PLAYER ONE

PLAYER ONE

          In 2045, to nobody’s surprise, the world of Ready Player One looks pretty much like the dystopia envisioned by scientists today—overcrowded, polluted, dangerous, with millions of people living in squalor.  In Ernest Cline’s rich and lively novel Ready Player One, the population mostly survives the general devastation by inhabiting a version of virtual reality, a not unlikely prospect.  Anyone with a computer can create an avatar, some idealized version of themselves, and log into a global virtual world called OASIS, where most of them spend a good deal of their waking lives.

         

         The protagonist of the novel and Steven Spielberg’s adaptation, Wade Watts, participates in OASIS through his ancient laptop, improving his appearance by means of a created persona, his avatar, and calling himself Parzival, appropriate for someone on a quest for something like the Holy Grail.  Inspired by the legacy of the creators of OASIS, Wade/Parzival (Tye Sheridan) and two sidekicks, Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) and Aech (Lena Waithe), pursue a series of cryptic clues, solve riddles, engage in contests, and battle a horde of rivals, some of them avatars, others actual humans, in order to obtain three magical keys and achieve a prize that will transform their lives and OASIS as well.

In addition to the trio’s various complicated adventures, including an ongoing struggle against the murderous head of a corporation attempting to take over OASIS, the film depends upon the book’s profound engagement with popular culture, particularly teen culture from the 1980s.  Thanks to the memories preserved in various electronic devices, Wade possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of comic books, video games, movies, songs, and television shows from that time, all of which aid him in his quest.  He must, for example, play an antiquated game against a created monster to gain access to an important goal; a fan of Back to the Future, he drives the famous DeLorean from that movie in an important race; he finds himself repeating some of actions of the TV shows he has watched over and over (Family Ties is a particular favorite); his sidekick Aech, also an adept, enlists the comic book character Iron Giant in a climactic showdown.

           Although the movie strips down and simplifies many of the novel’s complications, Spielberg manipulates all the avatars, monsters, and battles with his customary skill and the usual assistance of digital technology; in fact, the novel really seems a natural choice for his sort of filmmaking.  In a complex sequence that some people call intertextuality he in effect makes another movie inside his movie.  He places the trio of questers inside a perfect reproduction of The Shining, repeating many of that movie’s most memorable moments, like the ocean of blood by the elevators, the two sinister little girls, the decayed crone, and even the photograph, slightly modified, of the Hotel Overlook’s guests from the past.  It’s a kind of tour de force for a filmmaker who often specializes in such gestures.

Although I generally avoid comic book movies, superhero movies, special effects extravaganzas, and all the other expensive and elaborate claptrap that passes for filmmaking these days, Ready Player One actually works, with its strong story, terrific sets, and rich context of popular culture.  The translation of the novel into the visual medium, probably partly a result of the author himself collaborating on the screenplay, succeeds admirably.  The only surprise about the film is the very limited commentary it has inspired; it deserves more.

PINS AND NEEDLES

          According to press reports, Daniel Day-Lewis learned to butcher for his role in Gangs of New York, toted a 12-pound Kentucky rifle wherever he went when he was playing Natty Bumppo in The Last of the Mohicans, and for his latest picture, Phantom Thread, acquired enough skill at tailoring to design and make a dress in order to play the protagonist, a London fashion designer named Reynolds Woodcock.  The famous Method often engages actors in that sort of preparation, research, and absorption, and apparently Day-Lewis more than qualifies as a Methodist.

From its beginning the film establishes the character of its protagonist as a meticulous and annoying fussbudget, grooming himself carefully, irritably reacting to the small noises of his girlfriend’s breakfast while sketching designs, a process that repeats throughout the picture.  The simple plot takes Woodcock to his country house, where in a restaurant he orders a huge, complicated meal from a waitress named Alma (Vicky Krieps), whose memory for his order, German accent, and general appearance impress him enough to invite her to dinner and bring her back to his house; there he and his sister Cyril (Lesley Manville) measure her minutely and judge her a perfect model for his dresses.  He hires Alma and brings her back to his London home, where a fleet of seamstresses work on his designs.

