comes armed with a boomerang, but also has the tendency to leave a blooming flower in his burrow’s wake.

Best of all, maybe, is the Sandman, a roly-poly sort who doesn’t speak, but communicates by shaping his thoughts in sand over his head. They’ve all received their commissions from the omniscient—and thus, of course, highly enigmatic—Man in the Moon, and now it’s Jack Frost’s turn. If he becomes a full-fledged Guardian, then the kids may actually believe in him like they do Santa or the Bunny, and thus be able to catch a glimpse of him.

The menace is Pitch Black, aka the Boogeyman, given a nicely ironic, tut-tutting voice by Jude Law. Pitch is a simply pale figure in a brown robe, attended by a stamping herd of terrifying black horses—nightmares, of course.

Nostalgic for the Dark Ages, the salad days of terror and despair, Pitch looks to make a comeback, and he’s no minor adversary. So the Guardians must put aside their egos and grudges—even the Bunny, who resents Jack for the “Blizzard of ‘68” on Easter Sunday—and unify to defend childhood wonder.

Like last year’s fine Arthur Christmas, among other kid movies, Rise of the Guardians plays with the childhood desire to literalize and reconcile the difficult logistics connected to the duties of these symbolic figures, and does it in funny and imaginative ways. It also features an exciting action finale and many good jokes and some thrilling images, like the Sandman’s good dreams—sand-cast dinosaurs and sting-rays and dolphins—trooping to the rescue down suburban streets. That it’s not the best animated movie of the year testifies not to its weakness but to the genre’s strength these days.

RIP to the excellent Larry Hagman, passed on at 81, and to lovely Deborah Raffin, passed on at 59. More about the redoubtable Hagman, and his contribution to Monster-dom, in the next edition of Monster-of-the-Week.