Ntuple Indemnity

By now, anyone who cares has already seen the leaked shot from the DVD of Return of the Jedi that features a long-haired Hayden Christensen, not Sebastian Shaw, as the redeemed spirit of Anakin Skywalker. The fact that the DVDs boast further changes to Classic Trilogy above and beyond the 1997 Special Editions is nothing new – The Digital Bits has been reporting it for months – for many self-professed fans, this is probably the first time an image has really packed the magnitudinal punch for what’s happening to hit home: yes, Star Wars is changing. Yes, it’s moving closer to the controversial Prequel Trilogy. Why, exactly, is this causing an uproar, as if it were a bad thing?

The truth is, when it comes to revisionism in art, Star Wars has been almost exclusively singled out to take the heat for being changed and updated. The extended and revised cuts of Blade Runner, Almost Famous, The Big Sleep and Close Encounters of the Third Kind are considered the definitive versions of those films. After the rebirth of high-profile modified re-releases with the Star Wars Special Editions, we saw Apocalypse Now Redux and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial receive similar treatment, with the only noise being made about the latter’s trivial replacement of a few guns by walkie-talkies. Many classic films that are seeing release on DVD are as much as half an hour to an hour longer than the original without modern-day audiences knowing they were ever any different; observe the restorations of Spartacus and Lawrence of Arabia.

This applies not only to film, but also to literature; academically, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is still popularly studied using the text of the 1831 edition, which is heavily rewritten from the 1818 original, though the First Edition can be found and is even preferred by some. J.R.R. Tolkien rewrote the entire “Riddles in the Dark” chapter of The Hobbit after the publication of The Lord of the Rings, which itself underwent subsequent revisions and the addition of supplementary material now considered to be integral to the Middle-Earth canon.

So, why the kerfuffle about Star Wars?

Having spent more time observing the patterns of the online Star Wars community over the past six or seven years than is healthy for the sanity of any given individual – I was once an Administrator at TheForce.net’s forums (lack of a hyperlink intended), which is a hive of scum and villainy akin to everything bad about any arbitrary Internet messageboards all rolled into one – I bring forth this indisputable fact: the majority of people who call themselves Star Wars fans, at least, the ones on the Internet, are idiots.

This isn’t a matter of who agrees with me and who doesn’t. I am clearly in the minority in the sense that, strike me off your Christmas lists if you want, I love the Prequels. A lot of idiots also love the Prequels, so like I said, this is not an issue of who holds what opinion. The real issue is that the Star Wars fan culture on the Internet is one giant pep rally after another of flag-waving lunacy, where people mobilize themselves into congruous rival gangs under the banner of liking or disliking something, justifying their cliquy behaviour by citing victimization and a bunch of other excuses they borrowed from the same bag of tricks used by racial supremacists.

Back when I was still patrolling the bozo-boards, there was actually a set of n-thousand-post chat threads started by a group that called themselves the “Expanded Universe Defense Force”, or EUDF, which was started by so-called fans that did their darndest to convince themselves and everyone else that a) the licensed fan fiction coming out of Lucas Licensing is valid literature, and b) despite the volume of said licensed fiction that comes off the press every year, its readership is an oppressed tribe of nomads under the thumb of those who for some crazy reason think that the Prequels are, in fact, not based on the aforementioned non-literature. Call it EU-vangelism, if you will. What they would do is assign themselves squadrons and ranks, and when a member logged in, he would go to the current n-thousand-post “home base” thread and post a notification that he’s patrolling their imaginary borders for danger, along the lines of, “Blue 5, coming in.” After he finished pissing on say, a given community-forum discussion about classic literature by mentioning Michael Stackpole’s I, Jedi within a ten-post radius of the name “Dickens”, it would be straight back to the EUDF thread with a “Blue 5, signing out.” And this is how they act before you engage them in conversation and debate.

Predictably, some of these camps are targeted to despise anything that was done with Star Wars after 1997, be they SE-bashing preservationists or Prequel-bashing neo-cons. For some reason, this is the camp that has a lot of allies in the online media – mostly a generational quirk unifying the fans and laypeople who liked the original films in ways that George Lucas didn’t, and are now appalled at the mere suggestion that they, in fact, do not know more about Star Wars than its creator.

