I spent most of Quantum of Solace missing Casino Royale.

I missed the absolute clarity of the wide-angle view we had of the action, stitched with a pulsating tandem of escalation and diminuendo that pervaded the showpiece sequences with a shot-to-shot rhythm rivalling the finest fruits of Steven Spielberg’s longtime collaboration with editor Michael Kahn. I missed how Bond was constantly and seriously endangered on all sides. I missed the dutiful preservation of Ian Fleming’s greatest balancing trick: the ability to draft characters that look like comic-book figures on paper and still make them belong in a milieu of hard-boiled, no-nonsense realism.

Nowhere in Quantum of Solace will you find anything to match the tension at the poker table, the tics of Le Chiffre, or the topping of Daniel Craig’s devil-smile when the airplane sabotage sequence finished with its controlled-explosive kerplop.

This isn’t to say that Quantum is a bad time at the cinema. It’s good fun, it’s technically accomplished, and it retains the brains, topicality, and calculated coarseness of its predecessor. There is even a shocking homage to Goldfinger‘s most iconic image that literally drips with the post-9/11 ethos, capturing the essence of the new James Bond in a single frame. And I know it’s a cosmetic trifle, but the locational title cards are superb.

But they borrowed the right Fleming title, for this film is a quantum indeed: discontinuous, and in need of a unified theory.

The best thing Quantum of Solace has going for it is its stark departure from formula, a consequence of its situation as a direct sequel to Casino Royale—and I mean it when I say direct: it’s a short drive from one to the other. The newer film gets considerable mileage out of extending the arcs of characterization that were already in place. Bond is still too trigger-happy for his own good, and not entirely honest to himself about his lingering connection to Vesper Lynd; M has the same agitated personality as in the preceding film, wherein she had a very distinct characterization from the M of the Brosnan era despite how both of them were played by Judi Dench.

Really, the sense of serial continuity is such a surprise next to the episodic reboots of the past that it is enough to make Quantum feel wholly unlike anything the film franchise had hitherto produced. The plot follows no predictable curve. There are surprises galore, twists around every bend, as moles show their hands when you least expect it.

Co-writer Paul Haggis’s fingerprints are all over this film, and at this rate it’s only a matter of time before he directs a Bond film himself. I mean this as an observation, not as a positive or negative remark: I’ve been paying attention to Haggis since all he was known for was an obscure Soviet rock-and-roll romance called Red Hot, before Million Dollar Baby and Crash made him a big player. He became involved in Casino Royale in the later drafts to add some polish, and while I’m saying this on a hunch, I believe his presence helped substantially without taking over the script. In Quantum, which has no bedrock of Ian Fleming to sit on, Paul Haggis characters are everywhere—from the ostensible Bond girl from Bolivia played by Olga Kurylenko to the mustachioed caricature of a CIA regional branch director, to the CSIS agent who shows up at the end. (Count on the Canadian writer to give Canada a nod, however small.)

One of the reservations I had about Crash was its habit of beating hot-button issues with the blunt hammer of a news-reading dilettante, and Quantum of Solace is guilty of the same: it is so eager to play whack-a-mole with everything under the sun—oil exploitation, climate change, water commodification, CIA-backed dictatorships, and more—that it all amounts to a wild tangent from what we really care about: the looming threat of a subversive global organization reminiscent of SMERSH and SPECTRE in their Cold War heyday.

Quantum‘s opening scenes promise a continuation of Casino Royale‘s suggestion that by messing around with Le Chiffre, MI6 has poked its finger into a much bigger pickle jar than they are prepared to handle. For a while, we are lead to believe that the film will actually go somewhere with this, but as soon as we get a tease of the organization—a merry band called Quantum that meets over performances of Puccini—all Bond ends up pursuing is another appendage of the operation.

Not a very interesting one, at that: the world of Quantum of Solace is full of delicate characters in bold-stroked political situations, in dramatic contrast with the Ian Fleming ideal of bold-stroked characters in delicate political situations. It’s casual Friday at the office for the supposed Bond girl and the alleged Bond villain, and while I don’t know the proportion of Haggis’s contribution to the script compared to his returning collaborators Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, I smell the distinctive odour of Crash, Crash, Crash.

Perhaps it isn’t fair to criticize Quantum of Solace for not being Bondish enough when it is here to try something new. But one would be right to accuse it of taking a few too many cues from The Bourne Supremacy and inheriting the same case of middle-child syndrome. It feels organically connected to Casino Royale thanks to the returning minor characters, the reliable linchpin of Daniel Craig, and the retention of the rubble-flecked texture of sandstone and shrapnel that draws its power, I suspect, from its resemblance to the war photography we have seen come out of the Middle East. Structurally, the plot development mimics The Bourne Supremacy more than I’d like, with the open ends on either side, the returning minor characters I alluded to above, and the pursuit of grudges unrelated to the main plot to settle an unresolved score or two.

Make no mistake: there’s room for another Bond yet in the Daniel Craig era, and probably some more after that if the next film wanders off like this one without answering its own compelling questions. I like the idea of a tight continuity over several Bond films, creating a series within a series, but there needs to be progress and direction every step of the way. For an unorthodox entry to the franchise—the first film in the series extrapolated from the events of a preceding Fleming story—Quantum of Solace exudes an odd impression of returning to business as usual. The Bond film series currently has the good fortune of existing in a world where geopolitical intrigue is the most exciting it has been since the height of the Cold War. Let’s not squander the moment.

The Da Vinci Code is inherently an interesting case study in film adaptation, since the “novel” on which it is based is so incompetently written that the most charitable thing a reader can do is think of it as the first draft of a screenplay proposal by a ninth-grade kid who once got molested by a priest. And then there is the further gamble of handing it to the most erratic screenwriter in Hollywood—Akiva Goldsman, who wrote two of Ron Howard’s better films (A Beautiful Mind and Cinderella Man) but also has his name on the likes of Batman & Robin and I(saac Asimov is rolling in his grave), Robot.

Ron Howard, at least, has a track record that assures us he is literate in the art of cinema, which is not something we can say for Dan Brown’s grasp of written English (grammatical enough to be published, but only that). To film The Da Vinci Code in a manner that reflects the quality of its prose would require a handheld camcorder and a monk costume from the corner shop. That the adaptation is in the hands of professionals at all is enough to assure us that the delivery is an improvement—and it is.

Less expected is how the film manages to expose some of the serious defects in The Da Vinci Code‘s story structure that the book’s breakneck pace sweeps under the rug. Dan Brown’s novel is many execrable things, but one thing it is not is boring. (It’s like Sarah Palin that way—fitting, because Dan Brown’s America is Sarah Palin’s America in so many respects.) Ron Howard’s film is boring, and it is Dan Brown’s fault.

Many filmgoing citizens unfamiliar with the language of cinema cling to the correlative-not-causative mantra “the book is always better than the movie” and expect that the role of the movie is to be as faithful to the book as possible. (You know who you are, you odd ducks who inexplicably prefer the first two Harry Potter films to the far superior Prisoner of Azkaban.) In the case of a book like The Da Vinci Code, I would maintain that it is the responsibility of a filmmaker, to the audience and to the storied history of the craft, to fix the original work.

Howard and company manage this to some degree, though they do not go far enough—I, for one, would have liked to see them redact Robert Langdon’s title (Professor of “Symbology”) to reflect what he actually is, a scholar of Religious Studies or Art History. Fortunately for educated audiences, gone are the majority of Dan Brown’s endless expository insults to the intelligence of anybody who knows anything about anything.

Nobody has to be told what the Fibonacci sequence is. There are no digressions about how Walt Disney rose from the dead to insert subliminal Grail imagery in The Little Mermaid or how the female-to-male proportion of bees in hives works out to exactly the Golden Ratio (an irrational number impossible to express as a ratio of integers). Nowhere does Langdon indulge in fond flashbacks about lecturing clueless and gullible students who gasp at every earth-shattering, life-changing revelation he presents. Nor is Sophie’s estrangement from her grandfather solely reduced to seeing him do something naughty and being scarred for life; instead, that event is the culmination of a gradual course of exclusion that sours her very relationship with history. On the whole, the characters exclaim less, and there are fewer dumb contrivances.

Somehow, The Da Vinci Code still manages to hit a running time of 149 minutes, making it the rare book-to-film that takes longer to watch than read. (I am told that in some regions, there is an extended cut of 168 minutes in length, which encroaches on the territory of the shorter historical epics.)

