No signs of life: Angels & Demons

Symbologist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) is the Indiana Jones for lapsed Catholics and New Agers who buy their books at the airport, the redeemer for every suburban conspiracy theorist certain that the truth is out there if you just follow the signs sprinkled across the globe by the Elders. Langdon should probably be president, or at least running the space program, but he contents himself with his humble post at Harvard, patiently waiting for his petitions to inspect the Vatican archives to get approved.

Angels & Demons opens with a dead pope, some stolen secret antimatter on the verge of blowing up a substantial chunk of Rome, and the return of the Illuminati, still pissed off after succumbing to Vatican atrocities back in the 17th century and promising to murder the four favourites to assume the Papal throne in a matter sufficiently baroque to get Thomas Harris salivating. This is a job for Langdon, who finally gets his coveted tour of the Catholic classifieds and leads the mission to smoke out the bad guys with the help of a sexy Italian scientist (Ayelet Zurer). 

But who will help writers Akiva Goldsman and David Koepp adapt Dan Brown’s mega-selling sequel to his mega-selling The Da Vinci Code? Whether taken from the source material or their own doubtlessly numbed imaginations, the pair has spawned the most audaciously awkward—and seemingly endless—expository dialogue this side of Underworld: Evolutions, while fashioning Langdon into a formidable fountain of redundancies. And who will help Ron Howard, a director capable of rendering even giant explosions fantastically boring, who himself possesses an unholy knack for redundancy?

Brown’s tale is a genuine feat, a mind-bogglingly elaborate hybrid of fanciful imagination and inconsistent baloney, replete with a climactic reversal hoisted up via hysterically implausible detective work, such as Langdon and the Italian’s stumbling upon a surveillance video recording of the heavies helpfully explaining the nefarious plan, all of it ostensibly elevated into the realm of social commentary by constant discussions about the tensions between science and religion, including boilerplate arguments between extras about stem cell research. Howard and company lack any critical distance from Brown’s hokum, squeezing out this wearyingly overlong thriller, sleeping soundly with the knowledge that the books’ legion of fans will come regardless. “Faith is a gift I have yet to receive,” Langdon says in one of his more lucid moments. But who needs faith when you’ve got box office gold?

Interview with the vampire: Frost/Nixon

Success in America is unlike success anywhere else, says David Frost. Failure, one assumes, achieves an equally singular stature. And so the terms are set for Frost/Nixon, Ron Howard’s movie of Peter Morgan’s play, which was indeed successful in America, and was inspired by something that took place there in 1977, when English talk show host Frost sat with former President Richard Nixon for nearly 30 hours of interviews that made broadcast history. Both sought to redeem failures, or slumps, in their careers. The event wasn’t exactly a revelation, but it did find an underdog unsettling a formidable orator sufficiently to yield something like an apology for abuses of power. The movie then is timely, coming precisely when millions crave to see another US President confess to not dissimilar sins.

For all his monstrous associations, Nixon is often flattered by Hollywood, and Frank Langella, with his handsomeness, sonorous voice and effortless charisma, is a delight to watch even if he misses those traces of sheer weirdness that perhaps no actor need do justice to since we have the real Nixon so heavily documented for posterity. I adore Langella, but I don’t think he quite escapes the confines of impersonation. His facial mask is impressive, but it tethers him to too limited an array of expressions. Michael Sheen, playing an easy-to-dismiss puff-meister has to work harder and thus gets us more involved as Frost, the film’s actual protagonist, and one rather aligned in his obstacles with Sheen’s Tony Blair in The Queen, also written by Morgan. It’s a part that probably won’t get the same accolades but which the story absolutely hinges on, especially when the movie’s authors manage the material in less than inspired ways.

Morgan’s written his own adaptation, and while you can’t blame the guy for wanting to “open up” the play, it’s hard not to notice that the immediacy and tension of the theatre is sorely missed. The action keeps getting diluted, and the supporting roles are at times left too exposed to scrutiny, like Rebecca Hall’s Caroline Cushing, who hangs around a lot but is the epitome of arm decoration for the male lead, a way of ensuring that we know he’s not gay.

Howard for his part does nothing to spoil the entertainment value of Frost/Nixon—he’s far too safe a director for that—but he doesn’t stir it up much either, despite a Hans Zimmer score that at times sounds better suited to a spy thriller or submarine movie. There’s a compelling statement near the end where investigative journalist James Reston, played by Sam Rockwell, talks about “the reductive power of the close-up.” Howard, in his typically workmanlike but dazzlingly unreflexive way, directs Frost/Nixon as though he hadn’t read this page in the script, offering us, well, a whole lot of close-ups. And boy, are they ever reductive. It doesn’t seem like Howard considered how a movie version might offer something vital that the play—not to mention the actual televised event, with its ample number of close-ups—could not. But he’s dutifully revived a genuinely interesting media landmark and let it play as a fun drama, and that’s reason enough to check it out.

Horton Hears a Who!: the sub-microscopic apocalyptic disaster movie as talking animal kiddie fluff

An elephant is gradually shunned, then hunted down by his entire jungle community for claiming that there is life beyond what we can see, hear or feel. A less-than-respected town mayor is wracked with anxiety, a panicked sense of futility, burdened with the knowledge that his world teetering on the brink of apocalypse. Pretty heavy shit for a kid’s movie, but we’re riffing in the heady realm of Dr. Seuss, who sort of had a knack for blending mortally high stakes and political metaphor with screwy humour and fantastical hi-jinx.