The rest of the movie pretty much revolves around the relationship among the three people, conducted in the midst of and against the background of his work.  The low level of action, the tiresome sensitivity of the chief character, and the puzzling relationship between him and his model make for a rather dull and repetitive series of actions.  After hiring her as a model, he takes Alma as his lover, and she assumes something like a special place in the house, with some competition from Cyril, who manages everything, including her brother’s love affairs.  When their relationship begins to founder, beginning typically with his annoyance with the noise she makes buttering her toast, Alma takes some drastic and surprising steps to cement the bond.

Phantom Thread seems a strange little work to incite the sort of praise the usual ravers lavish on films starring Daniel Day-Lewis, like Gangs of New York and There Will Be Blood.  Then again, the director is the also highly praised Paul Thomas Anderson, who also gave us the ridiculous Boogie Nights and the pretentious nonsense of Magnolia and yes, There Will Be Blood.  Unlike Anderson’s previous “big” movie, this one settles into something like a Henry James novella, with a small, static plot, a limited cast of characters, and a central couple joined in an ambiguous symbiosis, each dependent on the other in a generally unhealthy way.

Whatever his qualifications as a butcher, Indian fighter, or dress designer, Daniel Day-Lewis turns in a generally one-note performance, establishing the essentially unpleasant personality of this selfish, controlling, hypersensitive artist, and pretty much sticking to it all the way through the picture.  As Alma, Vicky Krieps looks nothing like anyone’s ideal as a perfect model; plain, chunky, with the look of a Swiss milkmaid, she would hardly rival the tall, slim, stylized women who display designer creations on runways all over the world.  On top of all that, at least to this untutored observer, even the dresses Reynolds Woodcock designs don’t look all that great either, rather more dowdy than stylish, and certainly not distinctive or memorable, which actually fairly well describes Phantom Thread.

                                     

BILLBOARDS

BILLBOARDS

          Another movie dealing with the American small town, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (one of the weirdest titles in years), explores an intense and ultimately complicated emotional climate that breeds a number of related stories, all growing out of a terrible crime committed before the action begins.  Like last year’s excellent Manchester by the Sea, the film offers no real answers, no real resolution to its problematic events and troubled people, but differs in at least suggesting some faint amelioration of its central character’s attitudes and their effect on others.  More sentimental and, not incidentally, more violent than Manchester, it examines some of the same situations as its predecessors—broken marriages, illness, alienation, and a terrible tragedy that propels the action and the emotion.

          Frances McDormand plays the central character, Mildred, who dominates the movie in every way, so much so that her feelings and behavior open up other plots involving other people in the town, all of them connected to her particular situation.  Understandably devastated by her daughter’s rape and murder seven months before, she simmers in a cauldron of guilt, grief, anger, and bitterness, which boils over into a series of increasingly drastic decisions.  She resurrects the decrepit billboards of the title, posting messages accusing the sheriff (Woody Harrelson) and his department of incompetence and malingering in the search for her daughter’s killer.  The billboards ignite controversy in Ebbings, in effect forcing people to choose sides—most of them against her—in her increasingly public crusade.

Mildred’s plight leads her to some occasionally comical moments, as when she serially kicks a trio of vandalizing high school students in the groin, or calls a reporter a bitch on live TV; she also delivers a devastating lecture to her parish priest when he attempts some sort of consoling visit.  Her frustration finally explodes into a drastic, dangerous attack on the local police station, which almost kills a deputy and in itself makes little sense, damaging the credibility of a work devoted to some vision of small town reality.  The movie also shows a shocking suicide and two savage beatings, perhaps the inevitable result of the anomalous emotionalism that leaches into the hard, tough surface of Mildred’s life and location—her condition affects everyone.

          Intentionally or not, Three Billboards also emphasizes the often melancholy truth that everybody has a sad history, a personal story, most of them disappointing narratives of failure, loss, and that epidemic American disease, loneliness.  One of the local deputies, Dixon (Sam Rockwell), who brutalizes prisoners, lives in a crummy shack of a house with his drunken, dependent mother, and drinks himself sodden on duty; both his sadism and boozing result apparently from the emptiness of his life, his sense of his own inadequacy.  Mildred’s husband (John Hawkes) has left her for a nineteen-year-old, a separation that along with her behavior further alienates her son Robbie (Lucas Hedges, who played a similar role in Manchester By the Sea), a lost, unhappy teenager.

