Author Archives: Anthony Sacramone

If we can stop [Moriarty], we shall prevent the collapse of Western civilization… No pressure.

War, war, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing — unless you’re in the arms business, of course. Or an anarchist hoping to sit back and watch the Old World Order bleed. Both Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows and MI:4—Ghost Protocol revolve around plots to set the world on fire by turning would-be allies into adversaries. Wackiness, of course, ensues.

This time out our old friend Sherlock (Robert Downey Jr.), a master of disguise and the martial arts, is out to discover who’s really behind the recent terror attacks in London town. Anarchists! it is said. Yes — but we know who the true mastermind is, who it always is, the blasted Moriarty. With the help of his recently married partner, the good doctor Watson (Jude Law) and a gypsy companion (played by the original Dragon Tattoo‘s Noomi Rapace) whose brother has become a pawn in Moriarty’s sinister game, not to mention his older brother Mycroft (the indefatigable Stephen Fry), Sherlock must get to the evil doctor, the father of the military-industrial complex, it seems, before a highly anticipated international peace conference in Switzerland becomes the a tinderbox that ignites world war.

The first half of Sherlock Holmes II is a rather raucous mishmash, and no one will ever confuse this screenplay with a carefully crafted film narrative. But the film’s second hour makes for some rather brilliant entertainment. Guy Ritchie has evolved into a quite deft and imaginative action director, and the set design is spectacularly involving and beautiful in its own right. 1891 London and a Europe that in a generation will be scarred forever by the trench warfare of WWI has never looked so rich and inviting … and menacing and daunting.

This is a film that in the hands of any other moviemakers could have taken itself and its antiwar message way too seriously, to the point of ponderous speechifying. But Guy Ritchie and his band of merry men are way too busy having fun to let a little thing like the fate of the West weigh them down. Downey is all wrong for the part of Sherlock Holmes, always was, and yet once again he charms and chatters his way through the kinds of beatings and bloodlettings that only a two-dimensional projected image could endure. His preternatural ability to anticipate how some very painful encounters will play themselves out, a kind of sixth sense that’s supposed to explain in some way his powers of deduction (but don’t really), is, again, an extremely effective update to the iconic character. Which is to say, he’s a blast.

There’s a very British cross-dressing bromance that may more than hint at the prescient detective’s more than platonic affection for a befuddled and infuriated Watson, whose new bride Holmes has defenstrated from a moving train. But with Downey’s marred makeup making him resemble Heath Ledger’s Joker, I wouldn’t take it, or anything else about this raucous romp, too seriously.

Except, of course, the boom-boom, bang-bang stuff, because that, as we know, would prove only too too real.

As for MI:4—Ghost Protocol, the plot reads like something that was kicking around for a Bond flick in the 1980s: a group of recycled Eurotrash needs “the codes” to launch a nuclear strike that will pit Russia against the U.S. and set the whole world on fire. Shades of SPECTRE!

The flick starts off promisingly enough, with Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) virtually dancing his way through an IMF-engineered prison break, Dean Martin’s “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head” playing in the background. (Almost anything can be made better with Dino playing on the soundtrack, I have learned.)

Once freed, Hunt pulls together his crew of uber-spies to hunt down the aforementioned bad guys, led by a mega-genius named Hendricks (played by Dragon Tattoo‘s original good-guy journalist Michael Nyqvist), excommunicated from the scientific fraternity for also being a maniac without written permission from the King of Denmark or something. Things go badly when the Kremlin is blown up. Things go very very badly when the IMF is blamed and the White House calls for a ghost protocol — a disavowal not just of an IMF mission or a particular agent but of the entire agency.

As the Russians think some rogue Americans are blowing up the joint, setting the entire geopolitical chessboard on “check,” Hunt & Co. must not only prove their innocence but also stop the disappointingly one-dimensional and extremely dull archfiend Hendricks from initiating a nuclear holocaust.

Again, no pressure.

The much ballyhooed scaling of the world’s tallest building in Dubai proved rather predictable and flat, and less interesting visually than Ethan’s mountain mounting in director John Woo’s MI:2. Throw in a ludicrous car chase through a — wait for it — sandstorm, in which the relative positions of the cars is determined by a — wait for it again — Droid GPS, and you have an example of way overthinking an action sequence in the pursuit of being “original.”