A lot of the vitriol directed to the DVDs does have a valid concern, though: the fact that without a digital release in the DVD format, the orginal version of the Classic Trilogy is doomed to degrade on unreliable magnetic media. This is not quite true, as Star Wars has already been marked for preservation, original reels do still exist, and nothing’s stopping a restoration years down the road like what has had to be done with any old film transferred to DVD, much like what Criterion tends to do. The trouble is that a lot of people out there want their version and they want it now.

It’s undeniable that gradually, a lot of those who claim to be Star Wars fans have lost a lot of faith in the direction of the saga, as if George Lucas were the late-nineties Calgary Flames or something. I use “faith” here because a lot of it is predicated on the religiously fervent belief that George Lucas circa 1977-1983 was God and the Classic Trilogy was His divine creation. It just so turned out that God disagreed. God had a very different plan in mind.

Much of the opposition to the Prequels is not so much a critique based on merit; one should remember that both Episodes I and II initially opened to favourable, albeit divisive reviews. A lot of the criticism they suffer accumulated over time, though not because the scrutiny of them was any more meticulous. The opposition to the Prequels is instead largely because they are in many respects quite different from the original three, and constitute an independent trilogy. The stories are more political, the protagonists come from a higher social class, and the villains are a less visible presence (phantom menaces, alas). The Doug Chiang designs of a Republic in its last renaissance have a fluidity not present in Ralph McQuarrie’s junkyard vision of a galaxy ruled by the Empire. Given that many out there consider the Classic Trilogy perfect, and given that you can’t do better than perfect, the syllogism follows that in their eyes, you can’t do better than the Classic Trilogy – not with the Prequels, and especially not with the Special Editions, both of which compound the sense of negativity by way of a multiplier for perceived blasphemy.

But in addition to these sociological factors, the specific opposition to “fixing the Special Editions” is silly on its own merit. It has been established from the beginning that no, we are not getting the original editions this September. So what would you rather have: the 1997 Special Edition’s experiments in digital editing that, while lauded at the time, now seem like a dated and half-finished test to see if the Prequels were viable (cf. the model of Jabba the Hutt in Episode IV’s restored hangar scene) – or a project brought to completion, consistent with the rejuvenated continuity and aesthetic established by the Prequels, in the name of better flow between the two trilogies? If we are getting a Special Edition anyway, a representation of what George Lucas would have done had he possessed new-millennium technology back in 1977, why not go all the way?

Star Wars is experimental, and always has been. Experiments tend to produce the occasional unintended errors, and no matter how much the audience has grown accustomed to these errors, it does not make their errancy any different in the eyes of the artist. When something avant-garde gets pigeonholed into the status of a mainstream franchise, it faces a new obstacle: fans do not commit to franchises to see something new. They commit to see more of the same. Kudos to George Lucas for not succumbing to the demands of the mob and instead continuing to push the envelope, approximating his own ever-changing imagination more precisely with every iteration.

Troy ends with an almost joking dedication, “Inspired by Homer’s Iliad,” when adaptation-wise it more precisely sits somewhere in between O Brother, Where Art Thou? being inspired by the Odyssey and, to draw an obligatory Peter O’Toole connection for a moment, Lawrence of Arabia‘s roots in Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Never mind the Homeric credit; this is a film best watched for what it is, which is not at all an arm of mythology, but rather a dramatized historical portrait of mythmaking.

Before I get any further, it should be made clear that discussing spoiler material is quite necessary for a proper appraisal of Wolfgang Petersen’s latest offering to the deified audiences of epic cinema. Suffice to say, if you don’t know that Achilles gets shot in the heel, that’s about equivalent to watching Titanic and not knowing the boat sinks, and there is no hope for you.

