Ntuple Indemnity

Most of what I wanted to say about Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow didn’t make it into the Gateway piece under my name, some of which was going into more detail than I could fit in the space I was given, others of which were removed or rewritten in the editorial process. (Regular blog-readers accustomed to my writing style should be able to pick out what’s what.)

Most of it has to do with its relation to other films that come before it, seminal works that almost necessitate a mention in a proper appraisal of Sky Captain lest the analysis feel woefully incomplete. I’ve already mentioned its tribute to the Star Wars Trilogy, which I watched in its entirety on DVD yesterday. (More on that in another post.) This is the kind of thing I want to discuss, but I would like to emphasize not so much like references themselves but rather the use thereof.

I’m not going to dwell on specific things that were excised from my original review or comment on some of the changes themselves, due to matters of staff policy and good taste, with one exception. I make this exception because it is of critical import. In the last line of the published review, I call Sky Captain “a special effects showpiece where Adobe After Effects and Final Cut Pro have taken the place of older techniques.” What I originally did was call it a modern Harryhausen where said movie editing software has taken the place of Claymation.

Maybe it was changed to be more accessible to the kind of layperson who has never watched a film produced before the date of his own birth, but given Ray Harryhausen’s distinctive contributions to animation in mixed-media cinema, my one-sentence capsule of Sky Captain was fully intended to be a very specific reference to the man behind Jason and the Argonauts. I am not going to whine about the omission itself, but allow me to explain something that I think is key to grasping the spirit of Kerry Conran’s killer robot movie.

See, Sky Captain‘s detractors – current, would-be and otherwise – have and will continue to focus their efforts largely around the syllogism that it is by its very nature a special effects film, special effects are bad for you, and therefore the movie is also bad for you. Take David Sterrit’s review in The Christian Science Monitor, for instance:

But, uh, what’s wrong with real images of reality, captured with a movie camera? It’s one thing to use computer-generated imagery as a way of “drawing” things a camera couldn’t photograph – the cartoon characters of the Shrek movies, say. It’s another thing to use computer wizardry as a way of bypassing real things in the real world.

“Look how industrious and ingenious we are!” coo wired-up moviemakers as they mimic things so convincingly on their high-definition screens. In fact they’re a lazy and disingenuous lot, so in love with their own daydreams that they see no need to do something radical – like going outside and filming things that might take them by surprise.

Yes, Sky Captain is unquestionably an effects piece where the live action supplements the animation, not the other way around. Yes, some people will absolutely despise it for being what it is. In some cases (but not all), their reasoning will quite openly reveal a prejudice against animation, and computer animation in particular – or, as in the review I just cited, a thinly-veiled pro-realist prejudice against all visual forms of mimesis. You will hear familiar yarns about how the special effects take undue precedence over the human element – which, when applied to many of the summer-season tentpoles nowadays, is a valid assessment. I still don’t know what everybody sees in X-Men or The Matrix Reloaded, and I despised that other comic book film that opened with a zeppelin. To varying degrees, those three movies (and many others) had light and noise at the forefront, and suffered for the lack of an underlying narrative propulsion.

The difference is that for some reason, in Sky Captain it’s okay. The characters are broad archetypes (“Sky Captain,” for a convenient and obvious example), the plot is in the pulp tradition of hopping from one set piece to the next through a series of escalating conflicts, and the killer robots are the stars of the show. Conran gets away with this because the art design is a pastiche of Golden Age wonders, and the way the shots are composed and edited drives the story at the micro level – not from scene to scene, but from shot to shot. In film, shot flow is as much a part of what we call “story” as what we know as “plot,” which is story on the macro scale.

But Sky Captain still remains an effects movie, and realists need not apply. If you want contemporary character-driven cinema where technical trickery plays no role, go experience the joyous delights of Garden State, though I dare you to keep waving the “realist” flag when you encounter the scene at the ark.

And that brings us to Ray Harryhausen, whom we look upon today as one of the men so thoroughly canonized as the stop-motion legend that he is, he has become no less than a saint of the church of animation. He came from a special effects background and made special effects movies, but ones so legendary that his expression of what we call “movie magic” is still revered today. Heck, the world of Monsters, Inc. even names a sushi restaurant after the guy.

If we can appreciate Harryhausen for his feature films where live actors battle fantastic monsters of all shapes and sizes, I see no reason to discredit Kerry Conran for doing the exact same thing with leading-edge computer animation in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

Looking at the social response to motion pictures, which is itself a comprehensive field of study, it still baffles me that computer animation gets such a bad rap for doing exactly what stop-motion figures and matte paintings once did with relative impunity. In Sky Captain‘s case, it’s even very much the same kind of film. It is flatly impossible for anyone who is familiar with the original 1933 King Kong to miss the similarities between Skull Island and the quasi-prehistoric wonderland that Sky Captain and Polly Perkins stumble into late in Conran’s piece.