Say what you will about Dan Brown’s fluffy little caper—I know I have—but one thing it does have going for it is a constant sense of forward motion. It flows like a pot of gravy poured down your throat—it goes down while it’s hot, but it’s best not think about it afterwards. (Nota bene: I haven’t tried this, and neither should you.) In part, this is because the writing is so thin. Brown is an author of limited visual imagination, and his idea of character development seldom extends beyond, “He’s claustrophobic and he looks like Harrison Ford.” And that’s the main character we’re talking about. Ergo, the character work is incompressible, and there is nowhere to go but up. Brown’s characters are not people: they are data points who know only what it is convenient for them to know, and they are always in a hurry.

Howard’s film redresses some of the book’s deficiency of character, but too often at the expense of time. Neither the book nor the film understand that the way to reveal character without seeming digressive is to test and change the characters as the plot unfolds rather than crystallize them in backstory. The book skirts around the task of making anyone seem interesting at all; the film stretches too far to give its cast something to do.

Thus we go from a handful of appreciable moments where Tom Hanks expresses Langdon’s trepidation at entering enclosed spaces with an anxious look and a “Do we have to go in there?” (good), to overt revelations that he fell in a well as a boy (that’s it?), to a series of grainy and overexposed flashbacks depicting his time in the well (redundant, redundant, redundant). Goldsman’s screenplay tries to salvage this in the final scene between Langdon and Sophie, where the former brings up his claustrophobia to make a point about how there’s no escaping our history—trite, perhaps, but appropriate to the theme that Goldsman develops to prop up Sophie’s characterization as a woman afraid of but not incurious about the past. This is an invention of the film’s; Dan Brown is not a writer who knows about themes.

Until the rest stop at Sir Leigh Teabing’s mansion, the film actually moves along at a nice clip; it’s no North by Northwest, but it holds up next to your typical run-of-the-mill chase flick. It’s a little jarring to see the laughable anagrams Brown generated using Anagram Genius plastered all over a film that takes itself seriously, as they are barely a rung or two above the moment in the 1966 Adam West/Burt Ward Batman where Robin deduces that Catwoman must be involved in the villains’ treacherous plot because the Penguin’s submarine is in the sea, and “sea”/C stands for Catwoman. Nevertheless, the pace is fine, despite the occasional reliance on injections of artificial tension, like when Sophie slips her car between a pair of trucks—backwards—and narrowly avoids a hopeless future as the centrepiece of a French-cryptographer sandwich.

Then comes the pivotal exposition dump about Jesus and Mary Magdalene, the part of The Da Vinci Code that made a lot of people angry—so angry that they turned Dan Brown into a millionaire overnight. Howard at least has the good sense to give us something pretty to look at, in the form of grainy and overexposed flashbacks (see a pattern?) of the Crusades, Constantine’s Rome, and the Council of Nicea. I wager that the millions spent on Templar costumes and lavish historical sets would have seen better use in a film that was actually about the Nicene Council; here, they only emphasize how pedestrian the main plot is, as our heroes hop from one popular tourist destination to another.

The tea party at the Teabing mansion reveals a fundamental flaw in Brown’s plot design, a defect well hidden in the book. It is this: Teabing tells Langdon and Sophie everything they need to know about the Grand Religious Conspiracy at the halfway point, and our heroes spend the rest of the story confirming it. Maybe my perspective is skewed by my prior familiarity with the book, but if it is my knowledge of how everything unfolds that spoils all the fun, that is a damning indictment of the quest itself.

If the only thing that keeps the audience engaged is the promise that the road must end—if the process of discovery and revelation is a series of puzzles that the reader is invited to solve before the “expert” protagonists do, and provides nothing else to enjoy on its own terms—if the characters simply follow a trail without having to make any tough decisions—then the audience speeds to the finish, but only to get to the finish. There is no reason to revisit the story, as the architecture of the mystery is nothing to admire. If it’s not worth seeing twice, it’s not worth seeing once.

It doesn’t help that in the eyes of a non-religious observer, the stakes of The Da Vinci Code‘s treasure hunt are comically low: to shed blood, sweat, and tears over a question of whether the Council of Nicea excluded certain apocrypha for unsavoury reasons is as trivial as an Internet-forum squabble about whether Star Wars comics belong to the Star Wars canon. It’s fiction either way.

Without the hook of leaving breadcrumbs for the audience to follow by themselves, the best the film can do is substitute visualizations of Langdon solving puzzles. In this respect Ron Howard was a natural choice to occupy the director’s chair: he calls for the same tricks as John Nash’s bouts of pattern matching in A Beautiful Mind, and coupled with Hanks’ performance, we get a much better picture of how people really go about solving anagrams (picking out clusters, occasionally mouthing substrings to latch onto associations by sound, until an epiphany snaps everything into place) than anything that is offered in the book.

It is still patently absurd that anyone accustomed to puzzles can have that much trouble figuring out a five-letter word for a falling object associated with Isaac Newton, when what Langdon and company should be agonizing over is whether the solution is apple or pomme, given that the puzzle-maker was French. But I suppose the film can only do so much. To a certain extent, the Grand Religious Conspiracy subgenre is crippled by design. While the detective story is an expression of a rational, empirical worldview where reason triumphs over the seemingly inexplicable, what the Grand Religious Conspiracy thriller asks us to do is trade one tattered article of faith for another one with even less substantiation.

What we are left with is a film that is watchable but dull, and full of talented actors struggling to make something of their paper-thin, typecast roles. (Jean Reno as an angry Frenchman named Fache? Seriously?) On the downside, Howard is too reluctant to cut their superfluous scenes, and the mundanity of the main characters is only more pronounced as we spend more unnecessary time with Paul Bettany’s self-flagellating albino henchman and Alfred Molina’s Spanish bishop.

And I’m not sure that would have fixed the pacing: Dan Brown’s story is such a one-gimmick yarn that, even with fewer flashbacks and tighter (dare I say more Spielbergian?) staging, I don’t think any film could salvage the page-turning excitement of reading The Da Vinci Code for the first time without a significant revision of the story’s meagre payoff. So dark, the con of Dan.

Thanks to the promotional stills and trailers for the film of Northern Lights/The Golden Compass, the visualization of amberpunk was the least of my concerns going into the film. The moment I saw that New Line had commissioned a cinematic adaptation, a list of Reasons to Worry flickered into being, and the visual design was the first item I crossed off the list.

Among the other, more pressing items: 1) In the novels, shapeshifting daemons like Pantalaimon retain a coherent identity before the reader because they are identified by name. How might one adapt that visually? 2) Lyra Belacqua is a role so ludicrously challenging that casting her appropriately could make or break the movie. Could Dakota Blue Richards convincingly fill her shoes? 3) Pullman’s writing consistently appeals to non-visual senses—touch, for example, as in the highly tactile experience of using the Subtle Knife. How might this work on film? 4) Will Pullman’s stridently anti-dogmatic message (which is finally poking the church in the eye with as sharp a stick as he intended, albeit twelve years late) survive commercial pressures for the filmmakers to self-censor? 5) Who is Chris Weitz, and should I be as worried as I am about his very limited directorial experience (About a Boy, Down to Earth and a co-credit on American Pie), or will he surprise me like Mike Newell did with Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire? 6) Are the angels in The Amber Spyglass still going to be naked?

Now, I regret to say I’ve only read Pullman’s marvelous trilogy once and therefore don’t know it backwards, forwards and upside down the way I (used to) know The Lord of the Rings, but my initial impression after seeing the film tonight is a very positive one. The adaptation adhered to its source with the utmost respect, but not slavishly or religiously (how ironic would that be?) to a fault. Devoted readers need not worry. In fact, I had myself a jolly old time right up until the credits rolled.

Unfortunately, the end credits are precisely where a very serious problem with the film appears. (Spoilers follow for both the book and the film.)

Remember the end of The Two Towers (the film), when Frodo, Sam and Gollum didn’t get anywhere near Shelob’s Lair, where Tolkien staged an absolute monster of a cliffhanger in The Two Towers (the book)?

Peter Jackson got away with that for three major reasons. a) He warned us all well in advance that Shelob was getting bumped to the third film. b) The Lord of the Rings was simultaneously planned and shot as a single picture, so it was fairly flexible as far as editing choices were concerned. 3) He ends the film with one of the best conversations in the entirety of Tolkien’s work (and one of the most poignant scenes in the combined running time of all three movies), where Frodo and Sam discuss whether their adventure will ever be the retold in books and stories—and tops it off with a moment with Gollum that foreshadows what is to come.

As you’ve no doubt guessed, the end of The Golden Compass (the film) doesn’t take Lyra and Roger anywhere near the end of The Golden Compass (the book), which—like the last chapter of The Two Towers—is one of the great open-ended climaxes in serial literature.