That leads me to the first curiosity about Troy, which is where it situates itself in its assumptions about what and what not to consider a priori, a problem for any historically-minded film to resolve. For example, Saving Private Ryan never feels it necessary to explain the nitty-gritty of the significance of the Normandy landings and what that whole D-Day schtick was about in the first place. A more recent example is The Passion of the Christ, which asserts some degree of familiarity with the source material on the part of the audience, and tends to fare better with those who know who the likes of that Simon of Cyrene guy are.

Troy‘s assumptions in this regard make it an accessible film without ever openly insulting the audience, with the asterisk that its source material is less the Iliad than the archaeological remains of the titular city, and what else we know of the classical civilizations. David Benioff’s screenplay freely takes Homer’s dramatis personae and the who-kills-whom scorecard and embellishes it with characterizations specific to the film, which work when they are present. What the film appears to be trying to accomplish is to re-enact not Homer himself, but what Homer may have written about, and thus it is imbued with a worldview of secular realism, with no sign of cleanliness’ next-door neighbour aside from the beliefs of the characters themselves. This is a more than legitimate excuse for the liberties taken, as in the same respect, better films have done worse.

But without the mythical element behind it all, Troy faces a unique challenge: it has to make the human characters interesting enough to carry the story. Given that these characters are in many ways archetypal personas defined by their Homeric stature, this is no easy proposition. In exactly three cases, it lives up to the challenge, thanks in large part to the acting power behind these roles. These are Brad Pitt’s portrayal of Achilles, Eric Bana as Hector, and the consistently marvelous Peter O’Toole as Priam.

All three lend physical personality to their characters in their own ways. With Achilles, we see the stature of an epic character defined not by heroics but by a rebellious arrogance, as well as what proves to be a unique fighting style to call his own. Hector is perhaps the strongest presence in the film, and walks tall with a sense of heroic nobility that goes unmatched. Eric Bana was long overdue for a star-making role despite coming close with a hammerhead shark and a big green angry guy, and this may prove to be it. Priam is a kingly character, and besides, this is Peter O’Toole we’re talking about; sadly, his screentime is just as limited as fellow Lawrence alumnus Omar Sharif’s in Hidalgo, which comes off as almost wasteful.

This is not to say that Troy is not without its distractions, and there are many. Many of them involve pacing, particularly of the first and last act. The opening is riddled with an excess of title cards that cheat their way around exposition, and the initiation of the conflict proved to be a pickle when avoiding any mucking about with that god brouhaha. At the end, after the point at which the Iliad has had its fill, the movie suddenly realizes that it has some unfinished business, and rushes to completion. It’s as if someone in the editing department realized that once Hector is out of the picture, the glue holding the movie together starts to dissipate, so why not wrap everything up in a hurry? Before long, Troy is sacked and Achilles is shot in the heel, all because of a trick with a horse that is in obvious reference to Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The conflict resolution is, in a word, patchy.

Conversely, the movie has its best moments when it takes its time, particularly with the two key duels – first between Paris (Orlando Bloom) and Menelaus (Brendan Gleeson), and later, Achilles and Hector – and Priam’s key scene, when he appeals to Achilles for an honourable funeral for his son. Believe it or not, the 160-minute epic could have done well with being longer, taking its time to properly transition between scenes and establish roles such as Sean Bean’s all-too-brief appearance as Odysseus, while remaining true to itself as what William Goldman would call the “good parts” version.

One would think that a film that promoted itself with the tagline, “If love is worth fighting for, then it has known no greater battle,” would be a little more competent in the romantic side of things. Unfortunately, this is not the case; despite an attempt to salvage Achilles’ hero status by overplaying the captivity of Briseis (Rose Byrne), about the only romantic depth we see is in Orlando Bloom’s portrayal of Paris as a besotten idealist who acts on infatuation alone and hides behind the nobility of his brother. As for the subject of said infatuaton, Helen of Troy (Diane Kruger) is hardly even a presence, a concern the film dodges by establishing that her supposed beauty had little to do with launching a thousand ships in the first place; again, realpolitik at work in the Ancient World.