And while on the subject of stumbling into wonderlands, let’s talk about The World of Tomorrow‘s closest connection to the World of Today, the rickety suspension bridge that hangs between our world and the fantasy world. It comes in the form of a movie with which you may be familiar.

After the opening scene in the Hindenburg III, we are introduced to reporter Polly Perkins as she receives a tip from one Walter Jennings (Trevor Baxter), who claims knowledge as to who is next in the line of scientists that have mysteriously disappeared. They arrange to meet for a film at Radio City Music Hall. Given that the entire film was shot over bluescreen and the backgrounds were later inserted, I wonder if Gwyneth Paltrow was ever told while shooting the scene exactly what scene from which movie would be playing.

That movie is The Wizard of Oz, and it provides one of the simplest, yet most outstanding applications of Sky Captain‘s compositing process. In this scene, Jennings reveals his hidden secrets to an attentive Polly and passes her two metallic vials for safekeeping, objects sought by the enemy throughout the movie. The two are shot directly from the side in profile, framing the picture – while between them, Glinda the Good Witch floats onscreen in that pink bubble of hers. That, of course, is the scene where Dorothy has just dropped into Munchkinland, and Glinda appears to first tell our heroine of the Land of Oz, then bestow upon her a whole other pair of objects coveted by the enemy: the ruby slippers. It’s a superimposition of the beginning of the journey in both stories, what Joseph Campbell calls “the crossing of the threshold.”

Come for killer robots. Stay for “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in the end credits.

I leave you with required reading this week: a superb Apple feature on the technical aspects of how Sky Captain was made, which should erase any doubt about just what kind of movie to expect, for those of you who have yet to see it.

Irwin Winkler’s De-Lovely beckons one to draw comparisons to a very odd assortment of movies, a selection where “Anything Goes”. Begrudgingly and with an asterisk or two along for the ride, it can be described as a conventional bio-pic about the life of the legendary songwriter Cole Porter, not dissimilar to the post-Casablanca movie musicals of Michael Curtiz such as I’ll See You In My Dreams (a straightforward look at the rise and fall of Gus Kahn starring Danny Thomas and Doris Day) and Night and Day (a sensationalized portrait of Mr. Porter to which De-Lovely makes some reference). Amidst its traditional aesthetics, cinematography and story structure a part of it wants to be more; it takes the straightforward biography and frames it as sometimes a stage musical, sometimes a film that an older, reflective Cole Porter watches and criticizes whilst sitting beside its director, played by Jonathan Pryce. Here we are reminded of the real-life Harvey Pekar observing his filmed biography, last year’s splendiferous American Splendor, right there in the movie itself; that’s what De-Lovely intermittently tries to be, but it falls a ways short. Where it most excels is in its main selling point, the performances of many Cole Porter favourites embedded within – and even there, it’s no Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

De-Lovely is not at all a bad film, but the recurring theme in this review is that it sets its own ambitions, and thus the expectations of the audience, at a standard too high for itself to achieve. You can imagine the pitch: a postmodern arthouse Cole Porter musical biography featuring cameos by contemporary recording artists, period costumes designed by Giorgio Armani, and a cutting look at repressed homosexuality in the underground of the forties! Looks like an Oscar-sweeping formula, doesn’t it? Even when you compartmentalize the work into its components, everything looks praiseworthy; replacing Night and Day‘s Cary Grant and Alexis Smith as Cole and Linda Lee Porter are Kevin Kline and Ashley Judd, who both look and feel the parts as they age decades together over the course of the piece. Cinematographer Tony Pierce-Roberts paints a moving picture of the exquisite sets and period aesthetics with a vibrant colour palette that exudes a constant sense of warmth. The music is a guaranteed seal of quality from the get-go. Look at this movie in snippets, and (as the song goes) it’s delightful, it’s delicious, it’s de-lovely.

Then the audience actually sees the film in its entirety, and a major problem surfaces: the screenplay. The culprit is not the dialogue itself, which is likable if never quotable, but structure. De-Lovely runs for a standard 125 minutes, but feels a lot longer because of a lack of narrative drive. Instead of delineating conflict-resolution patterns into plot threads that guide the audience from one scene to the next, Cole Porter’s story is told in clumps of singular moods and events like a biography of the dullest sort: one that retells, but does not synthesize, and thus has very little to say about its subject. Sure, we have some resurfacing character dynamics, like how Linda manages to stand back and ignore Cole’s latent homosexuality, but these would be more aptly labeled character statics – descriptions of traits rather than evolutions of personality. Conflict isn’t conflict if it sits around and never goes anywhere.

In the end, the whole experience is a lot like flipping through a photo album, only in true Harry Potter fashion, the photos move. This is the part where Cole meets Linda Lee. This is the part where Cole goes to MGM and starts writing songs for movies. This is the part where Kiss Me, Kate opens and brings down the house. It’s all fine and good until you realize that you are flipping through said album for two hours, all the while not knowing how far you are from the last page.