I’m not impressed, and to illustrate this, I’m going to draw a parallel (which is what the film didn’t do): a) I didn’t get the memo. Strictly speaking, this is my fault—Weitz explained his decision in an open letter months ago, claiming to have Pullman’s full support—and none of you will run into this problem, if you consider this post your memo. b) Production hasn’t started on The Subtle Knife; unlike The Lord of the Rings, New Line isn’t gambling on the whole trilogy at once. Although recent reports indicate that a script is ready to go, production of the rest of the trilogy is still (as far as I know) contingent on the success of the first film. 3) Chris Weitz doesn’t have the screenwriting mojo to make the dialogue in the airship journey to Svalbard deliver a satisfying conclusion that promises more to come.

In other words: what was Weitz thinking, leaving out the end of the book when the running time left plenty of room to spare? Did he go over budget? Was he not going to make the deadline? Did he not think the audience could deal with what happens to Roger, though now, they’ll just have to face it later? Was he intentionally trying to screw over the writer hired for The Subtle Knife, Hossein Amini (i.e. not Chris Weitz)? Did he envision Lord Asriel in a tuxedo, which he can’t depict until the expiry of Daniel Craig’s contract as James Bond?

Or did he simply not feel up to the task, which was why he left the director’s chair the first time to be replaced by Anand Tucker before subsequently returning in Tucker’s stead?

From a 2 December article in The New York Times:

Fans of Mr. Pullman’s version may be surprised to learn that the movie stops before the book does, leaving out Lyra’s long-anticipated meeting with her father, who plans to wage war on the Almighty himself. Instead the movie ends in stirring fashion, with Lyra saving the kidnapped kids from what amounts to spiritual lobotomy and heading off in an airship with Iorek, an armored bear who has become her friend and protector. “There was tremendous marketing pressure for that,” Mr. Weitz said. “Everyone really wanted an upbeat ending.”

He added, “They’re looking for a franchise here,” meaning that if “The Golden Compass” does well, the studio will go ahead with films based on the two remaining volumes of the trilogy.

Well screw you too, Mr. Weitz (and I say that gently, of course, as his film was great while it lasted). I’m not a stickler for films adhering to books at all costs, as longtime readers and personal acquaintances are no doubt aware after hearing me repeatedly assert and defend at length the opinion that The Prisoner of Azkaban is unquestionably the best Potter film—but this is just ridiculous. I believe in good filmmaking—read: filmmaking that isn’t afraid to take a few risks.

Philip Pullman says:

The ending makes every kind of narrative sense. The National Theatre production ended the first part plumb in the middle of The Subtle Knife, and nobody minded that because in the only terms that mattered it worked brilliantly. Every film has to make changes to the story that the original book tells – not to change the outcome, but to make it fit the dimensions and the medium of film. I’m very happy with the work the filmmakers have done, and no-one wants this film to succeed more, or believes in it more firmly, than I do.

That’s an admirable statement, and I’m glad Pullman respects the liberties of film as much as I (usually) do, but there’s something grossly arbitrary about Weitz’s decision that does not, in my mind, do anything to make the structure of the story more amenable to cinema. It reeks of a business decision manhandling a creative decision. I’m always one of the first to defend a film’s liberties if it makes for better visual-sequential storytelling, and I’m at a loss to understand how anyone could possibly think the ending in the film is better suited for the task than a sparkling starlight bridge to another universe.

Look, you just can’t beat the experience of having an eye-level encounter with a sky-level aurora. I should know. I’ve done it. I didn’t see any cities in alternate realities, but it still counts.

In Weitz’s defence, the creative dissonance in the production of The Golden Compass remained largely invisible to me until the end credits kicked me in the pants and cast off Pullman’s magnificent ending as if it were a daemon forcibly severed from an innocent child. Apart from that gripe, the film is actually as comparable to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire as I thought it would be. The visuals and effects work were congruous and dynamic enough to draw my attention to the subtleties in what they depicted. I accepted implicitly that armoured bears and nefarious golden monkeys ran amok in the world, and turned my eye to how they behaved. The technical aspects of filmmaking, at the very least, proved themselves ready to embrace Pullman’s imagination.

Most of my concerns were in this way assuaged. There was occasionally a bit of confusion as to when Pan was speaking, and whether his interior conversations with Lyra could be overheard by anybody else, but apart from that, the daemons figured in beautifully as an external manifestation of how characters felt and interacted. And it certainly helped that Dakota Blue Richards became one and the same as her enormously challenging character: she is the first and best argument for the New Line to go ahead with the next two films straightaway.

Visually, I actually have few concerns at all apart from the suffusion of blue that took a lot of colour out of the night shots near the end, a cinematographic issue that also detracted slightly from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

The musical score by Alexandre Desplat (Oscar-nominated for The Queen) definitely had its moments, but there were more than a few scenes in which it should have backed off. It suffices, but I was hoping it would more than suffice.

In a film adaptation of this sort, there is inevitably a certain loss of exposition. As a minor case, Lyra’s endeavour to set up a duel between Iorek and the usurper king of the bears (in the book, Iofur; in the film, Ragnar) doesn’t feel nearly as risky when we’re not given the disclaimer that typically, bears can’t be tricked. But we still receive a very concise sense of more important elements, like the Magisterium’s perceived connection between Dust and sin (and all of the hermeneutic consequences for myth-readers familiar with metaphors for menstruation and circumcision), which are necessary if the motives behind their daemon-cutting experiments are to be at all coherent.

Pullman’s anti-dogmatic message is in the film, and it’s explicit to the point of almost overcompensating for the initial suspicions that Weitz would be handling the Magisterium with kid gloves. I can see why Weitz isn’t writing The Subtle Knife, though: there’s a lot of “filler” dialogue, fully interchangeable with that of any other story where the hopes and fears of adventure-seeking children are involved.

All in all, though, I admire what’s in the film, and I’m going to see it again to see if it sticks. But the ending just kills it. And I don’t think this is just a matter of being suddenly let down after 113 minutes of highly satisfying development. (And Lyra is the one who’s supposed to be let down, not me.)

The ending’s absence doesn’t take away from the quality of what’s there, but consider this model of causation: a) Someone who hasn’t read the book smacks into the ending, thinks to himself, “How drab,” and doesn’t recommend it; ticket sales drop. b) Someone who has read the book smacks into the ending, thinks to himself, “Movies have violated the memory of one of my favourite novels once again!” (not my opinion, but I’m aware of how many devoted readers overwhelmingly harbour a prejudice against movies that dare to deviate from their sources, as if they were some kind of parasite to be exterminated) and doesn’t recommend it; ticket sales drop.

In either case, the decision to lop off the ending of The Golden Compass damages the possibility that The Subtle Knife will take a pocketful of New Line’s funding and come to the rescue. And even if they do go ahead with the next film, working in the climax of Pullman’s novel is going to be a considerable challenge. Pullman’s structure is abundantly clear: the first book is set in Lyra’s world, the second book begins in our world, and the third book offers a pan-universal tour of existence itself. Are we now going to have the crossing of the worlds at the beginning of the next film, without the benefit of two hours of solid buildup, followed by a massive gap in which Will Parry runs around and does his thing while we wonder what in the blazes happened to Lyra? Colour me a concerned citizen.

With that in mind, I hope the next two films go ahead, and that the incorporation of the first book’s ending makes sense. The Golden Compass was so close to hitting the mark, and we deserve to see the story completed. They have the right designers on the project, and more importantly, the right actress. Apart from the ending, I’m very happy with the film and I want to see more. Closure would be nice.

Lust, Caution is now playing in select theatres. I had the opportunity to see it a few weeks ago at the Edmonton International Film Festival, and although my impressions of a film are never wholly reliable after only seeing it once, my initial judgment is that it is the very best film I’ve seen with Ang Lee in the director’s chair. Mind you, I’m far more familiar with his recent films than I am with his works in the early 1990s, but this is still a strong statement of praise on my part when you consider that I’m suggesting comparisons to the likes of Brokeback Mountain and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon—excellent films both, but not as consistently tight in pacing. Highly recommended.

Is it just me, or are we in the middle of a spy cinema renaissance? In the last two years alone, we’ve seen Munich, Casino Royale and The Bourne Ultimatum—and I don’t hesitate to append Lust, Caution to the list. Be it the franchise blockbuster or the historical assassination thriller, the standard of achievement in the espionage genre, with respect to both brains and execution, is now at least comparable to the Hitchcock oeuvre without being completely outclassed.