Thematically, what holds Troy together and sets its tone as a work of cinema is the relationship between its characters and the very idea of being immortalized in legend. It outright rejects mythical elements such as Achilles’ purported physical immortality, but shows the origin of myth by implication; Achilles is found dead with an arrow in his heel, and such a circumstance overshadows the fact that it is not singularly responsible for his demise. Where this kind of pragmatism falls short is in the case of Agamemnon, who comes out of this story looking the most outright villainous. Brian Cox is only as good a bad guy as the material he’s given – see X2: X-Men United for a recent comparison – and here, it’s not much more than your standard megalomaniacal fare.

There are very few complaints to be had about the production on a technical level. Roger Pratt, best known for his collaborations with Terry Gilliam and saving The Chamber of Secrets from Chris Columbus’ inability to move a camera, shoots Troy entirely in shades of desert yellow, treading the line between consistent and stale, but ultimately producing a look and feel reminiscent of the period epics of the sixties. James Horner’s score is at times in far too close proximity to Hans Zimmer’s work in Gladiator and Black Hawk Down in its use of ethereal vocals in exotic modes, but by the end of the movie, he carves out a Troy theme that manages to stand on its own. While much has been made of the decision to scrap an allegedly more ambitious score by Gabriel Yared, Horner’s work is sufficient to be shortlisted for an award or two, albeit penalized on the basis of originality.

At the end of the day, Troy receives credit for serving as a fairly definitive narrative of the siege of the titular city, if not quite a retelling of Homer. It is at least as good as some of its lesser big-budget costume epic forebears, the kind that rightly won few awards in its day but still sees release and critique; like Spartacus, but an hour and an Olivier shorter. Flaws are noticeable in an abundance proportional to expectations and a priori baggage, but by no means is Petersen’s project a disaster like the one that befell its namesake.

Play a word-association game in sets of three and in two moves, someone is bound to mention Krypton’s finest. But as far as superheroics go, it’s only a one-step removal to Brad Bird of The Iron Giant, whose Pixar project, The Incredibles, has a new trailer. As has been the case all year, nothing has come close to unseating it as my most-anticipated film this year – but that’s not to slight some other very major blips on the more immediate summer radar, particularly the month of June, with the quadruple-whammy of (in chronological order) The Prisoner of Azkaban, The Terminal, De-lovely and Spider-Man 2.

Interestingly enough, the trailer to The Incredibles credits it to the same studio that delivered Toy Story, Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo; A Bug’s Life is conspicuously absent. Oh, how quickly we forget; pray tell, is it because the insect flick is the one errant statistic in the Pixar streak that did not manage to break $200M domestically, or something far more sinister, like trying to bury the gaffe that all of the ants have four legs?

One wonders how Monsters, Inc. will be treated years down the road, when the “From the makers of…” shortlist fills up even more with the likes of The Incredibles, Cars and Ratatouille. Like A Bug’s Life, Monsters was a run-of-the-mill Pixar film in the sense that it was merely wonderful, as opposed to a life-changing experience on the order of the two Toy Story films and Finding Nemo. Both drew comparisons to similarly-themed PDI offerings released earlier in the same year, Antz and Shrek, both of them hits in their own right – and case studies alpha and beta of PDI’s and Pixar’s differing philosophies.

PDI seems to go for the immediate returns, capitalizing on popular culture, aiming straight for the hardest laughs – but with the price of what plagues most of the comedy genre this day and age, which is that certain elements get stale by the third or fourth time through. In spite of the initial praise for Antz as an edgy response to a Pixar that was still growing up, its staying power has waned.

As for Shrek, PDI’s crown jewel and by all means an excellent work of pop art, I saw it again last week for the first time in over a year, and with divergent feelings. Much of it is still very good; the castle sequence, the transformation, and the more serious bits still resonate as they always did, and nobody can deny that the animation is lovely to this day, thanks to some exceptional character design. The toilet humour does not fare so well, nor does much of the music, which should have been tackled entirely as an original score from the outset, as the little of the score we hear makes some of the movie’s best scenes what they are. The spoof of The Matrix, once the best of its kind, comes off almost as a hump to get over. One should normally avoid making such comparions, but while Shrek beat out the lighthearted Monsters, Inc. for open laughter and heart at the first viewing, and took home the corresponding Oscar, the latter is easier to watch again.