          Oddly, the moral center of Three Billboards shifts from Mildred’s anger and outrage to the plight of the sheriff, dying of cancer; he becomes something like the voice of kindness and sympathy in Ebbing, delivering compassionate advice to all the important people he deals with throughout the movie and even in a way providing a hint of hope for all of them.  His words may signify something like a blessing and even a promise of something better for this troubled community and its unhappy citizens, including the deputy and the grieving Mildred.  If Mildred’s tragedy disrupts the community, his words move toward some sense of restoration and possibly even hope.

          The performances, the setting, the action all meld together successfully, with barely a false note anywhere.  Predictably, Frances McDormand inhabits her character with precision, projecting the grief that turns into anger and violent action, and even managing to create humor in this angry, unforgiving woman, a tough performance in a mostly tough little film.

BLADE RUNNER 2049

BLADE RUNNER 2049

          The first Blade Runner distinguished itself as one of the most brilliantly filmed science fiction movies, with stunning sets that in effect expressed both the advanced technology and the dark hopelessness of its world, our world, in the near future.  Its simple plot involves the search of an ex-cop known as a Blade Runner, for four advanced model androids, known as replicants, who escape from their corporate controllers and seek to extend their limited lifespan, what might be called a negative version of the manufacturer’s guarantee.  In the process of the pursuit and after a climactic battle with the most gifted of the replicants, it becomes apparent that the cop, Deckard (Harrison Ford), is himself a replicant facing the same fate as his quarry.

          Updating the situation to 2049, the new movie once again confronts the familiar situation of the artificially created human in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic future.  This time the blade runner is “K” (presumably an allusion to Kafka), played by a deadpan Ryan Gosling.  He works for an irascible police lieutenant (Robin Wright), apparently tracking down recalcitrant replicants, I guess those who, like the rest of us, don’t really want to die.  The film’s plot moves in a most disjunctive fashion, introduces characters without much explanation or context, throws in a quantity of mystical mumbo-jumbo, with a young girl called a Memory Child, some sort of blind prophet, and a vengeful dominatrix called Luv (go figure).  The booming, dissonant soundtrack frequently overwhelms the dialogue, which also contributes to the general confusion.

Unlike his predecessor Deckard, who occupied a dark apartment in the storied Bradbury Building, K lives in an antiseptic domicile with a holographic girlfriend (giant holographs of nude women populate the rainy city); she makes his drinks and dinner, converses with him, and in one sequence melds with a “real” woman so they can all have sex, an act combining the two women in what must be a most satisfying experience.  Harrison Ford, who now regularly reappears in sequels and remakes of his earlier work, returns as a now aged Deckard, dwelling in the dusty ghost town of Las Vegas.  The original blade runner, who with Sean Young had lit out for the territory like Huck Finn, now resides in a deserted casino, amply supplied with booze, accompanied by an alcoholic dog, and entertained with old Sinatra songs.  Like several other people in the film, he promptly beats the hell out of K, but then joins him in something like a rebellion against the oppressing power structure and the vengeful Luv.

          The tacit premise of both the original and the sequel involves the traditional dilemma of the artificially created being, from Pinocchio through Frankenstein’s monster and the robots and androids of so many science fiction movies.  They all simply yearn to be human and they all yearn to possess a soul.  In the original Blade Runner, after the climactic battle with Ford, Rutger Hauer’s character utters a sad, compelling coda of farewell, ending with “time to die,” and his soul in the form of a dove, flies away.  Like him, the replicants of the new movie desire not only a life beyond their artificially allotted time, but emotions and memories and freedom, their own humanity.  Insofar as I understand it, Blade Runner 2049 suggests that some solution to that oddly human wish exists in the future, in what we know as a sequel.

DUNKIRK

DUNKIRK

          One of the most unusual films now playing at a theater near you somehow manages to be something of a blockbuster without actually being a blockbuster, if that makes any sense.  Without any costumed superheroes, acrobatic stunt work, or magical special effects, Dunkirk achieves the sort of power and excitement usually associated with all those summer spectaculars.   A movie without a hero that proceeds in some unusual manipulations of time and space, that in truth deals with a devastating defeat, it in effect violates all the traditional rules of summer films; in addition, it is an intelligent piece of work, which further differentiates it from Guardians of the Galaxy, Spider-Man, Wonder Woman, Transformers, or any of the other overproduced, expensive trivia that clogs and shakes the cinemas these days.