And Lust, Caution begs to reach for the Hitchcock benchmark anyway, regardless of whether or not it succeeds. Even beyond the explicit allusions to films like Suspicion, it’s a film about the manufacture of a woman into a femme fatale, a theme that occurs time and again in Hitchcock’s best work— Vertigo, North by Northwest, and perhaps my personal favourite, Notorious (to name a few). Like Ingrid Bergman in Notorious, the femme fatale put in the position of using her sexuality as a tool of entrapment (Wong Chia Chi, played by Tang Wei) is the heroine who guides us through the plot, and not someone whose side of the story is concealed, as is often the case in classic noir driven by male protagonists of variable moral righteousness.

Naturally, how much of that “sexuality as a tool of entrapment” you can actually show has changed dramatically since 1946, which is why Lust, Caution is rated NC-17 in the United States, and where my discussion of the film becomes a tad more involved.

It’s always inadvisable to demarcate a genre (be it in film, music, literature, or anywhere else) with properties that member works must have. For example, anyone silly enough to claim that all epic fantasy sagas must include swords, magic and dragons will quickly find a prominent author whose work undoubtedly belongs in the category, but had the nerve to leave out the dragons. I recommend Philip Pullman.

I say this as a disclaimer, because I think a film like Lust, Caution, in being astoundingly explicit in its sex and violence by mainstream standards, belongs to a whole new species of thrillers. (And any categorical boundary we draw around it would likely also encompass Munich.) My reasoning here is that the genre of film noir that we associate with directors such as Howard Hawks, Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock as its leading practitioners is firmly, and perhaps fundamentally, defined by storytelling techniques that create tension with concealment. It was the era of Hollywood censorship that begat some of the lustiest eroticism and most chilling acts of violence in cinema—implied outside the frame, yet far more potent in their emotional impact than what you see in most films today that try to discomfort the audience by showing everything.

I’ve made this argument before in my post about Sin City:

What interests me is how so many people will take a look at Rodriguez’s adaptation of the Frank Miller graphic novels, admire it for its production design and say “that’s noir” without identifying any specific similarities beyond the presence of pulp archetypes like disenchanted detectives, pernicious prostitutes and corrupt coppers. Yet they make special note of the amplified comic-book physics as antique vehicles soar above the pavement and a landed punch sends a thug across the room. They cite the explicit violence and casual nudity as distinguishing marks of the film. They fail to notice that the obtuse, centrifugal expression to be found in Sin City places it at the other side of the world from what makes film noir tick.

Film noir is not about sex, booze and violence. It is about concealment and innuendo. The lines of noir dialogue you remember are the suggestive propositions. That is precisely why film noir flourished in the era of Hollywood censorship, its defining female archetype the femme fatale seductress with something to hide. It should tell you something that the narrative mode most closely associated with noir is the mystery, a story of secrecy and revelation. It’s when you don’t see sex, booze and violence that film noir is at its most effective.

So what I’m interested in is this: how does a film such as Lust, Caution—which is nothing like the unabashedly escapist genre parody of Sin City—evoke the tension of the classic noir thriller while getting as far away from concealment and self-censorship as one could imagine? Is it in the tempo of the film, its staging, or perhaps its careful control of perspective? What is it about Tang Wei’s remarkable performance that draws comparisons between her character and Ingrid Bergman’s in Notorious, when the latter’s most erotic act onscreen is the three-minute kiss on the balcony with Cary Grant?

I’m guessing that a large part of the answer lies in Ang Lee’s mastery of using sex scenes to develop character, something that I predict will be one of his major legacies as a world-renowned director.

There will undoubtedly be viewers who will find the sex in Lust, Caution to have too much lust and too little caution for their tastes, and walk away with the judgment that it wasn’t necessary for it to be that explicit. In China, which still enforces content restrictions instead of compelling self-censorship with an independent ratings board, it’s been trimmed by 9 minutes. (9 minutes? There was that much?)

I maintain, however, that the sex is not at all superfluous—and I’m not going to defend it with the hackneyed “but-but-but it’s the artist’s vision!” argument. There’s a critical juncture in the film that only works if you absolutely buy the transformative effect of bodily intimacy on the characters’ ability to make rational decisions. And much of the characterization—the development of strengths, the exposure of vulnerabilities—only works the way it does if you observe, in the progression of the sex scenes, what happens to the power structure between the participants. If you recall Cronenberg’s A History of Violence and how it bookended some of its character development with consensual sex at one end and rape at the other, you might have an idea of what I’m talking about.

It isn’t the first time rape has been deployed as an allegory for fascism, either (to call a spade a spade and go for the self-evident interpretation). I already considered Tony Leung Chiu Wai one of the greatest actors on the planet before this film; his subdued role here as a collaborationist officer is something unique, yet directly reminiscent of one of the most fearsome villains on the silver screen, Ralph Fiennes’ Amon Goeth in Schindler’s List.

A note on the adaptation: Lust, Caution is based on a story by Eileen Chang, who is reportedly my mother’s favourite author. I’m told that part of the inspiration for the story was Chang’s first marriage, which was to Hu Lancheng, a man who collaborated with the Japanese in 1940s Nanjing. Hu later wrote a memoir that included his own account of the marriage; my mother assures me that she has never been angrier with a book.

Chang translated many of her own works into English, but Lust, Caution wasn’t one of them; however, there is a new translation by Julia Lovell released in conjunction with the film. I’ll pick it up sometime, but I’m finding it impossible to squeeze off-syllabus readings into my schedule as it is—and should I even manage that, Gentlemen of the Road has top priority.

The exercise demonstrated, once again, that one of the best ways to notice new things about a story is to tell it. Here’s tonight’s curiosity: isn’t it odd that at the team’s inception, they christened it the Atlanta Flames? Were they proud of Union soldiers burning their city to the ground – or did they, frankly, not give a damn?

[Edit: According to these guys, that was a very good guess.]

Insert clever transition here.

It’s a strange experience to watch a cinematic remake immediately after the original film. It is not unlike reading a book right before you see its adaptation. When it comes to books, I know that for some people, it’s hardly ever a pleasant experience: they get all worked up about adaptation issues and never manage to get over them. For me, there is usually something unsettling that results from how the absences and changes are just as visible as what actually ends up on the screen, but this is typically outweighed by my attention to the use of film language in negotiating the inevitable gulfs. See my piece on The Phantom of the Opera for details.

Remakes, however, are a different matter. I think we often have a tendency to think of them as “new versions” of a story rather than “adaptations” in the same sense as books and stage plays. Gus Van Sant’s Psycho aside, our expectations typically extend as far as a reimagining of the holistic story and characters, and not shot-for-shot, plot-for-plot replication.

So it’s delightful when Naomi Watts steals an apple and Adrien Brody carries her down a vine in Peter Jackson’s King Kong, and it’s especially entertaining to us film nerds when the original film is hypodiegetically embedded in Jack Black’s film shoot on the ship; and then there’s the spider sequence, which is (oddly enough) a homage to a scene explicitly not in the original; but we see these as luxuries, and we could have done without them just the same.

That brings us to this weekend’s big release, The Departed.

A brief primer for those of you who don’t keep up with such things, and expect me to do it for you: Scorsese’s latest film is a remake of a 2002 Hong Kong cop thriller, Infernal Affairs, which quickly became Hong Kong cinema’s biggest phenomenon this decade not involving the farcical antics of Stephen Chow. The premise is deceptively simple: a police spy embedded in a triad (Tony Leung or, if you prefer, Leonardo DiCaprio) and a triad spy embedded in the police department (Andy Lau or, if you prefer, Matt Damon) attempt to fish each other out in a meticulous demonstration of what game theorists refer to as a simultaneous game of incomplete information.

If you haven’t seen Infernal Affairs, I highly recommend that you do. I revisited it last night, heeding a warning from a fellow film buff that it doesn’t hold up as well on a second viewing, only to discover that – while the shock value is gone, and there are two or three leaps of logic that arguably qualify as plot holes – the film is every bit as intricate as I remembered on the levels of direction, editing, performance and general craftsmanship.

A wise choice, then, for Scorsese and screenwriter William Monahan to adhere very, very closely to the sequence of actions in the original. Sure, the locales and actors are different, a few supporting characters are split and merged, and I’m told there are elements from the two sequels that emerged within a year of the original’s release. (Mark Wahlberg’s character is allegedly grafted from Infernal Affairs III.) I don’t want to spoil anything, but stack one film atop the other, and they mesh in an alignment I’d even call homomorphic.