As Alfred Hitchcock once said, “Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.” Somebody in the De-Lovely process should really read up on his Hitchcock, because the dry spells between musical numbers and performances could use some serious trimming. Given that the highlight of his resumé the similarly problematic Gangs of New York, that somebody is probably screenwriter Jay Cocks.

But aside from the major annoyance that it is just plain hard to sit through, De-Lovely is a great movie. Kevin Kline’s starring performance is arguably a career best. He plays, nay, becomes Cole Porter young and old, and both with a convincing sense of humanity. When committing his latest hit-song-in-the-making to the piano, he sings along with a subdued, only marginally in-tune voice true to the form of a composer who writes with the knowledge that his work is to be bestowed upon a more talented performer to come. In the theatrical dreamland of De-Lovely, these talented performers include the likes of Elvis Costello, Diana Krall, Robbie Williams and Natalie Cole; even Alanis Morissette and Sheryl Crow do not seem out of place.

In spite of all of the screenplay’s difficulties in negotiating the gulfs between one chapter of the story and the next, the visual handling of transitions from scene to scene is something to be admired – particularly the segues back and forth between the Chicago-esque onstage sub-universe and the empty rehearsal hall where the old Cole Porter sits beside the Jonathan Pryce character, like an invisible Scrooge with the Ghost of Christmas Past. Sometimes, a roaring musical number will disassemble its periphery like a fading reverie; at one point, the camera pulls out of a vintage film to reveal the darkened theatre once again, similar to the device employed in Moulin Rouge! as the curtain falls on the final shot of Toulouse-Lautrec singing “Nature Boy”. Seamless pans and rotations take us from the composer at work or an actor in rehearsal to a full performance; best of all, this display of technical prowess is subtle, and fits in so comfortably that it may easily go unnoticed. These spurts of dynamism are hidden further by the fact that within the scenes themselves, De-Lovely is very traditional, and the camera tends to sit around. It is no surprise that in one brief sequence shot in monochrome, there are few hints that this movie was not made decades ago, as its vintage feel is quite authentic.

With glorious production values and a songbook more than capable of carrying much of everything else on its back, De-Lovely is a lot better in parts than it is as a whole. As social commentary on buried matters of sexual orientation in decades past (which, to be fair, it never makes that big a stab at being), it is far from Far From Heaven. The screen story is a scatterplot of independent scenarios with few connections, and therefore little narrative drive. This tale of the man who wrote “You’re the Top” is a lot closer to the middle of the pack.

Acknowledgements in literary adaptations on film are getting funnier all the time. I thought I had seen it all when the credits rolled in Troy and it proclaimed itself “Inspired by Homer’s Iliad.” Then I, Robot comes along, and get this: it’s “Suggested by Isaac Asimov.” This is not to say it is wholly uninspired, as the movie has its fair share of qualities, but the adaptation is certainly as loose as it, er, suggests.

A little bit of background: Asimov’s I, Robot is not a single cohesive novel, but rather a collection of nine short stories that take place in the same universe governed by the same laws and sometimes feature the same recurring characters. Together, these stories span the author’s envisioned history of robotics from infancy to near-human natural sophistication. On the other hand, the Alex Proyas film I, Robot can be traced back to a story by screenwriter Jeff Vintar that never came to be, entitled Hardwired. It was later in the stages leading up to the production of the film that the story was integrated into Asimov’s world with all of the conventions that come with it – Alfred Lanning (here played by James Cromwell), Susan Calvin (Bridget Moynahan), the Nestor models, and of course, the Three Laws of Robotics. Curiously, instead of maintaining the name of the IBM-esque industrial behemoth U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, it was changed to “U.S. Robotics”. The real-life U.S. Robotics, which ruled the age of 14.4kbps modems, was a good sport about this and took it with pride – which is more than you can say for the Cyrix lawsuit when Eraser had Arnold Schwarzenegger take on the evil Cyrex Corporation.

If I may say so myself, I am normally lenient when it comes to liberal adaptations from book to film, as long as the film is philosophically consistent as a self-contained entity. For example, the “Scouring of the Shire” chapter in The Lord of the Rings is critical to what J.R.R. Tolkien is trying to say and the cyclical hero’s journey for which he was aiming, but its omission from the final third of the Peter Jackson epic is excusable, since the movie adheres to the guidelines it carved for itself regarding what ideas it wanted to emphasize. The intentions of the source material’s creator are important, but secondary to self-contained consistency. So I don’t mind so much that Proyas’ film plays with the possibility of robots inevitably breaking free of the constraints with which they were created and turning on humanity, when one of the reasons Asimov wrote robot stories at all was to counteract the then-ubiquitous Frankenstein’s Monster stereotype of technology conquering technologist. I don’t even take issue with characters successfully solving problems with gratuitous explosions and gunfire instead of cool-headed logic because it’s not Asimov; I just take issue with them because they are gratuitous.

But if you are going out of your way to quote the Three Laws onscreen at the beginning of your movie, I expect you to follow them. You cannot quote Asimov willy-nilly and lay him down as the source of the behavioural rules that govern robots, only to let those robots violate the rules.