The film’s frequent and ironic reversal of expectations differentiates it from the usual coverage of the famous evacuation of a thoroughly defeated British army at Dunkirk in 1940.  It begins, for example, with an act of cowardice that defines the unnamed character (called Tommy, a traditional generic term for English soldiers, in the credits), played by Fionn Whitehead.  He flees a skirmish with German soldiers, eventually discarding his rifle, his helmet, his pack, and, together with another sly and equally cowardly soldier, rolls a wounded man onto a stretcher in order to cheat their way onto one of the crowded boats leaving the beach.  Shifting back and forth in time and space throughout, the picture moves to England, barely thirty miles across the Channel from Dunkirk, where a civilian named Dawson (Mark Rylance) decides to take his own boat to France, just before the army commandeers it.  The third thread of the coverage concentrates on Farrier (Tom Hardy), a Spitfire pilot leading two other airplanes in support of the nearly 400,000 men on the beach.

Other ironies proliferate, including the death of a brave young volunteer in a tragic blunder, a rescued airman who resists rescue, and the welcome at home of one of the shirkers as a hero.  Christopher Nolan, the writer and director, bravely refuses to glamorize the material, which actually constitutes a highly unusual achievement, the telling of an epic story without melodrama or even an epic hero; the undeniable heroism lies in the daring actions of all the ordinary civilians who rescued the stranded troops after the rout in France, a rare kind of communal courage at work.  The great story of Dunkirk, of course, involves that immense flotilla of civilian craft that sailed across the Channel to rescue the stranded soldiers, turning one of the greatest military defeats in British history into something of a victory.   Since the water at the beach was too shallow to accommodate most naval ships, smaller vessels were necessary, so pleasure yachts, sailboats, ferries, tugboats, etc. accomplished one of the most unusual rescue missions in history.  The film shows the chaos on the beach, the desperation of the soldiers, and the amazing efforts of the rescuers in constant transitions, moving from the beach to the evacuees, to the boats, to the Spitfires, to the commanding officers dealing with the danger and chaos of the retreat and the departure.
The purely visual methods of the director allow the camera in effect to tell the story, so that the sparse dialogue is hardly necessary.  The camera swoops and scans, comprehending the nonlinear plot, showing various points of view, making Dunkirk a kind of super version of a silent film, really a triumph of the art.  Unlike most films that win the sort of excess that constitutes the stock in trade of reviewers, Dunkirk deserves all the praise it has received.

OBIT

OBIT

          A documentary on the obituary department of the New York Times hardly seems the sort of thing that would shake the walls of the multiplexes, but the new movie Obit deserves some of the same attention and praise lavished on the latest computer assisted adventures of the latest comic book superhero.  Despite its ostensibly unpromising subject, the movie provides a fascinating glimpse into the daily workings of the department, its people, and their conception of their job.

          Proceeding in the tried and true technique of contemporary documentary (though here generally justified by the subject), the director employs a series of talking head interviews with the several writers in the department, who describe the challenges of the job, their methods, and their attitudes toward dealing with death.  The director, Vanessa Gould, also interrupts the narrative with old newspaper headlines and articles—the Times morgue keeper, incidentally, deserves his own film—photographs, and film clips showing moments from the lives of the people the writers memorialize.  The ongoing montage enlivens the story, but also suggests some of the meaning and importance of those lives, in short, the reasons for their deaths receiving a full article in that section of the revered New York Times.

She also follows the day-long progress of one writer, Bruce Weber, on the obituary of someone most people probably never heard of, William Wilson, the first person to serve as the television consultant for a presidential campaign.  After calling the widow for the essential information that the Times demands—cause of death, age, survivors, etc.—he starts the process of research and writing, not all that different from any scholar’s work.  The investigation opens up a window on the past, showing clips of the first presidential debate, the historic confrontation of John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, orchestrated largely by Wilson; that debate, Kennedy claimed, won him the election. 