But again, as with Holmes, it’s the second half of the film that saves this picture, when the race to the nuclear button kicks into hyperdrive, and a clever turn on the original MI‘s dangling Ethan sequence is re-enacted — without the wires. Director Brad Bird (Iron Giant, The Incredibles) no doubt has a hit on his hands, and so has now entered the ranks of go-to action helmsmen, his ability to render wide vistas balanced nicely with little touches like sly asides and giveaway gestures, necessary to make vaguely credible some of the plot twists.

Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker) is a nice addition to the IMF crew and a fit counterpart to Cruise’s Hunt, as is Paula Patton, another kick-ass gal who’s having trouble keeping the murder of her lover, another agent, from affecting her judgment. Simon Pegg is the A-lister’s sidekick of choice, a rich man’s Rob Schneider. The “doubling” gimmick — when IMF agents don masks that enable them to assume the identities of their nemeses — is finally dropped in this iteration, thank goodness. The doubling redoubled sequences in that Woo MI:2 multiplied ridiculously until you couldn’t help but feel you could show up onscreen at any moment.

As with Holmes, I wish the script had been run through the laptop one more draft: a little less running around, a little more attention to narrative cohesiveness and character development, and this would have been a better picture. As is, it’s just enough of a joy ride, with an unexpected and touching kicker, to make it worth taking the trip.

CODA: Both these films suffer from the industry’s overreliance on computers. Yeah, yeah, they’re supposed to awesome and mind-blowing  and eye-popping. But with the aid of CGI, anything can be slapped up on the screen. And when anything can happen, nothing really happens, which is to say, the characters become just another special effect and may as well be duking it out on Pluto or in John Malkovich’s head. And great characters — whether Sherlock Holmes or Connery’s Bond — begin to fade into memory with every stroke of the keyboard. (Ethan Hunt never reached iconic status, I don’t think.)

With that said, I still look forward to a Sherlock Holmes III, assuming everyone involved can keep up the energy and joi de vivre, and hopefully with Stephen Fry on board once again (fully clothed, though, please). But despite a couple of nicely turned set pieces, I fear the MI series is played out, regardless of the glowing reviews of the mainstream media. But money talks, and all I ask is that if there must be a Part V, please, pretty please, bring back Ving Rhames. I mean, for real. And maybe Quentin Tarantino as director. Or Woody Allen. I’d pay to see Woody Allen’s MI:5, with a cold open of Hunt on a psychiatrist’s couch having imagined the first four films as an escape from his mind-numbing job in the social security claims office…

The earth is evil. We don’t need to grieve for it. Nobody will miss it.

There may be life somewhere else.

But there isn’t.

It’s a comedy, you see. Or at least I hope so. Because if Melancholia, the much-ballyhooed dirge from controversial Danish filmmaker Lars Von Trier, is intended to be tragedy, then we have here a disaster that makes the German Peasants War of 1524 look like an episode of Curb Appeal.

Cold open. Very cold. Deep space. Deep, deep space. Planets. Colliding. People. Fleeing. Nature. Unhinged. A bride. Entangled. In tree roots. Everything. Moving. Slowly. Until. Planets. Go. Boom. Blackout.

A terrifying dream? The nocturnal effluvia of a melancholic personality? Or a presage of terrible things to come, a foreordained and predestined end of everything. Make that Everything.

Justine. Played by Kirsten Dunst. It’s her wedding day. She and her groom are two hours late to the reception owing to the incompetence of a limo driver who won his license at a Middle School raffle.

Justine’s sister, Claire, played by the painfully pained Charlotte Gainsbourg, is more angry than relieved, having gone to great pains to create a party to end all wedding parties at an estate that features an 18-hole golf course and onion soup. Justine’s mother (Charlotte Rampling) is a bitter, pissy woman who declaims to all the attendees how she hates marriage, which is why she didn’t go to the church. And who can blame her, when her ex husband (the great John Hurt), has shown up with two dates, both named Betty.

Justine’s boss, Stellan Skarsgard (real-life dad of Alexander, who plays the pathetic groom), is the head of an advertising agency and offers her as a wedding gift a promotion to art director from that of copy writer. There’s just one catch: he needs a tagline for a new ad campaign. Before the honeymoon begins. In an hour of so. And to ensure that he gets the goods, he has just hired his nephew to get that tagline out of the otherwise preoccupied Justine before evening’s end, lest he lose said job.

So how is Justine holding up under all this wackadoodle? Not well. She is trying, poor thing. Putting on a brave face. Insisting that this extravagant celebration is exactly what she wanted. Then why does she keep walking out? Why does she leave the table to go take a bath? Why does she leave her poor schmuck of a clueless husband to hump the boss’s nephew on the golf course? Why does she then tell the boss off in a fit of worker revolt not seen since Keep the Aspidistra Flying?