But because the two films are so similar, and differ primarily in execution, I do feel compelled to compare them. I think my renewed familiarity with Infernal Affairs tempered my enjoyment of The Departed somewhat, and I suspect the latter deserves a second chance on a clean slate. I highly recommend them both, but neither one is free of imperfections. In that sense, I almost find that one complements the other.

Here’s what The Departed does better: onscreen violence, cinematography, verbal humour, the exchange of contraband, Jack Nicholson, clever visual motifs (I’m thinking of the final shot in particular), the budget, Catholicism, spoonfeeding the audience every step of the way to flesh out the motivations so nobody is left questioning why X knows/trusts/kills Y.

Here’s what Infernal Affairs does better: offscreen violence, editing, pacing of the opening act, sting operations, Morse Code, Buddhism, not spoonfeeding the audience every step of the way to beat it over the head with clues and motivations until it resonates with the guest appearance of Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb”.

Draw: stellar lead performances, use of cellular telephones, plot holes.

On balance, I prefer the original. I’ll concede that it is sometimes too subtle for its own good, just as The Departed is a bit heavy-handed when it comes to trying to explain everything (and still falling short in completely new ways). It doesn’t wave clues in your face like its American sibling, but it does indulge in the occasional redundant flashback to slap you twice with a revelation after it has been made. The two films tell the story from opposite directions, and different problems surface.

What The Departed doesn’t preserve about Infernal Affairs is its acute sense of perspective.

One of the core principles of film language is that while the audience is receiving visual data in a blinking rectangle, that does not mean films inherently work in a third-person objective point of view. Framing, blocking, the sequential ordering and timing of reaction shots – all of these elements contribute to a sense of omniscience and empathy, leading us inside a character’s point of view even as we see her face. Hitchcock played with this to no end. Hell, Scorsese plays with this to no end… just not up to his usual standard here.

It’s almost certainly an editing issue. There’s a big moment in both films that I won’t spoil, but it involves, er, gravity. In Infernal Affairs, it happens behind Tony Leung as he walks towards the camera, and it’s as much a punch in the gut for us as it is for him. (It says something that it still worked the second time through the film, even though I saw it coming.) In The Departed, the audience sees what happens long before Leonardo DiCaprio’s character; the eye level contributes to this, too. Something about it just doesn’t work: the timing and cutting feel off.

The Departed consistently opts for the visceral over what makes the most sense, perspectivally speaking. Mind you, Scorsese is still a master of the visceral; but that doesn’t always fit, especially in a film built on a concept that is all about the limited perspectives of the main characters progressing in blind, meandering baby steps.

Watch them both, though. I can’t think of a better exercise to teach yourself about the differing conventions and values of Hong Kong and American cinema, even if you presume that you’re already familiar with one or the other.

(The likely scenario is that you’ll only manage to see The Departed, which is playing in “theatres everywhere”, while Infernal Affairs is not. In that case, enjoy the element of surprise. I think that may have been missing in my experience, as there is very little in the Gotcha Department that Infernal Affairs doesn’t already do.)

The film is likely to pick up a whole heap of Golden Globes tonight, which I’m not watching thanks to Scrabble. I’ve never been suckered into the faux prestige of the Globes. The Hollywood Foreign Press has received a lot of undue attention by fortuitous statistical correlation to the Oscars alone – occasional, at that. And this year, they shafted both Munich in Drama and The Curse of the Were-Rabbit in Comedy. I remember when they had the class and courage to shower quality animation on an equal level with live-action.

I usually don’t do a year-in-review of film until about February, and this will probably be the case again, though the only exciting omissions on the list of movies I watched in 2005 are Crash and Walk the Line. I’ll catch up soon enough.

But first, a few words about Memoirs of a Geisha.

Now, one might wonder why I’m drawing attention to such a middling melodrama of no great consequence. Indeed, I found Geisha to be terribly underwhelming, though only rarely outright terrible. (To its credit, it sports pretty pictures of cherry blossoms and a lush musical score that is unique in the John Williams oeuvre, though in the general case the instruments and pentatonic melodies of the Far East are nothing new.) I want to talk about it because it is receiving a lot of undeserved hostility from folks on high horses who haven’t earned their spurs.

First are the postmodern other-thumpers who wave their Edward Said in the air and dismiss offhand the validity of a story about sexualized foreigners told in the mode of western romance. I contend that this is a misapplication of Orientalism.

Orientalist critique serves to reveal unexamined prejudices that are specifically not contained in the text, and calling the artist on it. In Geisha there are many. That’s fair. But the danger that Orientalism counteracts is the possibility that some secluded bloke might take mythologized falsities for historical fact.

Orientalism is not a blanket injunction on all works of tourist’s-eye-view fiction. We make allowances for factual inaccuracy in fiction all the time if it contributes to good fiction. Once contextual correspondence is out of the way, and those inaccuracies have been identified, it’s the textual system that counts. I find it far more patronizing for western audiences to be prematurely offended on the behalf of other cultures without an understanding of the difference between inaccuracy and offensiveness. As a romance, the Geisha story as presented in the film is weak for a number of reasons, but its western perspective isn’t one of them.

Then there are those who are deeply offended by the casting of three high-profile Chinese actresses as the principal players in a story set in idyllic fascist Japan, whose soldiers were off raping and pillaging in Manchuria at the time. There’s no other way to put it: the claim that actors of one Asian ethnicity can’t play characters of another is flatly ridiculous. Nobody complained when House of Flying Daggers starred a Japanese actor – and that was in no less romantic a role (martial arts expert, passionate lover, you get the idea). Were Polish Jews offended when a big-nosed American named Adrien Brody was cast as the lead in The Pianist?

Heck, Canadian actors play Americans all the time, and we hate Americans. At least, that’s what the Liberal Party tells me… some of the time.

To defer to one of the greatest film directors of all time: if Anthony Quinn can play Auda Abu Tayi and Omar Sharif can play Dr. Zhivago, all bets are off. Does Auda Abu Tayi serve? No!

If there’s any hump to get over at all once we’re past the biggest one (appearances), it’s not cultural consciousness or genetic heritage. It’s language. Sure, you can play it safe and genuine and go with an all-British cast for a British film, as was done to great effect in the Harry Potter films. But even Audrey Hepburn pulled off Eliza Doolittle the guttersnipe flower-girl and Eliza Doolittle the fair lady. Dialect coaching works wonders.

That’s probably the one aspect where the Chinese/Japanese discrepancy actually comes out in Geisha – language. Apparently, English in a sufficiently Asian accent was enough, and nobody took the care to note that there are actually noticeable differences between a Chinese accent and a Japanese accent. (It’s generally, but not always, in how they handle the Ls and Rs.) At any rate, it’s not a discrete either-or proposition, and if you listen carefully, even a Mandarin accent sounds different from a Cantonese one. Michelle Yeoh speaks in a sort of nether region that actually serves to make her character one of the more regal ones in the film. Gong Li, on the other hand, just sounds uncomfortable. But it’s not her fault she got horrible lines. “I will destroy you!” Yeah, whatever.

Here is a legitimate reason to subject Memoirs of a Geisha to endless mockery:

“Did Mother ever tell you about the eel and the cave? Well, every once in a while, a man’s eel likes to visit a woman’s cave.”

I’m told it’s straight from the book.

And you can stop giggling now.

There’s been a lot to say lately – busiest movie month of the year, after all, plus a somewhat amusing election campaign and about an hour a day catching imaginary fish, planting imaginary flowers and arranging imaginary furniture in my other, more rustic life. (By the way, if perchance you have the game and your town’s starting fruit is something other than apples, get ahold of me and we’ll discuss a trade.) Only now am I compelled to post, though what I have to say is closer to the shallow end of the trivia-analysis continuum.

Peter Jackson’s King Kong is a model remake. Never does it entertain pretensions of burying the 1933 original: far from it, Jackson’s film is a loving tribute, in every way made by a cineola for his fellow fans to cherish. It’s not The Lord of the Rings, but then again, he’s working off a story that doesn’t have quite so much meat on the bones, and it shows as soon as the embellished human relationships constructed before we get to Skull Island wear out and fade away. There’s no doubt that the Kong story is one of the Great American Legends and a piece of our cultural history, even speaking as a Canadian – but for all its poignancy, nobody could mistake the story for being materially complex.

But at its core, the new Kong isn’t so much a remake as it is a faithful adaptation of some of the most iconic moments in cinema. Kong rolling the sailors off the log, Kong unhinging the jaws of a tyrannosaur, Kong reeling in the vine that Ann and Jack are descending – it’s all something to behold this day in age when special effects have reached the saturation point where we can take them for granted as reality and direct our attention to how they advance the story. Merian C. Cooper’s original, as dated as the model work looks today, still holds up because of what the animators made the models do. They didn’t just stomp around trampling and devouring – they had mannerisms.

