African Cats: Disnifying the wild Savannah

The first thing you should probably know about African Cats is that, despite its being billed as such, in no way should this Disney production be mistaken for a documentary. (Okay, actually, the first and perhaps last thing you need to know is that it's Disney, but I'm not willing to wrap this up quite so patly.) Brimming with truly spectacular, no doubt arduously apprehended images of Kenyan flora and fauna, of mist, thunderheads and endless skies, the presence of the cameras recording the action are never acknowledged; though the film features plenty of fighting and killing, the bloody brutality and messy mating habits of the film’s subjects are discreetly eschewed; Harry Potter composer Nicholas Hooper’s heavily illustrative score emphasizes adventure movie theatrics over observational accentuation; and while Samuel L. Jackson’s colour commentary runs all over this thing there’s a conspicuous dearth of zoological facts to be gleaned. Unless you consider “water buffalos are grumpy” to be a statement of high educational value.

Assigning names to and even presuming to discern the thoughts of its cast of lions, cheetahs and crocodiles, (“To Mara, Fang is the best dad ever”), Jackson’s effortlessly charismatic voice-over anthropomorphizes these animals to the max, exploiting their abundant cuteness to explore, among other themes, the difficulty of single-parenting. (Incidentally, Fang’s not such an ideal patriarch after all: he hogs all the food, abandons his wife, and doesn’t say thanks when the lady lions defend the pride from a rival lion gang. The narrative imposed on these animals is not dissimilar to that of a gangster saga, replete with a conflicted moral code about traditional family values.) Highly questionable as this approach may be, there’s no argument that it can occasionally prove perfectly entertaining, such as in the scene where Jackson offers a sotto-voiced approval of a cheetah’s attack on a gazelle (“Successssss!”). It makes you wish co-directors Alastair Fothergil and Keith Scholey would have let Jackson off the leash a little more so he could go all the way and improvise a few funny voices for the animals. Alas, if only Disney didn’t cling to their irritating dictum to render everything at once tasteful and utterly shameless.

Twisted sisters: Bluebeard on DVD

Does Catherine Breillat instinctively think in pairs? There was something dizzyingly baroque to the catalogue of sexual encounters in her internationally scandalous breakout Romance (1999), while her brilliant follow-up, Fat Girl (01), felt pleasingly chamber-like by comparison. Fat Girl itself became part of a pairing, since that film was soon followed by Sex is Comedy (02), which functioned as a fascinating fictionalized meta-study of the making of a particularly arduous sex scene in its predecessor. Now comes Bluebeard (09) and, while also a period piece, it feels as lean and efficient at 80 minutes as its predecessor The Last Mistress (07) unfurled luxuriously at 115. Breillat’s films possess an unusual balance of incendiary subject matter and elegantly cool and controlled mise en scène. It’s intriguing that the sequencing of her output seems equally calculated for maximum effect. That being said, this effect only functions if people can actually see Breillat’s films. Bluebeard, which is itself another diptych, balancing one narrative within a framing device that proves to be a parallel narrative, arrives on DVD via Strand Home Video without having ever enjoyed a theatrical release in Canada. (It will actually have its Canadian premiere at this week as part of the Cinematheque Ontario's Breillat retrospective.)

The source material for Breillat’s latest is of course the familiar fairy tale first rendered into literature in the 17th century by Charles Perrault, who also delivered the beloved woman-in-peril fables Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Little Red Riding Hood into posterity. Unlike those other stories Bluebeard has failed to find itself repeatedly adapted into movies. The titular serial wife-killer can be found lurking in the DNA of a handful of nasty adult thrillers, but it doesn’t seem very malleable to the tirelessly sanitizing forces of Disney. Yet as an allegory of sexual curiosity and feminine oppression rich in enduringly strange detail it seems tailor-made for Breillat, whose work has brought continual rigour to such themes, sometimes employing scenes of explicit sex, sometimes not. If Breillat’s films are shocking it has more to do with what they imply about the crosscurrents of sex, power and gender than how they push the envelope on anatomical depictions. If you think you’ve got Breillat pegged as a feminist, you should be equally aware of the fact that she’s also labeled herself, quite accurately I think, as a Puritan. Bluebeard suggests that mortal punishment may indeed await young ladies who choose to penetrate the forbidden territories of eros. In fact, the movie makes this suggestion twice!

The dominant half of Bluebeard, set in what appears to be 17th century France, concerns a pair of sisters, the elder Anne (Daphné Baiwir) and the younger Marie-Catherine (Lola Créton), forced to leave their convent when their father’s death leaves their mother financially unable to continue their schooling. They return home, where the furniture is being carted away by debt collectors, mom boils their wardrobes in black, and the dinner menu consists of such humble fare as grass soup—there’s an inspired black comedian behind these scenes, though humour is an aspect of Breillat’s cinema that’s often forgotten. Salvation of a most dreadful kind arrives in the form of a handsome young messenger inviting the bereaved family to a garden party held on the grounds of the wealthy and colossally corpulent Lord Bluebeard (Dominique Thomas). It’s commonly whispered about throughout the county that Bluebeard has murdered each of his wives. The sisters go anyway. Marie-Catherine is fascinated by the seemingly gentle giant, who schools her on the local flora and recalls Cocteau’s Beast more than, say, Joseph Cotton in Shadow of a Doubt. Bluebeard is equally drawn to the wide-eyed, optimistic and barely pubescent Marie-Catherine. She accepts his proposal of marriage. Among the most memorable images in Bluebeard are those of Bluebeard’s immense paw hovering over Marie-Catherine’s tiny hand, and of Marie-Catherine nestled like the tinniest sparrow in the crook of Bluebeard’s elephantine arm. Other memorable images include a trio of paper doll-like corpses suspended from a ceiling, and the arguably gratuitous close-up of a decapitated duck, a phallic spinal stump wriggling from its neck.