What Pixar seems to do with every one of its films is establish a sense of lasting power, something that can rarely ever be appraised in the crop of reviews during a given movie’s initial theatrical run. The returns – and here, I mean that in the sense of the degree of entertainment provided – are not of the diminishing sort.

This, of course, leads me to a requisite discussion of the PDI offering formerly known as Sharkslayer, which was perhaps unwisely renamed Shark Tale to avoid confusion with the Calgary Flames. So far, Shark Tale has been pretty low-profile – in fact, there has been little to go on aside from this trailer – but one can expect a promotional blowout to accompany the opening of Shrek 2 later this week. I may end up eating my words as I initially did with Shrek three years ago, since it was a case of a film’s quality far exceeding that of its portrayal in advertising, but Shark Tale – which is not nearly as edgy as originally promised, especially with the modified title – is a film to be sceptical about. It appears to be swimming straight for standard PDI territory with its celebrity voices, hip-comedy tone and more expressionistic design aesthetic, but the Nemo comparisons will be unavoidable. See, it’s already hard enough for any movie to follow an act like Finding Nemo, let alone do everything short of picking a fight with it. The Incredibles already scared Dreamworks into bumping this movie up a month, which will not avoid an animation duel this fall where hopefully, the audience will emerge the ultimate winner.

At some point in my life I want to see Pixar earn history’s second Best Picture nomination for an animated feature, the first being the certainly deserving Beauty and the Beast. It should have been Andrew Stanton and Nemo, but let’s see if Brad Bird can do the trick.

Back in October I wrote about my concerns on the subject of adapting Watchmen to film, particularly if David Hayter was going to direct.

Chuck those out the window. Ain’t It Cool News finally lives up to its name and reports that the director attached to the project is none other than Darren Aronofsky. Hayter is still on board from the writing aspect, which is encouraging, but bringing an established independent-film veteran with a proven record behind the camera is even moreso. This is, in as few words as possible, a step in the right direction.

It’s clear what has to happen from this point onwards. David Hayter, do what you did with X2 and not what you did with X-Men – polish a script that doesn’t get lost in a forest of some of the most well-defined costumed heroes in the entire comics medium. Darren Aronofsky, work the same kind of chilling visual magic and style you brought to Requiem for a Dream. The potential here is nothing short of doing justice to the paragon of comic-book literature in the same way Peter Jackson did justice to the paragon of fantasy literature; you can either beeline straight to the Oscars, or screw it up completely. I would prefer the former.

Yesterday I wrote a reasonably thorough dissection of a problematic revenge-themed action flick more verbose than said movie deserved. In stark contrast, words are not enough to praise the concluding five chapters of the already-bisected Kill Bill.

When a movie delivers a forties-style rear projection driving scene, a Samuel L. Jackson cameo and an Ennio Morricone cue from the Man With No Name Trilogy in the first five minutes, you know it’s going to be good. What you don’t know, at this point, is that Vol. 2 is in same ways a world away from Vol. 1. This is not to say that the two parts do not cohere; they do, and quite brilliantly so, once the chapter structure falls into place and the jigsaw that is the Bride stands complete. But Vol. 2 has nothing akin to the Showdown at the House of Blue Leaves, no visceral lessons on the many ways to dismember the human anatomy with an example a second; by my count, the body count remains in the single digits. For those of you keeping track, that’s a whole two digits less than Chapters 1 to 5, never mind how it’s stated at one point that there aren’t actually eighty-eight Crazy 88s.

Instead, the second half of Kill Bill is progressively more literary in its writing. This is not in any way a cakewalk like Uma Thurman’s Bride – whose name is finally revealed – fighting her way up to and killing her remaining victims, Budd (Michael Madsen), Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah) and Bill (finally revealed onscreen as David Carradine). After plunging headfirst into Japanese cinema in the O-Ren chapters of Vol. 1, now we have a return to America’s Wild West, and even an all-too-brief stop in China. As with the first half, Tarantino treats his material with precise visual acuity true to the visual flair of his influences. By the end of it all, Kill Bill is like a film studies course in a box, taking the techniques of the great filmmaking dynasties from around the world and putting them in one four-hour package; all it’s missing is a Bollywood musical number on the streets of Delhi.

