BRIAN'S SONG, & THE PER-FISH-TENCE OF MEMORY

Opening this weekend:

 

De Palma—For all the faults of his movies, even for all the supposed great faults of his character, I’ve always had a soft spot for director Brian De Palma. This isn’t always easy to defend—while the frequent charge that he’s a misogynist can’t, I think, be proven from his movies, the general smarminess and arrested adolescence that many of them give off is hard to deny.

But his filmmaking mastery is even harder to deny. There’s a lot of schlock and silliness on the list of his credits, but there are several enduring classics, too, and I find that scenes from even his worst misfires remain in my memory in a way that plenty of better movies don’t. This is because, of course, he’s a true cinema stylist, lavishing so much craft and obsessive care on even the most absurd or ugly content that it ends up charged with vivid atmosphere.

Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow apparently share this admiration. The documentary they made about him comes across, more than anything, as an act of obsessive fandom. The only talking head is the title character, sitting in front of a gray fireplace. First he talks about his background, a little, and then he talks about his films—every one of them, I think, at least briefly—and the films that influenced him. As he talks, clips and stills are mixed in. That’s pretty much the whole movie.

The austerity of Baumbach and Paltrow’s approach is shrewd, because the material on which they draw is so cinematically rich. The biographical material is fascinating—I certainly didn’t know that De Palma’s father was a famous osteopath, or that the director himself had been a science whiz as a kid—and the straightforward progression through his works gives a bird’s-eye view of his development. The clips offer some intriguing treasures, too, like the unused deus ex machina ending of 1998’s Snake Eyes that’s more interesting than anything that made it into the finished film.

As for his own psychology, the ruefully chuckling De Palma seems candid enough, in a general sort of way. But although he shares some eyebrow-raising autobiographical subtext to Dressed to Kill, overall he seems unwilling to go very deep. Unlike, say, 1994’s Crumb, this movie doesn’t strip its subject naked for us. He’s evasive about his sensibility toward women, for instance, saying only that it “always made sense” to him, in the context of the genre in which he was working. And indeed, adjusting for generational differences in the degree of graphic violence acceptable in a movie, it’s hard to see how Hitchcock, for the most obvious example, is less vulnerable to this charge than De Palma.

In any event, De Palma can lay claim, at least for me, to the highest praise a documentary about a moviemaker can earn. Like last year’s movie version of Hitchcock/Truffaut, it left me with an appetite to re-watch these movies. 

 Finding Dory—Pixar’s 2003 animated ichthyological smash Finding Nemo is one of the most beloved of all kid movies. But I think I enjoyed this sequel focusing on Dory, the cheery titular blue tang with the unreliable short-term memory who helped in the search for the title fish in the first film, even more.

This time Dory, voiced by Ellen DeGeneres, is trying to find her home and parents (Diane Keaton and Eugene Levy), from whom she was separated as a kid, and the worrywart clownfish Marlin (Albert Brooks) and his little Nemo are helping her. Once again they have to cross the ocean, this time to a marine center on the California coast. And once again they have to depend on the kindness of strangers, notably an octopus named Hank (Ed O’Neill), as well as a whale shark and a beluga. Dory is also amusingly guided by a voice from above—specifically, the voice of Sigourney Weaver.

The imperturbable, doggedly polite optimism and geniality of DeGeneres is center stage here, and deeply endearing. Her off-the-cuff, throwaway delivery, along with the mild kvetching of Brooks, is central to the movie’s balance. The theme, along with the Pixar/Disney standard of separation from loved ones, is the preciousness and vulnerability of memory, and the light touch of DeGeneres makes this moving, but not exhausting.

To Mesa Arts Center this Sunday, June 19…

 …comes a different iconic American filmmaker of the ‘70s and ‘80s: John Carpenter. The auteur plays a concert of his own music, both from his films and from a couple of recent studio albums. Check out my interview with him, on New Times blogs.

RED & CIRCUSES

Maybe the highest compliment that can be paid to John Carter, the long-awaited version of A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, is that it looks just like it ought to look. Again & again, watching it, I was struck by how seamlessly the filmmakers had captured the visual flavor of the cover paintings of ‘70s-era sci-fi-fantasy paperbacks, by the likes of Frank Frazetta & Boris Vallejo & the Brothers Hildebrandt & James Bama.

These covers, often far more than the reprinted pulp tales from a generation or two earlier that they enclosed, had an effect on the imaginative landscape of Boomer-era boys that shouldn’t be underestimated, & the degree to which John Carter brings them to life is no small achievement. The green, six-limbed Tharks, the elite Red Martians, the rampaging White Apes, the cityscapes, the flying machines, even the hero’s endearing dog-like companion Woola—all of them struck this Burroughs reader as just right visually, & the battles, duels & gladiatorial combats are excitingly staged by director Andrew Stanton.

This makes it all the more disappointing to report that the movie isn’t the knockout that it wants to be. It’s terrific in stretches, but overall it’s tiring, with little of the book’s hearty, free-wheeling sense of storytelling panache.

Originally serialized as Under the Moons of Mars in 1912, A Princess of Mars was enormously influential on popular fiction in the 20th Century—even more so, possibly, than that later & more iconic Burroughs yarn Tarzan of the Apes. It tells the story of a former Confederate officer, John Carter, who, under attack by Apaches while prospecting in the Arizona Territory, suddenly finds himself mysteriously transported to the surface of the planet Mars, or “Barsoom” as it’s called by its inhabitants.

It’s a dying desert world, peopled by perpetually warring tribes of various bizarre races. Carter is caught up in these conflicts, & the lower gravity, coupled with the intrepidity & brash, boyish courage common to Burroughs heroes, makes him a virtual superman, & thus a legendary warrior among the Martians. He becomes an ally/friend of the fierce but honorable Thark chieftan Tars Tarkas, & also with the loyal Thark female Sola, & he also finds love with the beautiful Dejah Thoris, Princess of Helium.

Silly as all this sounds—& is—this rambling adventure narrative can give a heart-lifting delight. The movie, for all its craft, & for all its diligence in tidying up the source material’s 19th-Century chauvinisms, doesn’t come close. It’s badly overlong, & while the dialogue is intelligent, the screenwriters—Stanton, Mark Andrews & Michael Chabon are credited—weigh down the movie with layers of confusing, unnecessary & wearyingly “grown-up” exposition & backstory.

In this way John Carter is, regrettably, very much like the latter-day Star Wars trilogy. As with those films, the filmmakers seem to have been so intent on not treating the material as kid stuff that they forgot that kid stuff was exactly what we wanted from it—& just what Burroughs always gave us.

Another part of the disappointment may be that Taylor Kitsch, who plays Carter, isn’t quite up to it. He has a fine physique but a callow, somehow unmemorable beauty & no particular presence as an actor. The character is saddled, again unnecessarily, with a tragic backstory in the spaghetti-western vein, & he speaks in the same manner as Christian Bale in The Dark Night, that growl by which unconfident young leading men of our era try to project heartsick manliness, but which really just makes them sound like they need a lozenge.

One of Kitsch’s supporting players, James Purefoy as the valiant Kantos Kan, might have done better with the title role; he has a relaxed, swashbuckling charm. On the other hand, Lynn Collins fits the role of Dejah Thoris, here admirably more Amazon than damsel in distress, perfectly—gorgeous & regal, yet likable.

It’s especially gratifying that in modern-day Hollywood, Collins was entrusted with a romantic lead at the crone-like age of…34.