And then there are the overtly tributary moments, as lovably indulgent as Uma Thurman wearing the Bruce Lee track suit in Kill Bill. I don’t want to spoil them all, but at the same time, I can’t let them go unmentioned. When Carl Denham is escaping in the taxicab, he queries his assistant about which actresses are available as an emergency replacement. “Fay is a size four,” he suggests – but alas, he is told Ms. Wray is doing a film over at RKO. Snicker, snicker. Then there’s the scene he films on the ship between Ann and the actor Bruce Baxter (played by Kyle Chandler, who is wholly new to me and at the same time one of the highlights of the movie). It’s note for note the same scene as the one between Fay Wray and Bruce Cabot, down to the way either Bruce turns his head to the right as he mutters, “And I’ve never been on one with a woman before.” And then there’s the Broadway marquee the night Denham opens his show – an exact reproduction.

It’s very much the same approach that Jackson took with his Tolkien adaptation. The source material is not only treated with reverence – it’s taken as historical fact.

There’s no shortage of movies in the past twelve years that have wanted to be the movie that this King Kong is, chief among them The Lost World and Ang Lee’s Hulk, but as recent as bits and pieces of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. A lot of people have likened it to Titanic: a landmark spectacle that obscures a human element that pales in comparison. A fair comparison, sure, but only if we consider on top of it that the Naomi Watts’ take on Ann Darrow and Andy Serkis’ motion-capture performance as Kong make for what I think is clearly one of the great screen romances. In fact, I prefer the relationship between Ann and Kong here to that of the original film. When you see them skate in Central Park, you’ll know what I mean.

But enough praise for now. What I was most interested in going into the movie was how Jackson’s film would address the primitivist, and perhaps even racialistic assumptions inherent to the the 1933 version’s worldview.

To me, the most curious thing about the ’33 Kong was its morally ambiguous position – indeed, its refusal to comment on what to make of Kong’s ultimate demise. Is it a triumph or a tragedy? We’re never told: the Robert Armstrong Carl Denham enunciates the immortal last line as if it were a proud declaration of his own cleverness, tickled by how conveniently the fall of Kong fit the beauty-and-beast theme he had envisioned all along.

The answer to the triumph-or-tragedy question is left to depend on the attitude of the audience. Is it sympathetic with Denham and company? Or does it plead for an absent mercy when Kong, atop the Empire State Building, cowers in self-defense and wishes the airplanes would just go away so he would be left alone (and alive) with his terrified little Ann? Do we applaud when the monster falls – or is man the monster?

The answer is immeasurably complex, and I’m not going to repeat seventy years of film scholarship to establish my own thesis on the matter – at least, not on this particular December evening. But here’s a primer: it is a distinct possibility that the interpretation of the Kong myth has, since its initial release, been completely turned on its head.

King Kong ’33 presumes a chain of command between all living things, an ordering of the world from the barbaric to the civilized. In a sentence, Kong beats dinosaurs, Kong beats hooting and hollering natives, but the civilized man beats Kong, or does he. The sights to behold on Skull Island are, to quote, things “no white man has ever seen.” Denham treats the island and its inhabitants – first the natives, then the creatures – as subjects of entertainment for developed places where entertainment exists.

You can talk all you want about King Kong as purely escapist spectacle (it is) and heck, even one of the greatest films ever made (it is) – but I can’t fathom how it would be possible for anyone to ignore that its presumptions are inherently colonialist. Being a proud son of the colonies myself, I’m not passing judgment – I’m just telling it as it is. At the extreme, King Kong is spoken of as a metaphor for the black man that steals a blonde beauty, and doesn’t discard her as a human sacrifice like those inadequate native-girl offerings. It’s really not at all a stretch.

The damsel-in-distress archetype is colonial discourse, and is reflected in spades in the pulp adventure fiction of the early twentieth century, most prominent among them the stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs. (It’s also deflected in the anti-adventures of Joseph Conrad, which you’ll notice Jamie Bell’s character reading in the Jackson remake.) Back in March I wrote a post about how this comes to the fore in A Princess of Mars, when John Carter travels to the Red Planet and beats back the brutes with the force of compassionate love, which he is capable of and they are not.

Or, to put it in filmic terms – it was beauty killed the beast.

So Kong’s defeat is a triumph to those who see themselves atop a ladder of civilization (or an Empire State Building, for that matter), a position worth defending against the invasive pretenses of an ascending monster. But as a tragedy, the one we sympathize with is Kong, a creature who consistently acts in defense of himself, and in defense of Ann Darrow. The central question, then, is whether or not he has the right to protect Ann so vigourously; whether it is an act of care, or an act of possession. It is, moreover, comparative: how does Kong’s right to Ann compare to that of Bruce Cabot’s Jack Driscoll, who in his initially misogynistic gung-ho masculinity makes him a microcosm of the same beauty-beast dichotomy?

The movie winds up back in New York with Kong a captive, Driscoll a hero and Ann his fiancée. But the last time we see Jack leaves him defeated in much the same way. Nobody really gets the girl, but the girl sure got the ape.

A civil rights movement, a global postcolonial backlash and a Peter Jackson remake later, I posit the modern audience that watches the 1933 King Kong almost invariably errs on the side of tragedy. When Denham announces to his audience that Kong, once a king, comes to the civilized world a captive, there is something deeply ironic about it. Kong cannot be held captive, and he dies on his feet. (Okay, so he dies on his back. But he is on his feet when they shoot him.) In that sense, King Kong is as useful an exposé of primitivist attitudes as it is a celebration, and the work itself tips the balance neither way.

It is the modern sensitivity to the civilized subduing the savage that dominates Jackson’s version, a sensitivity that puts a limit on whether or not it can be done. Observe how the new film differs.

Now the natives aren’t just a scantily-clad ritualistic tribe that lives in huts – they’re snarling, mace-wielding murderer-folk with bad teeth. Like the orcs in The Lord of the Rings, they demand no sympathy because they do not resemble anything like what we would call a human society – they’re clearly monsters, and the sailors have nothing to feel guilty about when they gun them down.

But not so with King Kong. In this one, his love goes requited. (A good thing, too, because nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter like you-know-what.) Maybe it’s Stockholm Syndrome – who knows – but the Naomi Watts Ann Darrow is thoroughly sympathetic and thankful for a creature that, by the end of the movie, turns out to be probably the most human character in the story.

Not that it’s an indictment of man, though, because the same change occurs with the new Jack Driscoll as played by Adrien Brody, now no longer such a man’s-man beast-among-men but a meek playwright thrust into romance and adventure quite against his will. And so this film, like its precursor (let’s not even bother acknowledging the 1976 one, which doesn’t fit into this comparative study), refuses to point fingers and say, “He’s a villain.” There are monsters, yes – the now-inhuman native folk, the tyrannosauri, the arachnids from the Legendary Missing Spider Sequence – but no villains to whom we can assign a face.

Denham is still in many ways reprehensible, yes, but he’s far from villainy: as in the original film, he’s more of an architect of circumstantial misfortune. And Jack Black’s delivery of the last line is telling. Unlike Armstrong, he isn’t smug about it. He says it with awe, wonder and perhaps a tinge of regret. It’s like Fortinbras surveying the bloodbath in Elsinore: the observer in the drama, and the audience outside it, are left with a characteristic aftertaste of terror and pity.

Beauty kills the beast, but man doesn’t really rescue the beauty. It’s the hero who dies, simian as he may be.

Great film, and Wellington Santa Claus has delivered a worthy Christmas present once again. I’d feel very comfortable putting the new King Kong next to my generation’s monster classic, Jurassic Park, for reasons that are not solely alphabetical.

Dispute these if you must, but let me propose the following. One who is most likely to benefit from a review in the traditional sense is one who has not seen a movie, which then allows me to exercise my relative position of discursive power to encourage or discourage the related expenditure that goes into said movie depending on whether it will lead to the betterment of one’s life and understanding of the much-ballyhooed “human condition” – or, alternatively, fund terrorist cells. Such reviews will normally consist of evaluating the different structural elements of production and how they add up, whilst approaching the narrative in vague terms so as to avoid spoiling the experience.

Reviewing a film, however, is not the same thing as critiquing it. The two are not mutually exclusive, but even when they work together, the former is just an extension of the latter, and reduces to the affixation of value judgments to certain interpretive products. The problem with these stickers that read “this is good” or “this is bad” is that not everything invites the label. As for everything that does, it gets tiresome after a while.