This is where I, Robot runs into a bit of trouble. The movie opens with the apparent suicide of Dr. Lanning, which our hero Spooner (Will Smith) begins to investigate. He rejects the suicide theory and instantly convinces himself that a robot in Lanning’s office of murder, because the extent of his character throughout the entire movie is, “I hate robots.” The robot escapes, and Spooner follows in hot pursuit – only to discover it hidden in the midst of a thousand other robots of the same model. One of the nine stories in Asimov’s anthology, “Little Lost Robot”, presents the same scenario: out of a thousand and one robots, one is a rogue unit not bound by the Three Laws; how might one ferret it out? As with Asimov’s logic puzzles in all of the I, Robot stories, the solution is to subject the robots to a controlled equilibrium where the conflicting Laws each exert a certain gravitation, then identify the one with the anomalous response.

In the movie, Susan Calvin cites the process she used in “Little Lost Robot”, explaining that it was a three-week solution. Spooner, who finds his investigation to be just a tad more deadline-sensitive, pulls out his gun and starts shooting robots – because after all, he hates robots. Somewhere in the mix, a robot peeks to see what is going on, and he identifies it as the culprit. Imagine if they made a movie about Oedipus where he draws a dagger and kills the Sphinx without answering the riddle. Not quite the same, is it? At best, I think they were going for a Gordian Knot of a lateral solution here; and in that case, why frame everything in the Three Laws to begin with? On the surface, I, Robot is an engaging piece, but the Asimov connections never come off as anything more than a superficial bid to capitalize on an established brand identity – and one that was not thought through sufficiently.

I, Robot is essentially a murder mystery that unfolds into something far more sinister, as good murder mysteries should. In literary theory, an entry in the mystery genre is described not as one story, but two: the surface story, which takes the audience through a voyage of deduction and discovery; and the hidden story, which is the sequence of events comprising an underlying truth waiting to be revealed. Here, the hidden story is by far the stronger of the two. The trickling trail of evidence that guides Spooner along a thread from Lanning’s death to the bigger picture is intriguing once revealed in full. The promotional materials like to make this flick look like an action movie, but it most excels as an antecedent action movie. A lot of care went into the construction of a twisting, turning thinker-thriller underneath what the audience sees.

The surface story is worse off, because in several cases it lacks the logical deduction required to draw a line between one major turning point and the next, and instead feels like checking off a to-do list of clues and explanations. Most of the time it consists of Spooner making a wild robot-hating assumption, which either turns out to be either a) right or b) wrong. Not much of a detective, if you ask me. Mysteries are like higher-level mathematics exams: the elegance of the solution lies not in its correctness, but in the process through which a correct solution is found. My advice to I, Robot: for full marks, show your work.

In the current reigning champion of sci-fi whodunits, Minority Report, John Anderton has an unswerving faith in the Precrime system, but knows something is fishy because when he is himself a suspect, he knows the system could not possibly be correct. In I, Robot, Spooner knows something is fishy about the Lanning case because he hates robots. Well, that’s not entirely fair – in that scene, there is a revealing clue that rules out an unassisted suicide – but next thing you know, he’s pointing fingers at USR boss Lawrence Robertson (Bruce Greenwood) because his company makes robots, and we all know about Spooner’s attitude towards the dratted things. One of the two is a better movie.

Will Smith is a problem. Spooner is not really a character so much as he is a two-hour walk-on part for Will Smith, only he hates robots. The cheeky Fresh Prince attitude issues really have no place in this movie and serve only as a distraction, and almost everything he says is written to pander to those who might show up at the cinema “to see Will Smith,” an entrenchment of an already bad trend in suiting a film to an actor rather than fitting the actor to the film. As it turns out, Akiva Goldsman, one of the true volatile enigmas of screenwriting whose CV ranges from Batman and Robin to A Beautiful Mind, was hired to do exactly that to the script; the results come out negative. Why pay an A-list actor millions if you are not going to challenge him and make him work? Oh, right – marketing.

One thing for which I, Robot cannot be faulted, though, is its visual look and feel. Alex Proyas knows how to stage an atmospheric genre flick, and the art department deserves a hand for creating a near-future Chicago that, while nothing revolutionary in the face of Spielberg’s recent pseudo-contemporary future aesthetic in both A.I. and Minority Report, at least does us the service of stomping on the bland vision of Asimov’s world we saw in the wholly mediocre Bicentennial Man. The world of I, Robot is full of life and movement, and is filmed with a matching breathless dynamism. Vast images like that of a drained Lake Michigan converted into a robot scrapyard linger in the audience’s memory long after the credits have rolled.

The movie is most faithful to Isaac Asimov in a way you would not expect. Like the author’s works, it stars a cast of uninteresting humans who are closer to being story props than characters, and upstages their humanity with a truly interesting personality in the form of the robot on which the story is focused. In this case it is Sonny (voiced by Alan Tudyk), who is the most flavourful personage among our players. I applaud the nuance of expression in the way he is animated and the artificial, yet inquisitive demeanour he displays when speaking his lines, often some of the better dialogue in the script.