Why has she used her wedding day to blow up everything “good” in her life?

Because life on earth is evil.

After the wedding guests have all gone home, Justine plunges deeper into near catatonic depression, to the point where she can’t even bath herself without help from Claire. Her put-upon sister, too, is limp with anxiety, not only because her sibling, who she hates as well as pities, can’t help checking on the progress of that planet seen in the opening sequence, subtly called Melancholia. Is it going to hit planet Earth, or simply provide a once-in-a-lifetime fly-by, as her fabulously wealthy scientist husband (Kiefer Sutherland) insists.

And so we wait. Is science right? Will earth survive this near calamity of flirting orbs? Or will all on Earth be reduced to ashes, rendering the best and the brightest a bunch of boobies who can’t even get the Apocalypse right? And if so, what were all those putative good things — like love and family and work and estates with golf courses and onion soup — for? What did they mean? Were they always meaningless, as Justine and Claire’s mother never tires of declaiming? Or do they just become meaningless in the face of mass extinction, which is just personal extinction with more running around?

Melancholia is an exercise in crapulous angst — not to be mistaken for existential angst. A tipsy filmmaker, a poor man’s Ingmar Bergman, assuming that poor man was Woody Allen on the set of Interiors, has decided to exorcise his demons by giving Charlotte Gainsbourg a role in which she’s not forced to perform her own clitoridectomy. Instead, the audience is forced to perform a lobotomy, at least if they’re to take the critics’ fawning over this empty pretentious twaddle seriously.

As for Kirsten Dunst, who won Best Actress at Cannes: She’s suitably morose and self-absorbed. And she’s nude in two scenes. And she stares out into the distance with an intensity not seen since Deepak Chopra’s cameo in The Love Guru. If she beats out Meryl Streep’s sure-to-be-spot-on but soulless imitation of Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, I’ll punch a mime.

How seriously are we supposed to take these empty, two-dimensional, dullwitted characters? If they’re truly representative of humanity, at least a humanity with a net worth in the mid eight figures, who wouldn’t want to see them obliterated? Even their pain is boring. That’s the problem with a “dramatic” exercise in the meaningless of all things: your attempt to be meaningful is itself meaningless.

Don’t look for any religious undertones or spiritual yearning or even last-gasp efforts to seek the will or face of God. This universe is as empty as an Episcopal church on Stewardship Sunday. The very last image, of Justine, Claire, and Claire’s little boy huddling together under a teepee configuration of sticks with no external covering, is supposed to sum it all up in some pathetic way: all our attempts to hide from reality are merely so many twigs in a tornado. OK. Thanks for sharing.

This could have been an intriguing look at clinical depression from the inside — you feel like the world is coming to an end and you just don’t care about anyone or anything and why won’t it all end already. That may have been what initially motivated Von Trier, given statements he has made in interviews. The finished product, however, is not that. It’s clinical depression as the only grown-up way of looking at life full stop. And the only reason I don’t kill myself if because you won’t all join in and thus confirm how smart I am.

Again, I tried to imagine this as a comedy whose punch line was “Beware happy people, they don’t have enough information.” And perhaps Von Trier is, in fact, having us on. He’s known for being a prankster, pulling the public’s whiskers for a laugh.

Or maybe this is just a piece sullen, sulky dribble dressed up as a great meditation on the human condition and the inevitable planet that hits us all — death.

I’m sticking with dribble. So bring a lobster bib.

If you read the entertainment press at all, you’ll have noticed all the four- and five-star reviews and raves of Masterpiece! that Martin Scorsese’s latest, Hugo, has received. That the director best known for Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and Goodfellas was straying into Steven Spielberg/George Lucas territory was seen as a category mistake by some. Nevertheless, if the critics are right, Scorsese’s having temporarily abandoned the world of secret societies, strange codes of conduct, and loyalty above all has proved an eye-popping, impressive, and altogether successful venture.

But is the film really as good as the press?

Yes. And then some.

Hugo Cabret is a little boy who lives in a Parisian train station. Having lost his beloved father, a fixer, a mechanic, in an accident, he is taken in by a drunk of an uncle whose job it is to wind all the clocks in the station. When the uncle takes off one day, Hugo continues winding the clocks lest someone notice that he is all alone  and – off to the orphanage for him.