As a writer I far prefer engaging in critique removed from the judgment of whether or not something “works,” where I can tackle something and rationalize it for what it is, and only then go back to evaluate the argument’s validity.

At the level of critique, it is impossible to give a film – or any story, really – an adequate treatment without an examination of endings and spoilers. In other words, I much prefer to discuss movies with a certain audience in mind, that being the audience that has already watched the movie. Sometimes, that audience may never get to that stage without a prior recommendation, which is why I’ll occasionally tell people to get out, see the movie, come back and read the rest of the post.

Of course, there are always the party-crashers who read the whole post anyhow, either because of a slip of the vertical scrollbar or the fallback that “I won’t see it anyway.” So here’s my advice: don’t be a party-crasher. Go see Sin City.

I’d go into what an excellent film it is and justify that claim of excellence with one example after another, but that would get boring after a while. Here’s a capsule summary of my recommendation: Robert Rodriguez has just directed/”shot and cut” his landmark film, the performances driving the three protagonists (Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke and Clive Owen) are endearing enough to draw one’s exclusive attention amidst the visual flourish, and as for that visual flourish, wow.

There. That’s your review. Get out, see the movie, come back and read the rest of the post. Now, let’s get a-critiquin’.

You will see a lot of people call Sin City a film noir genre piece and leave it at that. I would argue that it is on the whole quite a different beast, though I should clarify that this is not merely a semantic claim under some authoritative definition of noir, but my effort to draw attention to what makes Rodriguez’s movie unique in substance.

What interests me is how so many people will take a look at Rodriguez’s adaptation of the Frank Miller graphic novels, admire it for its production design and say “that’s noir” without identifying any specific similarities beyond the presence of pulp archetypes like disenchanted detectives, pernicious prostitutes and corrupt coppers. Yet they make special note of the amplified comic-book physics as antique vehicles soar above the pavement and a landed punch sends a thug across the room. They cite the explicit violence and casual nudity as distinguishing marks of the film. They fail to notice that the obtuse, centrifugal expression to be found in Sin City places it at the other side of the world from what makes film noir tick.

Film noir is not about sex, booze and violence. It is about concealment and innuendo. The lines of noir dialogue you remember are the suggestive propositions. That is precisely why film noir flourished in the era of Hollywood censorship, its defining female archetype the femme fatale seductress with something to hide. It should tell you something that the narrative mode most closely associated with noir is the mystery, a story of secrecy and revelation. It’s when you don’t see sex, booze and violence that film noir is at its most effective.

Let’s take a look at the Howard Hawks film of Raymond Chandler’s novel The Big Sleep starring Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe (the 1946 theatrical cut, for the purposes of this discussion). In many ways, I consider both the film and book to be the defining noir story, even though they differ in some very significant ways, and even if it was The Maltese Falcon that “started it.” The Big Sleep was, at the time of its release, one of the most chilling thriller pictures on record. Promotional posters advertised it as “the violence screen’s all-time rocker-shocker.”

It’s hard to imagine this day and age, but it used to be that even one murder was a big deal. Casablanca was advertised as an action picture on the basis of the gunpoint threats and the grand total of two onscreen shootings. Nowadays we talk about the desensitizing effect of seeing the body count run into the double- and triple-digits within the span of a two-hour trip to the cineplex, but back in the day, every snuffing counted.

In The Big Sleep, the trail of corpses beats a lower bound of seven, in a bullet-ridden domino chain of crisscrossing motives and passions. And still, every snuffing counted. After Marlowe kills Canino, the one death he inflicts in the whole adventure, he feels and expresses a modicum of regret sufficient to warrant a kiss from Lauren Bacall.

The censorship regime did its own wonders for film noir’s self-assertion as a mode of storytelling specific to the cinematic medium. The central act of blackmail that sets the plot in motion – dirty pictures of Carmen Sternwood – is referred to in vague, implicit terms. Carmen is fully clothed when Marlowe finds her posing in front of the camera at Geiger’s residence. Marlowe’s amusing charade with Agnes in the bookstore is as someone with an interest in “rare books,” if you take my meaning. And then there’s the 1946 cut’s addition of that legendary dinner between Marlowe and Vivian, arguably Bogart and Bacall’s best scene together in all their collaborations, where they discuss sexual positions with the euphemistic vocabulary of equestrianism.

Chandler’s novel was itself was a rejection of chivalric ideals in favour of a new, gritty realism. Observe the scene (excised from the film, it goes without saying) in Chapter 24 where Marlowe discovers Carmen lying naked in his apartment, and notices an unsolved chess problem nearby:

I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn’t a game for knights.

This, from the novel that defined the modern conception of hard-boiled private eye fiction beyond its foundations in Hammett’s Falcon. And to think that on film, yet more of it was left unsaid. Is concealment not what put the “film” in film noir? I hope I have dispensed with the notion with sufficient conviction.

With that out of the way, we lead ourselves back to Miller and Rodriguez with a blunt rhetorical question. Do Sin City and the words “realism” or “censorship” even belong in the same sentence? And I hope you’ve seen the film by now, because in answering that question, I’m going to spoil the film like crazy.

The case for the “no” side is obvious. The exaggerated sensationalism of sex and violence in Sin City places it in an ironic position antithetical to the realism inherent to its generic influence. This is not a negative criticism of the film, but of ignorant critics – both the proponents who will tell you what a good noir flick it is, and the detractors who see it as an exploitative abomination no more than a thin and pale mimetic imitation of the classic noir oeuvre. This is a film to be evaluated on its own terms, and any comparative study would do well to make note of differences instead of merely repeating the observable similarities.

That said, the observable similarities tend to appear in the film at its most critical heights of dramatic tension. For all the amputations, beheadings and castrations in the picture – and that’s just the ABC of Sin City‘s alphabet of gore – it is with the occasional, hardly-noticed spurt of concealment that it makes a brief return to the noir tradition, when what matters is not what you see, but what you don’t.

Perhaps the most noirish scene in all of Sin City is its opening scene, based on the story “The Customer is Always Right” and starring Josh Hartnett as a hitman unaware of his ultimate purpose. The composition exhibits a constructed whiff of nostalgia, and the characters are so fresh off the stock as to remain anonymous. The sudden, silenced jolt as he does away with his unsuspecting “customer” hearkens back to the decisive shot fired at the conclusion of the best noir mystery of the last few years, Spielberg’s Minority Report. Beyond the precision of the staging and the colour palette (black and white, a red dress and blue eyes), it all feels like an elevation of traditional noir conventions to a Platonic ideal. But the movie is just beginning, and something feels off about the scene beyond its manifest artificiality; later, we see that it is a deception in the face of the tone that follows.

The three stories that make up the movie proper aren’t nearly as subdued – what, with Kevin eating hookers and mounting their heads on the wall and Marv subsequently feeding his remains to the dogs in “The Hard Goodbye,” the entire Dwight chapter (“The Big Fat Kill”) centering on a game of hot-potato with Jack Rafferty’s severed head, and Hartigan ripping out a pair of pasty happy-sacks in “That Yellow Bastard.”

The violence does not provoke suspense, though – and it should be noted that it is altogether infrequent next to how some would describe the film. While it is in a sense extreme, it incites disgust at worst, but more often a sort of base and bloodthirsty pleasure. When the skinheaded thug played by Nicky Katt (the voice of Atton in the ending-free computer game Knights of the Old Republic II) is shot through the chest with an arrow, it’s damn funny.

But to me, the violence with the greatest impact is that which is concealed or shrouded – and I don’t mean offscreen. Of all the gunshots fired in the course of this 126-minute thrill ride, the best was saved for last. And you’ll notice that when Hartigan does himself in, it occurs in reverse silhouette, in the same negative space as when Dwight is drowning in tar – backgrounded as what is not present, a white cutout in a blank canvas. It is onscreen, yet it is absent. Or, in the case of the Yellow Bastard’s own ignominious end as he is pounded into a pool of piss-toned gunk, the pounding is obscured, and Hartigan’s rage is all the more visible precisely because the audience is distanced from its expression.

Shot after shot, Sin City drowns you in imagery you cannot fail to notice, thrusting it into the foreground. Film noir doesn’t do that. But every now and then, when you’re not looking, it hits you. It hits you the hardest when you don’t see it hit you, and that’s when film noir rears its shadowy head.

My point, to sum it up, is that one would do Sin City an injustice to praise or dismiss it as merely a parasitic digital-age iteration of a timeless genre infused with the aesthetics of sequential art. It is a dialectic synthesis of different philosophies and as a result, something both original and special.