I, Robot tries earnestly and hard to be a thinkpiece above the common crop of summer blockbusters, but give it the intellectual respect it so desires, and its cracks begin to show. It is nonetheless fairly painless to sit through, and mostly entertaining; Will Smith aside, the annoyances come upon reflection. It may have been a far more fruitful endeavour on the part of the producers to stick with Vintar’s Hardwired and never explicitly bring Asimov into it at all, but as with technological progress for good or ill, what’s done is done.

Two screenings, three weeks and $300 million later, my recollection of everything I wanted to say about Spider-Man 2 is admittedly spotty. Given that virtually everybody who wanted to see the film already has, this will be less of a review in the sense of a recommendation than it is a reflection.

Before I proceed, it is probably beneficial to establish where I sit with respect to comic superhero movies – my value system, as it may be. Of the standard DC and Marvel stables, there is not one superhero movie that I would proclaim to be the hallmark of the filmic subgenre of the comic adaptation. A good many of them make a decent stab at it and grind to a halt halfway through. Take Superman, for example – an epic journey of self-discovery for the most part, then it hits a brick wall with that “Can You Read My Mind?” nonsense. X-Men had some nice character setups going on, then stops and says, “Oh, crap – we need an evil plot in order to lead to a final fight. Bring on the United Nations!”

And speaking of the United Nations, while the campy Adam West Batman and the television series from which it protruded were a pretty close approximation of the colourful, tongue-in-cheek comics of the sixties (and a great deal of fun), it would be a stretch to call the feature film a shining example of cinematic storytelling. Batman – now that’s a character that has never truly been done justice – not even by Tim Burton, even though he was on the right track. With a powerful backstory and the best dramatis personae of supervillainy in any franchise at the disposal of a given filmmaker, I expect better.

The most honest effort I have seen to take a comics franchise to the next level is Ang Lee’s Hulk, which was an example of phenomenal storytelling technique, only it lacked an involving and coherent story to tell. In trying to bridge the occasional gap between art and entertainment, this well-made and underrated character drama veered just a tad far from its prerogative to the audience, but stopped short of living up to its intellectual promise. What was admirable was what Hulk wanted to be. This will become important.

Settling on an answer to what sits at the pinnacle of superhero movies is something to be done begrudgingly, as the best of them are still short of being five-star instant classics in the pantheon of all films, not just the ones derived from panels and text bubbles. By the best of them I refer to X2 and the first Spider-Man, two very different films in terms of what works and what does not. X2 is a very difficult film to complain about, because identifying specific flaws in such a thoroughly enjoyable thrill ride is no easy task. It wrangled a large cast of characters and somehow gave them depth and individuality, means and motives. Unlike its predecessor, it had a plot – a match of wits in which even our chessmasters, Magneto and Xavier, proved fallible. There is so much to like about the movie, what keeps it back is hardly a specific complaint as much as it is a desire to have seen it go further and be iconic in all respects instead of merely very good. It built real-world character dynamics on the foundation of superheroic powers, and left unspecified room for improvement.

Spider-Man, instead of being all-round very good, had its fair share of both milestones and annoyances. Without a doubt it laid claim to the most interesting protagonist, and the presentation of the origin story was beyond compare. However, as a movie not entitled Peter Parker (or even Pavitr Prabhakar), there was a certain imperative to include a few superheroics. Enter a second half with a schizophrenic evil corporate executive with a green helmet and a hoverboard as a thoroughly insufficient villain in a thoroughly insufficient hero-villain conflict.

So with all that said, it should be easy to extrapolate what it was I wanted to get out of Spider-Man 2: cinematically-conscious storytelling that takes advantage of the motion picture medium while remaining true to the comic book aesthetic, complex characters delivering complex lines, the continuation of the insofar compelling Peter Parker story, and a much better handling of “Spider-Man versus the bad guy” – lofty demands, but not impossible.

Lo and behold, I got my wish.

The film begins with a thrilling opening titles sequence. One thing you cannot fault the Marvel films for is their brilliant opening titles, regardless of the quality of the rest of the film – the Braille in Daredevil is a fine example; even The Punisher started with a bang. (Shame about the rest of the movie, though.) Spider-Man 2 outdoes them all with a dynamic sequence of panels that evoke some moments in Hulk and emulate pages of art being flipped in all directions. The panels contain still paintings of the first film’s most pivotal moments, particularly the inverted kiss, in a two-minute recap of the story thus far. It is a fine and innovative example of how to get an audience to sit through a lot of names, and the first of many little things that stack up to make an intruiging whole.

The Peter Parker story is once again the highlight of the movie, and cements him once again as the most human protagonist out of all the movie superheroes, the ordinary boy charged with living under extraordinary circumstances. Time and again, Spider-Man 2 reminds us that these extraordinary circumstances do not absolve him of the trials and tribulations that come with being a fresh-faced, sleep-deprived college kid. Playing the web-slinging good guy does not pay the rent, get the girl or deliver the pizza on time. It’s a realist’s approach to a world governed by the fantastic; no film does it better, and in no film is it more appropriate.