Weber begins the day on the telephone, proceeds through research on his subject, and finishes a long and satisfactory essay just in time to meet his deadline in the late afternoon.  Like any writer, he stalls and stumbles, tries several beginnings, overcomes an array of familiar obstacles, and ends with a work he happily regards as successful.  As he and his colleagues point out, they write a kind of history in uncovering the lives of people who achieved enough to earn an obituary in the newspaper.  They not only record the lives of the famous and distinguished, however, they also often remember the forgotten, those who have slipped away from fame, dropped out of the public gaze, reminding us all that for both the celebrated and the obscure the paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Inevitably, the writers also find that their work brings them into a consideration of death, of their own ends, intimations of their own mortality.  In the process of recording the lives of so many so often, they inevitably confront the notion of the obituary that awaits each of them.  Like Prospero at the end of The Tempest they realize that “every third thought shall be (their) grave.”  Obit may remind us all of that reality.

KING ARTHUR

KING ARTHUR

          Since Shakespeare wrote it and his theatrical company performed it, Hamlet has undergone innumerable interpretations and transformations, from the literal to the bizarre; yet the play, in all its messy brilliance, remains a universally acknowledged masterpiece.  In a similar manner, the great English myth, the story of King Arthur, appears in innumerable incarnations throughout the ages, including dozens of films, from adventure stories to comedies and musicals.  Like the prince of Denmark, the king survives them all, and he will no doubt survive his latest version, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword.

Guy Ritchie, who directed the new movie, turned the immortal story into yet another summer spectacular, with a gaggle of monsters, including some pachyderm type beasts and a trio of reptilian women, gobs of magic, and of course, a plethora of computer generated imagery.  His Arthur (Charlie Hunnam) pulls Excalibur from the stone as expected and in fact demanded, but proves reluctant to assume the responsibility of ruling the land now under the control of the evil Vortigern (Jude Law), who controls his people with the assistance of some supernatural powers.  After a long period of preparation and training, Arthur leads an army against Vortigern and, after much slaughter and other assorted difficulties, defeats him.  He ends the film knighting his faithful followers and creating the famous Round Table, a piece of furniture that initially puzzles his knights, and which suggests a sequel as well.

Despite all the spectacular effects, the film adds little to the great legend beyond a number of comical anachronisms.  Arthur speaks of being “proactive,” for instance, a term that I think was not terribly common back in the Middle Ages, along with his use of “razzle dazzle” and another knight’s mistaking the table for a carousel.  Hardly a commanding or charismatic figure, Charlie Hunnam seems flat and dull compared to his adversary, whose character actually dominates most of the action.  On the upside, Arthur introduces the modern concept of diversity to the Round Table, with an African knight, Bedivere, played by Djimon Hounson, and an Asian knight, Kung Fu George, played by Tom Wu.  King Arthur: Legend of the Sword otherwise ranks quite low on the long list of Arthuriads in fiction and film; the great story, always worth retelling, deserves a better incarnation, possibly with some sense of character and action and absent all the magic of contemporary cinema.  It is, after all, a long, long way from Camelot to Avalon.

T2 TRAINSPOTTING

T2 TRAINSPOTTING

          Sometime in the 1950s the British discovered their working class as more than, well, workers, happily content, in Matthew Arnold’s phrase, with chapel and beer. The postwar expansion of higher education, the introduction of social services, the general sense of new beginnings that accompanied the end of a long period of Tory control, and a whole generation that had suffered disproportionately through the war combined with a long history of oppression and denial to create the group of writers known as The Angry Young Men.  The title derives from Look Back in Anger, a play by John Osborne, one of their number, which also included such writers as Kingsley Amis, John Braine, John Wain, David Storey, Keith Waterhouse, and Alan Sillito. 

Aside from awakening the culture to some new insights, their writings inspired a number of lively, relevant films during one of the rare bright periods in the generally dismal history of British cinema.  Those films featured a new generation of actors, many of whom differed from their predecessors in class background, appearance, and accent (always a primary point in England).  Actors like Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay, David Warner, Richard Harris, Michael Caine, and, yes, Sean Connery, with strong regional accents and simply, a different look challenged the classically trained theater veterans who’d dominated the Shakespeare, Shaw, Coward material of the English stage. 

One of the best and most entertaining cinematic demonstrations of that transformation occurs in Sleuth (1972), in which Laurence Olivier plays a wealthy, aristocratic mystery novelist and Michael Caine the hairdresser lover of the writer’s wife.  The gap between the working class Milo Tyndle and the snobbish, superior Andrew Wyke opens immediately when with a sneer, Wyke asks Tyndle  if he lives above, below, or behind his shop; on the other hand, the Italian-English Tyndle suggests that Wyke’s wife appreciates the hairdresser’s greater virility, the usual source of insecurity for the upper classes.  They spar, exchange insults, and embark on a preposterous and complicated game created by the writer that ends in a somewhat ambiguous and inconclusive surprise.  The contest of the movie reflects not only the class distinctions between the two characters, but also the change in generations, as a new kind of actor appears opposite one of the most honored performers of his time, a kind of summation of the revolution that occurred in British cinema in the last two decades.