I will do just that with the 2004 harvest in good time, as I have now left that year behind (aside from never having gotten around to the likes of Collateral and Hotel Rwanda) and seen the first theatrical release of 2005 worth mentioning, Ong-Bak.

On the surface, everything that happens in Thailand’s signature hit film is old and tired by what we have come to expect in North America. Tony Jaa plays a country boy who goes to the city, finds his former country-boy cousin turned urban gambler, fights in an underground boxing ring in a quest to recover an artifact of value from a drug kingpin, gets involved in an explosive car chase, and has a climactic final showdown with a baddie hopped up on steroids. We’ve seen it before, we might think.

That is, until we realize that the country boy comes from the villages of rural Thailand and ends up in Bangkok, a city of nine million – a disparity that really has to be seen to be understood, should you ever get the chance to visit the region; the underground boxing ring doesn’t feature just any boxing, but the ancient art of Muay Thai; the artifact of value is a sacred Buddha image of paramount importance to the villagers; the explosive car chase is on tuk-tuks – tuk-tuks! – and the final showdown makes for one hell of a good fight scene.

The novelty of Ong-Bak can be identified thus: can you name another Thai action flick you’ve seen? Didn’t think so. And what makes Ong-Bak interesting is that it is a celebration of all things Thai short of the blues compositions of King Bhumibol Adulyadej. I mean, a tuk-tuk chase!

In all seriousness, the thing that this movie will be remembered for is that it fills a gaping void in modern martial arts cinema, in that we really, really needed a Muay Thai superstar like Tony Jaa to burst onto the scene. Someone of his calibre is long overdue, and very welcome. Ong-Bak unreservedly exploits all of the distinctive characteristics of Thai boxing, particularly its emphasis on pummeling your opponent with your joints, not just your fists and feet of fury. Elbows land on skulls with an audible crack. Knees land on, um, people, with a sickening crunch.

The film sells itself as being free of CG and wire-work, but that’s just one of many ancillary benefits of an ethnic fighting flick being produced outside of the American studio system. The one that really shows is the length of the action sequences. It is rare nowadays to find continuous action sequences, rip-roaring urban chases and extended duels that comprise the majority of a movie without being repetitive, and nigh on impossible to spot this ever happening in an American-made product. Comparisons to 1980s Jackie Chan are entirely accurate, aside from the lack of slapstick comedy and Sammo Hung.

In terms of storytelling, everything of significance is flat-out obvious, but it is still worth noting. The obligatory string of one-on-one fights against increasingly burly Anglo-American thugs in the underground fight club are a prideful demonstration of the superiority of Muay Thai; if you follow martial arts cinema at all, you probably know that the superiority of the hero’s discipline is a recurring secondary theme whenever foreigners are present. (Or final-fight foes hopped up on steroids, for that matter.)

Then there’s how the evil mob boss atop the chain of command is a wheelchair-bound tracheostomy patient who speaks with an electronic device and smokes through his throat, but deifies himself as a god; recall that the plot revolves around the recovery of a stolen Buddha head, and you have a neat little parallel motif of headless idols going on.

And there’s a tuk-tuk chase!

Now, for some criticisms: like I said earlier, the premise of the film is about as standard as you can get from a modern action flick. Without the undercurrents that are distinctly Thai, which are thankfully almost ubiquitous, Ong-Bak would not be much of a film at all. There is only one reason to watch this movie – a very good reason, mind you – and that is to see superstar Muay Thai combat committed to celluloid. It would be nice if eventually, Tony Jaa is cast in something of real cultural significance and mythic quality; Thailand has a rich tradition to draw from, a tradition that is underexposed in the Western corpus.

The editing is tight for the most part, but one particular device grows tired very quickly due to overuse: the preponderance of sportscast-like instant replays of every particularly impressive stunt. I realize that the filmmakers may have been very impressed with certain takes, but for the sake of continuity and pacing, it is customary to pick your best angle and stick with it. Using such a device is excusable if done sparingly, but there are so many ooh-inspiring hits in Ong-Bak that the filmmakers just couldn’t get enough of it. Well, I did.

The last issue, and one that is actually an impediment to some of the fights, is that some scenes are shot in lighting that is so dim as to obscure the action. Yes, underground boxing clubs should be dark, but the thing about movies is that even in darkness, the audience can still see. Here, that is sometimes questionable.

There is a minor problem with the Magnolia Pictures edit that is in release here in North America, and that would be the addition of music that feels very much out of place. Dan Kaszor, who as I’ve remarked on many occasions is one of the few fellow U of A students whose knowledge of film I vouch for and trust, says in his Gateway review that the original music was none too great either, but one has to wonder if it were perhaps more tonally consistent. Personally, I don’t think foreign films should ever be tampered with upon local release, but I have the disadvantage of not being a major studio boss.

But these gripes aside, I recommend Ong-Bak for its offering of what is currently a one-of-a-kind experience in some respects. If it leads to the explosion of a burgeoning Thai boxing film industry of which the international community is aware, with Tony Jaa as its headlining celebrity, the world will be all the richer.

We like it when movies creep up behind us and smack us upside the head. We like it when gaps are filled in ways that surprise us. For recent examples, see Memento, Minority Report and A Very Long Engagement. For classic examples, see Citizen Kane and The Empire Strikes Back. But we remember these movies for their crazy twists not because of the shock value that comes of each successive discovery, but because every twist makes the story all the more compelling. You can go into Kane knowing full well what Rosebud is, or Empire knowing that Vader is Luke’s father, as I’d wager almost everybody does nowadays given how those epiphanies have become a part of our cultural consciousness – and the curious thing is, the film is all the better for it.

But that does not give us adequate grounds to say that predictability is necessarily something to avoid; again, it’s not about shock value. If you take a look at film adaptations of popular material, the most difficult thing to get over the first time through is what you can’t predict: deviations from a story with which you are already familiar. Here, we seek the comfort of a story we already know.

My point is, you can’t open a can of plot twists, sprinkle it all over a story and call it compelling. Sometimes you get an otherwise masterful film like House of Flying Daggers where the plot twists feel like chores that have to be done in order to lay out all the necessary elements of understanding that make the character dynamics work. When everything is on the table, it all makes sense; but here, unpredictability is not the source of causation. The film becomes compelling; the twists do not make it compelling.

I argue above that it cannot be universally considered a fault for a story to let the audience outpace it within reason, and nowhere is that clearer than in Million Dollar Baby.

If you have watched a lot of movies, boxing or otherwise (and truth be told, even if you have not), you will anticipate every single thing that happens in this movie. You will know exactly who wins every fight, who lands every punch, and every outcome of every critical decision the characters make, well before it happens. Part of it may be because the boxing movie has become such a defining subgenre of American film that we are all well aware of its techniques – not just how the director and editor time the punches, but how they build up to them in little spurts of tension and release.

How is it, really, that a boxing scene makes you, an audience member, feel like you are “part of the action”? I would posit that it involves a lot more than how visceral it is, how close the camera gets, and how resonant the bone-crunching sound effects are. To be a part of the fight, to be part of the experience of the boxer, also involves a replication of a certain anticipatory spider-sense. And in Million Dollar Baby, this is what happens both in and out of the ring. The sense of anticipation extends to the overall narrative flow.

But if you can see everything coming, how does the film keep you hooked?

Well, there’s the rub. You can see everything coming, but as a passive filmgoer in a darkened theatre, you are absolutely powerless to do anything about it. And in much of the film – particularly its final act, which is very much about helplessness – you can see it heading somewhere very uncomfortable. Here’s a movie where everything follows the natural progression of events that you should and do expect. You cheer for Maggie as she delivers a first-round knockout match after match, because she does what you expect of her, and more. You cringe as you perceive just how much harm is about to be done to her, but have no way of warning her of anything.

At the same time, that makes Frankie, Clint Eastwood’s character, an easy elicitor of audience sympathy. He is very much the same familiar character that Eastwood has defined for himself in his self-directed period, the William Munny archetype of an aging senior haunted by regret and seeking repentance. Like boxing, you’ve seen him before. But there are moments in the film where, as the cutman in the corner, he is just as helpless as the audience. Great storytelling, or what?

It is difficult to pinpoint how Eastwood pulls off this anticipatory elegance. Maybe it comes from a natural technical aptitude for foreshadowing. Maybe it comes of experience. In any case, Million Dollar Baby presents a curious contradiction – everything about it feels so familiar, every element feels borrowed (which is mostly the case), but the story draws you in anyway.

Curious, too, that in spite of its apparent predictability, I have been reluctant to speak of it in terms that are anything less than vague. But go discover it for yourself, and you’ll see what I mean.