If there was any doubt after the first movie that Tobey Maguire was perfect for the role, the sequel erases it. He demonstrates resolve, sadness, longing, innocence, confusion, reluctance in the face of responsibility, self-conflicted concealment in the face of unspoken truths – it’s all there. In one sequence in the middle of the film that hearkens back to a certain musical interlude from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where Peter tries to crawl back into the warm and comfy shell of an ordinary life, Maguire has all the same nerdilicious charm as Ewan McGregor’s scenes in Down With Love when he is masquerading as the astronaut Zip Martin.

Kirsten Dunst, reprising the role of Mary-Jane Watson, evolves with her character. In this movie, Mary-Jane gets a little further in achieving her ambitions of modeling and acting, but what happens at the funeral in the end of the first movie has some personal ramifications that are not forgotten, and serve as the basis for her relations with Peter Parker throughout the movie. She displays a touch of bitterness on her own search for happiness, and there are few complaints to be had about how Dunst handles this. James Franco as Harry Osborn is perhaps the weak link of the trio; Harry has some very strong scenes where his ambitions of being a tycoon like his father show through, and a particularly memorable one at a reception where he is quite intoxicated and takes it out on Peter, but some of the later scenes that require fear, confusion and moral uncertainty are not quite there.

Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina) is one of the highlights of Spider-Man 2, and addresses exactly the biggest problem with the first movie, which was an uninteresting and unchallenging villain that the rest of the work was above. (No offense to Willem Dafoe, so much as the material he had to work with, or lack thereof.) In film journalism one often sees the term “comic book villain” used in a perjorative sense, to describe soulless evil clowns written and played in as over-the-top a fashion as is manageable. This is not the case with Doc Ock, who may be the most satisfying megalomaniacal villain in any superhero movie. The Green Goblin, in contrast, was a soulless evil clown on drugs who conveniently murdered Oscorp’s board of directors and still got away with his secret identity intact, with the occasional bout of talking to himself that everybody forgot about as soon as they saw Gollum do it right in The Two Towers. He’s an evil corporate executive who wants his government contract, damnit – oh, and let’s fight Spider-Man since he’s a good guy, and we shan’t have any of those getting in the way.

Doctor Octopus – now there’s a villain: someone whose characterization actually has something to say about mad science, which is by movie standards a really novel idea. He begins as the groundbreaking fusion scientist Otto Octavius, a happily married and well-mannered genius who is secure in his precautionary measures – until the technology goes awry and his sentient robo-tentacles take over. Even then, his motivation is not to destroy the world with his great ball of fire, but a desire to finish his life’s work and show the world that said great ball of fire is harmless, furry and energy-efficient. He fights Spider-Man because the titular arachnid pulls the plug on his invention early in the film – with good intentions, naturally. Best of all, when it comes down to the effects-heavy fight scenes, he is enough of a match for our hero that the combat is interesting. The strategic employment of super power against super power breathes life into the extended, show-stopping action sequences in a way that was never once present in the first movie, where the Goblin hovered around a lot and chucked a few radioactive snowglobes here and there without so much as a “Rosebud”.

Spider-Man 2 is rife with visual symbolism both picturesque and subtle, from a pivotal moment when Peter’s rimmed spectacles shatter on the ashphalt to him standing across the street from an unnoticing Mary-Jane under a theatrical marquee reading “The Importance of Being Earnest”. Oscar Wilde’s text is woven into the film in a way that refrains from being overbearing, but hints at the subliminal relevance of the excerpts in question. There are some genuinely funny moments where the humour is clean, situational and completely derived from the timing of a given shot, like a scene where Spider-Man ascends an elevator in full costume and fuller awkwardness.

Danny Elfman’s score to the first Spider-Man gave the initial impression that it was less memorable than his work on the likes of Batman, without an instantly recognizable theme to trumpet around – but as an audience we have had plenty of time to get used to it over the past two years, and to hear it reprised in all the right spots here is refreshing. Unfortunately, it does not carve out an identity for Spider-Man 2 like John Williams did for The Empire Strikes Back with the Imperial March or for Attack of the Clones with “Across the Stars”, but like the score to the first, perhaps this will sink in.

Does Spider-Man 2 have problems? Well, yes – but that depends on the weight you put on these specific logical gaffes. Spider-Man’s mask comes off quite frequently, though it provides an opportunity to see some expressive facial exertion, without which climactic sequences like the scene with the runaway train would not be the same. He survives some fairly impossible falls without so much as a scratch, which is ambitious by Jackie Chan standards and pushing it even for a comic book. To paraphrase Aunt May (who also makes a welcome return), he’s not Superman, you know.