Horton Hears a Who! has the enormous advantage of Ron Howard’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) still lingering in our collective memory, ensuring us that no matter what the Fox animation squad does to Horton can’t possibly be worse that the grotesquerie of Howard’s live-action toilet fodder. Horton does share Grinch’s star, but fortunately Jim Carrey, often cartoonish in any case, can’t mug quite as gratingly when reduced to voice only. (And weirdly, the elephant looks more like costar Steve Carell than it does Carrey.) In fact there are a moments where his good-natured titular elephant, persecuted for claiming that an entire world exists on a spec resting on a flower, is reasonably charming, interacting with his pupils or with his mouse pal, the obligatory sidekick well-voiced by Seth Rogan.

What ushers Horton Hears a Who! to a substantially higher level of Seussian entertainment however are the scenes in Whoville, where Carell’s Mayor slips and slides through a village of curly, gravity-defying, Gaudi-inspired architecture and candy-coloured everything. While Horton’s jungle home feels akin to typical contemporary, soft-hued, numbingly fluid, Hollywood-budgeted computer animation, Whoville, where the animation style has been stripped down to something far more graphically bold, draws us into a landscape that actually feels like a place Seuss might have dreamed up.

But the film’s major problem isn’t related to these varying degrees of visual or aural charisma. What makes Horton Hears a Who! something of a drag is the fact that you can feel writers Ken Daurio and Cinco Paul (the scribes behind The Santa Clause 2) straining to expand Seuss’s winsomely compact tale to feature length. There are too many supporting characters with little to do, too many scenes that become repetitive and redundant. One of the laudable themes of the story is the importance of questioning authority: if only the team behind the film could have questioned their studio superiors to the point of making them accept that Horton, like the beloved 1966 version of Grinch, would probably work better at a third of the duration.

Viridiana: the follies of desire

A quick survey of Entertainment Weekly’s recent “25 Most Controversial Movies Ever” proves that even terms like “controversial” can be baldly co-opted by commercial interests. How else can we account for the presence of Ron Howard’s New Agey, theologically egalitarian, soft-on-the-Vatican adaptation of The Da Vinci Code scoring Number 13? Was anybody actually offended by that movie? Did anyone take it seriously enough to be offended? Did Howard even take it seriously?

I’m not proposing that anyone actually take Entertainment Weekly seriously, but it says something about the narrow range of the mainstream media’s cultural radar when Da Vinci ranks so prominently while Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana doesn’t even make EW’s final cut. Deliciously provocative, caustically insightful, hounded by censors and legal troubles, Viridiana was controversial in the richest sense. It’s the work a seasoned master, playfully confronting the deep-rooted socio-religious ideology that shaped his own life.

After making such an early splash with the scandalous Un chien andalou (1928) and L’age d’or (30), Buñuel underwent years of sporadic activity before reinventing himself in Mexico, where he made numerous films in quick succession, some of which (like 1950’s Los Olvidados) are among his masterworks. He’d garnered an international reputation and proved that, with age, even the most maverick artists earn grudging acceptance by the establishment.

A quarter century after the end of The Civil War, Spanish authorities decided to thaw their previously icy relations with their most notorious filmmaking progeny. Invited home under the auspices of the Franco regime he once fled from, Buñuel, a few restrictions aside, was given free reign. Viridiana was completed just in time for the 1961 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d’Or and was declared blasphemous by the Vatican’s newspaper. The director of the Spanish Film Institute who approved the production was dismissed, the film was disowned by Spain and all prints were ordered destroyed. It was never shown there until 1977.

Picking up thematically where Nazarín (58) left off, Viridiana concerns a young nun (Silvia Pinal) who accepts an invitation from her Uncle Jaime (the marvellously melancholy Fernando Rey) to pay him a final visit before entering the convent. Jaime reveals his fetishistic obsession with his dead wife, whom Viridiana closely resembles, convincing Viridiana to dress as her before pleading with her to maintain the role permanently and live on his estate as his spouse. Viridiana leaves in disgust.

Jaime eventually finds a perverse way of making Viridiana stay, but once settled she endeavours to transform his home into a house of Christian charity, inviting vagabonds to work on the estate in return for food and shelter. The benefactors inevitably abuse Viridiana’s charity, making a wild party in her absence, climaxing in a portrait where the drunken bums are positioned at the banquet table in imitation of Da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper.’

With characteristic cool, Buñuel claimed he never set out to blaspheme, and to a degree this seems genuine. Many of Viridiana’s controversial details (the crucifix switch-blade, the tortured dogs) are taken directly from Buñuel’s experiences of Spanish life. His characterization of Viridiana isn’t mocking but sympathetic. Characters aren’t judged morally, but rendered as complex and deeply human in all their weaknesses and strengths, their acts of malice or altruism. Guided by Buñuel’s increasingly elegant, quietly strange camerawork (highlighted by his jarring, erotic isolation of legs), Viridiana is unsparingly, blackly comic, but a keenly observed portrait of the follies of desire.

A French documentary on Buñuel found on Criterion's DVD of Viridiana, features comments by a Jesuit priest from the seminary where Buñuel studied. “Even in his most irreligious films,” the priest says, “some traces of religion can always be found.” This testimony is in keeping with Buñuel's famous anti-declaration "I'm still an atheist, thank God."  If Buñuel could truly offend, it’s only because his films are founded in belief and wonder. And that’s something you’d never say about Ron Howard.