The other half of Bluebeard features another pair of sisters, the elder Marie-Anne (Lola Giovannetti) and the younger Catherine (Marilou Lopes-Benites), their costumes placing the period sometime in the middle of the 20th century, making their belated appearance something of a flash-forward. They sneak into the family’s off-limits attic where Catherine finds a book and, much to her sister’s repulsion—though, crucially, not her direct refusal—she begins to read the sordid story of Bluebeard aloud. Between passages they discuss somewhat related matters, including their humorously imaginative notions of what the term “homosexual” means. What’s most interesting in these short, often sinisterly playful scenes isn’t necessarily how they reflect a reading, both literal and analytical, of the movie’s primary text, but how they contribute to a particular idea of sisterhood as a potentially volatile testing ground for the push and pull of adolescent transgression. And it is no surprise that in each case the younger, braver, potentially doomed sister is named after Bluebeard’s writer/director. The original French title of Fat Girl, incidentally, was À ma soeur! You’ve got to wonder just what it would be like to be Catherine Breillat’s sister. The final minutes of Bluebeard make you glad you don’t have first-hand experience.

Scentless Apprentice

Balthazar (Nicolas Cage) had been searching for the “Prime Merlinian” for 1270 years and in all that time never caught wind of this invention called shampoo. He did however develop a liking for ultra-long rawhide trench coats and other such comic book Goth super-stylings and at some point wisely chose to base himself in New York City, a place where one can go out wearing such flamboyant vestments without drawing too much unwanted attention.

Balthazar was biding time running a grimy midtown antique shop when he first met Dave (Jay Baruchel) back in 2000, but Dave was just a little kid then and not quite ready to assume his duties as savior of the world. Ten years later Dave’s grown into a nerdy genius physics major at NYU, and when Balthazar’s old nemesis Horvath (Alfred Molina) is resurrected from a pillar of roaches Dave’s belated date with destiny finally arrives. He’s taken under Balthazar’s wing, is ordered to wear pointy shoes, and learns how to make molecules vibrate faster and cough up plasma bolts and fireballs, both of which, it should be said, look pretty awesome. Indeed, the fairly seamless parade of luminous special effects in Disney’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is by far the best thing in the movie, whose story is entirely mechanical, formulaic enough that you can take naps and not miss a thing, and whose performances range from pleasant to annoying.

Director John Turteltaub’s been making movies for all ages for ages, among them Cool Runnings, 3 Ninjas, Disney’s The Kid and both National Treasure movies, which I guess is where he became pals with Cage, who repeatedly flings his locks and trench coat but isn’t let off the leash enough here to be very interesting even as pure camp. Canada’s own Baruchel meanwhile delivers hunchy, squirmy, fidgety affectations that seemed fairly purposeful in The Trotsky but here just get distracting and oblivious to the vibe conjured by his collaborators, especially his token love interest (Teresa Palmer). You have to wonder, did they bother to ask Michael Cera?

In any case Turteltaub’s doesn’t give his actors enough space to fully play the comedy, but he keeps things jumping at least, letting our eyes roam all over as, for example, we watch a Chinese dragon careen through Chinatown or a brassy bull bash up Battery Park. Yet for all the expensive location work there isn’t a single scene in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice that actually resembles New York in the slightest. Too bad, since all that hocus-pocus would probably feel more magical if it were unleashed in settings that felt more like real life.

Prince of dumbness

Making even the Middle East safe for budget-busting spectacle cinema, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is the invasion we were all waiting for. Today’s empires don’t colonize but rather colon-ize. This video game adaptation with the long-winded title, the colon and the words that follow presumably promising abundant sequels, sweeps viewers off to CGI-enhanced ancient lands and holy cities and holy shit is it ever devoid of new ideas. The opening anonymous voice-over actually begins with the words, “Long ago, in a land far away…” (You mean, um, Iran?) Three different scenarists, not to mention Jordan Mechner, the video game’s author, actually got paid to write that.

Jake Gyllenhaal, who has never before been such a dry screen presence, plays this street rat who gets plucked from a life of scavenging by a benevolent polygamist king and grows up to be this disturbingly inflated, giant-necked super-acrobat and ultimate fighting champ with L.A. rocker hair and stubble and a distractingly hazy British accent. Ben Kingsley’s his uncle, always looking a little fishy, wearing too much eye liner, and talking too smart for his own good. An unsanctioned invasion transpires, the king is killed by a cloak soaked in something flammable, and Jake takes the rap. With the help of Bond-girl Gemma Arterton’s ornery princess and a time-reversing knife, Gyllenhaal of course sets the record straight and saves the day. The fevered dumbness and political obliviousness wouldn’t be so bad if things weren’t so punishingly generic.

About the only thing that makes Prince of Persia relatively diverting is Alfred Molina, who keeps turning up with his entourage of black guys who don’t get to talk much. Molina mostly complains a lot about taxes but goes wild for ostriches, whom he races and kisses while fretting over their habitual depressions. Molina’s clearly been given a lot of room to stretch out with this potentially negligible supporting role, and that’s about the smartest thing director Mike Newell does here, taking his orders from the Jerry Bruckheimer/Disney juggernaut. The camera whips around a lot yet Newell can’t seem to piece together a scene with any real coherence, particularly when there’s a lot of action to track, often resorting to excessive slow-motion to cover the lack of useful coverage. Newell’s made some actual movies before, most notably Donnie Brasco and Four Weddings and a Funeral, but in joining the ranks of Michael Bay he’s managed to completely erase any sense of directorial personality. Given that video games, to my knowledge, don’t employ directors, you have to wonder if soon enough movies like Prince of Persia won’t save a few bucks and simply be helmed by robots.