I do have an issue with how far the stories of the respective characters go in this movie; namely, it may seriously undercut the potential of future sequels, especially if Sam Raimi wants to do another one after the third, which is currently in the germinal stages. I refer specifically to Mary-Jane’s decision at the end of the film, a temporary resolution of the romantic arc just as unsatisfying as the end of the last one, only this time around, the choice is really asking for trouble. In that sense, the ending stretches a bit long, especially because it goes a few scenes beyond my favourite shot in the movie, the one of Peter and Mary-Jane suspended on a web side by side, a scene that has a poetic finality of its own. Still, it can be argued that reasonable choices have no place in dealings pertaining to love, and the choice can still be validated by its consequences, which is something to look for in Spider-Man 3.

Perhaps the most telling observation about Spider-Man 2 is that the set pieces and super powers are but accessories to the weapons with which the real battles are won or lost: individual choices and the determination of one’s own destiny. This is the dramatic ideal, a story pulled along by a chain of dilemmas, actions and consequences instead of web-shooters and robotic claws – just as how the best science-fiction stories are never truly about spaceships and time machines, but ethics and social responsibility in a world where anything is possible. At long last, here is something to point to as the exemplar of everything a superhero movie should aspire to be.

The reference to A Streetcar Named Desire in the above title bears some relevance to The Terminal, which I have already put off discussing for a week and a half, but first, some belated thoughts on Marlon Brando. This will be far briefer than an actor of such legendary calibre deserves, but events like these are cases to file under “saturated volume of discourse”; more than a day after the fact, and there is little left to add.

Everybody has their favourite Brando moments on the screen, not to mention the mystique they find in one or more of the many offscreen legends that surround his persona. Heather Wallace, for instance, associates him most with his big moment in Streetcar. Many of us, even those such as myself born after the fact, recall the 1972 Oscars, when he refused his Best Actor win by proxy, sending a Native American actress named Sacheen Littlefeather to deliver a statement on his behalf. Brando, of course, was all about theatrics; as it turns out, Littlefeather was not a Native American at all, but the little-known Californian actress Maria Cruz. If anyone back then projected that they’d be talking about that one for years – thirty-two years on, that anyone is still correct.

What makes the ’72 acting Oscars even more interesting is that Marlon Brando was nominated in what could be considered the wrong category. The Godfather earned four acting nominations – one for an Actor in a Leading Role (Brando), three for an Actor in a Supporting Role (Al Pacino, James Caan, and Robert Duvall). Watch the movie, read the screenplay, read the original book by Mario Puzo: there is no way Don Vito Corleone is the Leading Role in The Godfather. The central character who dominates in terms of screentime is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, Michael. Of course, the Oscar nominations have always been driven by election-style marketing campaigns in trade publications like Variety and The Hollywood Reporter; two years ago, Ian McKellen was being pushed for a Leading Role nomination for his performance as Gandalf the Grey in The Fellowship of the Ring, but New Line decided partway through to switch gears and rightly push him for Supporting nomination instead – where, conveniently, his chances were better anyhow.

Not so with 1972. That year, all three Supporting Corleones – Michael, Sonny and Tom Hagen – were defeated by none other than Joel Grey. While among the younger generation he probably rings a louder bell as the father of Dirty Dancing‘s Jennifer Grey, his Oscar win that year was more than just a consequence of vote-splitting. It was the consequence of one of the best performances in any movie musical (and certainly the wackiest), the Master of Ceremonies in Cabaret – a role Grey created on Broadway, reprised by Alan Cumming (Nightcrawler in X2, Boris the Invincible in GoldenEye) in the 1998 revival. Joel Grey, whom I actually saw perform live at the Jack Singer a few years back, is a show-stealer. Mark my words: if Marlon Brando were in the right category that year, we would have no Sacheen Littlefeather of which to speak – and deservedly so. Yes, Don Corleone is iconic in the way he moves, the way he talks, the way he falls over and dies with an orange in his mouth; but I would put the balance in favour of “Wilkommen”, “Two Ladies” and the “Money” duet with Best Actress winner Liza Minelli.

But with Marlon Brando in the Actor in the Leading Role category, the Academy ended up awarding the two best performances of the year without pitting them against one another – and in doing so, set themselves up for Oscar’s most memorable stunt.

But returning to a spot of praise here, I want to talk about A Streetcar Named Desire. In only the greatest performances, like the aforementioned Master of Ceremonies, does one equate an actor with his work. Never mind that he practically invented method acting: Stanley Kowalski is Marlon Brando, and moreover, Marlon Brando is Stanley Kowalski. I have seen three screen versions of the Tennessee Williams play – Elia Kazan’s 1951 movie starring Brando, and two colour television remakes: one in 1984 with Treat Williams, another in 1998 with Alec Baldwin. The three varied in terms of how close they were to the original stage play; as some may know, Stella’s decision at the end of A Streetcar Named Desire, the Kazan film, is quite different from what she does in A Streetcar Named Desire on stage.