In addition to the films based on or inspired by the works of the Angry Young Men, several of those sharp and entertaining Ealing Studio comedies of the 1950s dealt with some of the same issues.  Those whimsical, witty movies that introduced a troupe of fine, mostly comic actors to the public often revolved around social realities and a few, like I’m All Right, Jack and The Man in the White Suit, for example, suggested the changes in political and economic thinking in the new, postwar Great Britain.  Almost all of them satirized elements of the class system in one way or another, and many combined that with something of the anarchic humor of many American movies.

Unfortunately, that revolution, like so many revolutions, ultimately fostered its own particular meaningless and distressing responses to the culture and perhaps to itself.  The importation and reinterpretation of rock music from the United States fed first a new exuberance and another example of creativity welling up from the lower classes rather than seeping down from the cultured upper classes.  That music metastasized into other forms, including punk rock, which employed a strong sense of social upheaval and, once again, anarchy.  Names like Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten efficiently sum up the attitudes, along with band names like The Sex Pistols and The Sniveling Shits (I am not making this up).  Ultimately, I think, the decadence that in the past tended to trickle down, shall we say, from the effete elites eventually to some degree bubbled up from the depths, a result of the same energy that initially galvanized the new culture.

This long, possibly accurate, and I hope, not too boring preliminary leads to the latest British film import, T2 Trainspotting, a sequel to the original of twenty years ago.  The director, Danny Boyle, ingeniously brought back the same principals from that movie to play the same characters, now of course twenty years older themselves.  Though times have changed and the actors and their characters have aged, everything else seems depressingly familiar.  Renton (Ewan McGregor), the nearest thing to a protagonist, returns to his old home town in Scotland and his crew of druggies and criminals to find everything different but somehow the same.  Although one member of the gang dies on a treadmill to open the film, the rest of the crew remains.  The psychopath Begbie (Robert Carlyle) begins the action in prison; the junkie Spud (Ewen Bremner) fights an intermittent battle against his addiction; and Simon (Jonny Lee Miller) runs a blackmail racket involving his girlfriend Veronika (Anjela Nedyalkova) and a strap-on dildo (don’t ask).

Though sometimes comic, the action mostly depends on the same old violence and thievery.  Begbie escapes from prison and seeks to kill his former pals, who have betrayed him; the pathetic Spud ultimately kicks his habit; after a wild fight, Renton and Simon collaborate on a scheme to swindle a grant to make a pub into a tourist spot.  Maintaining some continuity with the original, the director frequently employs shots of trains as transitions between scenes and sequences, and rather overdoing it, shows Renton’s childhood bedroom decorated with railroad train wallpaper.

The movie provides fewer shocks and fewer disgusting images than its predecessor, and even hints at a modicum of sentiment.  Perhaps the best scene involves Renton and Simon improvising to save their lives on a stage in a pub where the patrons still celebrate a famous battle in that bloody history of Protestants versus Catholics in the British Isles, and customers must perform.  After rifling the wallets of the drinkers and dancers they sing a celebratory song about the conflict, with the chorus, “No more Catholics left,” which completely enchants the crowd, who happily join in, dancing and rejoicing in that long ago victory, while the thieves manage to slip away. 

Although perhaps not quite so squalid and repulsive as the original, T2 Trainspotting provides some convincing insights into ordinary life in today’s United Kingdom.  It also provides a nicely opposing glimpse of a world far removed from those genteel dramas so beloved of Anglophiles and public television.  This picture reminds us that Ye Olde Merrie England consists of more than Upstairs, Downstairs, Brideshead Revisited, and Downton Abbey.  An occasionally incomprehensible Scottish burr replaces the refined accents of the upper classes, booze and cocaine replace tea and crumpets, and a woman armed with a dildo replaces the polite courtship of the upper classes: rule Britannia.