I cannot say enough about the China sequence – Chapter 8, “The Cruel Tutelage of Pai Mei”. It stands as a towering tribute to classic Hong Kong cinema, with the same zoom-in, zoom-out photography and the beard-stroking of the legendary White-Eyebrowed Monk, Pai Mei – here portrayed by Gordon Liu, who also played Crazy 88s leader Johnny Mo in the first part. His scenes miss nothing. One of my recurring gripes about American films with brief forays in Hong Kong or China is the careless indifference to the gulf of separation between the Mandarin and Cantonese dialects, often resulting in inconsistent banter where you would see alternation between the two in the same conversation, banking on the fact that the audience won’t notice. Tarantino knows better; he even goes out of his way to mock this from the beginning – as an aside, with Pai Mei reminding this reviewer that he still understands Cantonese in the context of martial arts movies. In this chapter in particular, we see a display of something Tarantino executes remarkably well: a balanced juxtaposition of scenes goofy and serious.

Budd and Elle Driver are valuable additions to the Tarantino canon, and complement well the half of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad we have already seen. Budd, like Vernita Green, left his past behind to start anew, only he is anything but well-adjusted to being a Texas bar bouncer who lives in a trailer in the middle of nowhere. In seeing his wreck of a life, one observes an important parallel with what is revealed about the Bride’s own path in life. Elle, on the other hand, followed O-Ren’s path in that she never gave up being a Deadly Viper, and she is every bit the same assassin as in her brief appearance in Chapter 2: someone who wears an eyepatch, carries a cell phone, is never content with settling with second place, and resorts to the most vile techniques to express her dissatisfaction. In many ways, she is perhaps the most villainous character in the saga.

Kill Bill is one film, with its separation in two an afterthought of release strategy, and it never lets the audience forget that. Neither part stands alone, and the most impressive thing about the work is just how well the two parts fit together. The second part, however, distinguishes itself right off the bat; no longer is the Bride’s name concealed by a censoring beep, and no longer is Bill a faceless entity. Both of them drop their anonymity over the course of Vol. 2 and blossom to completion as two of the deepest original characters in recent cinema. What we see most of in this movie are revelations of motive through character interaction in a way that takes the chaos of the “roaring rampage of revenge” and sets it in order.

But when it comes to motive, most revenge films – even the good ones – stop right there. Kill Bill goes beyond. It dares to pose the question of why the perpetrator and counter-perpetrating victim resort to violence, and what it is in the nature of these individuals, or human nature itself, that drives them to commit their actions. The film realizes that as far as full-on action spectacles go, it already reached an asymptotal limit at the House of Blue Leaves in Chapter 5, and takes a different developmental path that favours depth over death. As it works its way towards a grand finale that may not be a spectacular boss battle, but is anything but anti-climactic, it shows a progressive level of maturity. To boot, this maturity never precludes it from being outright fun.

Does Kill Bill, Vol. 2 have flaws? On a trivial, “nobody’s perfect” level, arguably. An encounter with a Mexican pimp (Michael Parks) near the end comes a little late, and could be construed as an aberrant drop in the pace. With the amount of screen time devoted to Budd and Elle in this volume and O-Ren in the first, of the Deadly Vipers, Vernita Green is shafted in terms of development – though some balance is restored given that her brief appearance in Chapter 1 has a symbolic value that is made ever more evident in the second half, when we find out more about the Bride herself. As far as Budd goes, a lot of his fractured relationship with his brother Bill is left ambiguous, but the tensions there make enough sense to avoid being too unsatisfying. By itself, Vol. 2 seems as light on action as the first seemed light on Tarantino’s trademark soliloquies, but again, the two have to be regarded as a unified product.

These reservations can be put aside in the face of what Quentin Tarantino has achieved with his project, an attempt to create the ultimate cult film, and one that could be dubbed successful. Kill Bill, when considered in its entirety, is the quintessential movie for people who love movies.