This, not Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, is my pet example of how the slavishness of a screen adaptation bears no linear correlation to the quality of a motion picture. Okay, so the other two are already disadvantaged by the fact that they are not really motion pictures, but dramas made for television, which is itself an inherently inferior medium for reasons I will not go into for the time being. They are not helmed by Elia Kazan, or any director who knows how to position a camera, for that matter. In fact, the only thing worth mentioning about the 1984 version is that the music is scored by the reliable Marvin Hamlisch; and the 1995 version has absolutely nothing going for it, except it is a cheap and accessible alternative to seeing the complete Tennessee Williams text on a stage where it belongs. But the most telling difference is this: not only are Treat Williams and Alec Baldwin not Marlon Brando (and by induction, not Stanley Kowalski) – they aren’t fit to lick his boots. Anyone who even attempts to play Stanley in front of a camera can be described in three words: not Marlon Brando. Never mind that Stella walks out on the guy – because of Marlon Brando, among other factors, the Kazan film upstages (no pun intended) the play itself in terms of being the definitive Streetcar. As such, it is an untouchable property.

And so were The Godfather, Apocalypse Now and all the other films where Marlon Brando didn’t just act – he defined. That’s how iconic he was.

With that very brief statment out of the way, let us proceed to a fictional character who, as the saying goes, depends on the kindness of strangers: Viktor Navorski, the stranded traveler played by Tom Hanks in Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal.

Now, this film had to live up to some lofty expectations, seeing as how given the prolific versatility of his curriculum vitae, Spielberg is probably whom I would identify as my favourite director living or dead. I am only three films away from being a Spielberg completist, not counting the ones prior to Jaws: The Color Purple, Always and Amistad being the last ones on the checklist. It was generally considered, up until he directed Leonardo DiCaprio to a career-best performance as Frank Abagnale, Jr. in Catch Me If You Can, that the one genre Spielberg could not do was comedy. Of course, the reference point for this was 1941, a slapstick piece of the silly-stupid school, which few people remember was still above the cut insofar as the silly-stupid school is concerned. In The Terminal, he aims for a middle ground between the two extremes and ends up with a piece that features both a cat-and-mouse character dynamic and just-for-laughs scenarios aplenty, but certainly not to the same extent.

As a movie that is built entirely on the premise of a man stuck in an airport terminal, this is the equivalent of what Trekkies commonly refer to as a “bottle episode”, a story that takes place entirely aboard the Enterprise: on the surface, it appears to be one of Spielberg’s least ambitious projects, but it deals with its own challenge of trying to stay interesting for two hours whilst trapped in a very finite number of sets.

Not much can be said for The Terminal in terms of plot, but its situational character relationships and more comedic scenes keep it alive. Navorski, who goes to America for reasons I will not reveal here but is denied entry on the basis of his country ceasing to exist en route, is an inspiring presence played by an inspiring thespian. Tom Hanks has a convincing stumble and a foreign grasp of English, only falling short of completely becoming the character because we have already seen his face in ten or more other films and heard him sing “You’ve Got a Friend In Me”; he delivers hilarious physical comedy with a charm that eludes the Jim Carreys and Ben Stillers of the industry.

Speaking of Jim Carrey, The Terminal in many ways reminds me of the former Ace Ventura’s own career best, The Truman Show. The connections are more than superficial; both are about a man confined in a world monitored by the cameras of a god from above. Here, Stanley Tucci takes the Ed Harris role, as a supervising immigration officer engaged in a battle of wills with Viktor Navorski. The conflict between the two is, sadly, one of the less engaging subplots of the movie, and it has a lot to do with how Tucci’s character is written. As far as villains go, unlike Tom Hanks’ FBI agent in Catch Me If You Can, he never grows beyond being a frustrated control freak, and this lack of dimension hurts an otherwise delightful movie.

The Terminal is largely a one-man show, but it also delves into how Navorski brings something out in the people around him, and how everyone’s life is really a journey to escape a cycle of perpetual waiting. There is an engaging supporting cast that includes the likes of a fugitive janitor who watches people slip on wet floors for entertainment (Kumar Pallana), and a lovelorn cook (Diego Luna) who offers Navorski food in exchange for proxy advances on a Trekkie customs officer (Zoe Saldana). Less interesting is the flight attendant that captures Navorski’s attention, played by Catherine Zeta-Jones, but the romantic subplot does round out a few thematic corners and make for a terrific candlelight dinner scene.

John Williams, by the way, is on fire this year. Following the act of finally giving the Harry Potter series a breath of musical freshness in The Prisoner of Azkaban, here he delivers arguably the best of his lighthearted and contemporary scores, other than, well, Catch Me If You Can. It supports the movie with a whimsical, lively sort of bounce. You can shortlist this one for the Original Score award right now.

For the most part, Spielberg’s latest offering never pretends to be anything more than a diversionary comedy, and an uproariously funny one at that, but it comes bundled with some very real ideas about goals, destinations, and lives that never seem to get there. See it for a lovable Chaplinesque performance from Tom Hanks that transforms what should be a dreary backdrop into a fantasy playground in its own right.