KING KONG

KING KONG

          To begin with, the grand original King Kong , released in 1933, ranks high on my list of ace favorites; I may have seen it more times than any other film, and I have taught it as an outstanding example of horror film (monster variety) and a brilliant display of the sorts of special effects pioneered in Hollywood many decades ago.  Rich in thematic meaning and relevance, like so many films of its era it reflects some important truths about the condition of America and the world in the 1930s. 

          The Empire State Building, constructed in something like eleven months by workers who knew in those dark days of the Great Depression that they would be jobless once they finished, was completed in 1931; in 1933 King Kong climbed it, holding Fay Wray in his arms, regarding her, in Jack Kerouac’s words, with huge eyes of tender love.  The great ape, the lovely woman, the wonderful building created one of the most enduring and symbolic film images of that time or any time.  The beast in the jungle finally perished in the urban jungle of the big city, where his adventures on Manhattan Island closely echo those on Skull Island.  In a moment of absolute but quite wonderful corniness, Robert Armstrong utters his epitaph, “Beauty killed the Beast.”

And who could forget the lovely Fay Wray, the first and greatest of all the scream queens?  She developed her vocal cords and perfected her running style in The Most Dangerous Game, which prepared her for King Kong, where she also looked most desirable in the brief swimming scene, when she suffered a wardrobe malfunction and revealed a bit more than usual in those pre-Code days.  (The actual monster was only three feet, six inches tall, and was moved through painstaking stop motion photography; in the scenes where the ape holds her, she only occupies a huge hand on an arm that slid out on wheels.  Appropriately, she titled her autobiography On the Other Hand.)     

Although the new version, the sixth or seventh remake, cannot match the original, Kong: Skull Island displays the latest in computer generated images, showing just how far the art of cinematic special effects has developed.  Kong himself is massive, easily the largest of all the giant apes in all the giant ape movies, big enough to swat helicopters out of the sky, big enough to make waves like ocean surf in the island’s lake.  Like his ancestors, he battles a number of monsters, including a multi-tentacled water dweller, and vicious creatures that combine the lizard and the snake into a sort of dragon; as the scientist John Goodman) who leads the expedition says, Skull Island is a place that God didn’t finish.

Thanks to the wonders of contemporary cinema, those monsters surpass the dinosaurs, snakes, and pterodactyls of the original in sheer ugliness.  They include that octopus-like creature that rises out of the water, only to become a meal for Kong; a giant spider whose tree-like legs impale some of the crew; and worst of all, the horrifying reptilian beasts who pose the greatest threat to all the Skull Islanders and manage to munch on quite a few of the explorers.  Aside from their ferocity and their appetites, one of the most distressing results of encounters with the beasts is their propensity to vomit on their human antagonists and, worse, when disemboweled, to spill their viscera all over them (fortunately, no excrement).  Whatever they suffered, Fay Wray and Bruce Cabot never had to deal with those messes.

Set in the waning days of the Vietnam War, the movie also attempts some odd connections to the past, with a whole fleet of helicopter gunships ferrying the scientific expedition and a platoon of soldiers to Skull Island.  The script litters the action with coy allusions to Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness, including Hank Marlow (John C. Reilly), a slightly nutty pilot whose plane crashed on the island in World War II, combining references to both works.  With the help of some of the expedition survivors of several creature attacks, he completes work on a boat cannibalized from two planes that conveys the group toward the hope of safety, serving in effect as one of the heroes of the film.

On Skull Island Kong is more than a king, he is a god, who actually protects the indigenous people—a small, silent, colorfully painted and apparently kindly tribe—from the hideous animals seeking to devour them.  After losing a goodly number of their members, and over the objections of the war loving colonel (Samuel  L. Jackson) who leads the military contingent, the expedition comes to a grudging understanding of Kong’s importance to them and the island. 

The actors perform their roles serviceably if not with any particular distinction.  A fine actor generally, John Goodman appears tired and bored with his part and somewhat subdued when he becomes a monster’s repast.  Tim Hiddleston, who’s riding high these days (the cover of GQ means something after all), teams with Brie Larson in their versions of the Bruce Cabot-Fay Wray power couple, but contemporary underplaying somehow needs more of the original’s unabashed exaggeration and exuberance.  The new picture ranks as probably the best of all the many remakes and imitations, but nothing will completely replace that great original, which above all provides a rich thematic content, perhaps the most significant void in Kong: Skull Island.