When he isn’t dodging the station guard, played with an almost Germanic rigidity by Sasha Baron Cohen, he’s pilfering food and, more important, spare mechanical parts from vendors in the station. One such vendor, a seller of toys, catches him in the act, and forces him to empty his pockets. Along with the gears and springs and screws Hugo has accumulated is a notebook filled with sketches of what looks like a robot. The toy seller, Monsieur Georges (played by the pitch-perfect Ben Kingsley), is horrified by the book and snatches it away, refusing to return it, despite the boy’s tearful entreaties.

That notebook holds the key to the one thing Hugo has left from his late father – an automaton, found in a museum, but that is in a poor state of repair. Hugo is determined to fix the broken machine and see whether it holds some hidden message from his father – and some clue as to his own destiny.

It most certainly does, especially when it is learned that the surly toy seller is none other than the great French film magician George Melies, fallen on hard times, and that the notebook was originally his. After the First World War destroyed his career, such that hundreds of his “sci-fi” and fantasy films were destroyed or lost, Melies is reduced to selling trinkets and trying to forget his true vocation, lost forever.

But both Hugo and Melies were brought together for a reason: both will ensure that past tragedies are redeemed and that the future still holds surprises and hope – the hope of realizing one’s true calling despite all the obstacles a cruel world throws in one’s way.

Scorsese moves his characters through the train station and each other’s lives with such dexterity and death-defying grace as to render you speechless at times. Moving, fun, and wise, Hugo will give you both a catch in your throat and much to think about. As Hugo ponders the meaning of the mechanical man he has been left by his father, he comes to see that machines work because each and every part, no matter how small, no matter how insignificant, has a role to play in the larger scheme of things. Everything, in other words, has a purpose. Including the little orphan boy Hugo.

Sounds inspiring enough, until you contemplate the consequences for a bit. Doesn’t this reduce us all to mere cogs in a great machine? Doesn’t this risk viewing humanity as a grove of  clockwork oranges, with some parts damaged beyond repair, to be thrown on an overly efficient society’s junk heap, and others to be “fixed” in such a way that they become not their true selves but merely gears in the works of the rich and powerful?

While the film does not, Western Union–like, state it in so many words, certainly the implicit message is that such a fear, which literally haunts Hugo as a nightmare, can be assuaged by how we dream. Our imagination is what raises us above the mere machinery of the Industrial Age. Our ability to envision worlds yet to come, that may never come, at least in this life, so enlarges our perspective that we can never be merely useful. The dreamers are what keep us from being crushed by technology, even as that technology magnifies our capacity to realize and share those dreams.

Why hasn’t Hugo done better at the box office? Because it’s a kids’ film for adults. What kid has a love of the old – old movies, old books, old tales of adventure and daring do. Not the telling of the tales – but the mere remembering of the tales, and the world in which they were first conjured.

It’s also a film about the “magic” of the mechanical, the makeshift, and the gear-laden. The 1920s saw machines beginning to dominate industry, manufacturing – newfangled automobiles and automation and auto-everthing would at the close of another war see even more home-spun dreariness evaporate with the click of a switch. Yes, there was a time when one could still marvel at the possibilities.

Now we take this all for granted. What is there for kids to truly stare wide-eyed at anymore? With videogames and iPods and digital this and 3D that, any six-year-old can download an app or piece of software and zoink! — the miraculous right before his or her already bored eyes! The only advance is how quickly you can pull the rabbit out of your high-def hat.

To remember a time of such innocence, for lack of a better word, or perhaps the quotidian, when a wind-up toy, a mechanical man, and the movies as movies could still beguile is not for kids of 10 or 14. You’d have to at least remember buying records and videotape players and roll-up windows in cars. And what a big deal Star Wars and the first Superman were – You’ll believe a man can fly! Sheesh, today, you’d better make me believe I can fly.

So with or without the kids, run and see Hugo today. I’m hoping word of mouth will keep this in theaters long enough to see a decent return on investment. I see no real advantage of the 3D version over the 2D, by the way. As far as I’m concerned, if I was already convinced that 3D is a waste of money and Tylenol, Hugo did nothing to dissuade me. Talk about gilding the lily. The “magic” of 3D is a bit of a cheat and adds nothing to what the story – and the stories within the stories, those of Melies, and Harold Lloyd, and Charlie Chaplin, and Buster Keaton, and all the great innovators and early artists of the silent-film era – already provides. 3D can never replicate the feeling those first movie audiences had when it looked like a train driving into a station was going to burst through the screen and plow right into them! We’re too jaundiced for that. Hugo is best experienced by way of God’s greatest special effect: the unaided human eye, and of course, imagination.