Oh crap
One cinema visit this week, marked with a *.
Lilo & Stitch (2002)
In the wake of all of the extras I saw last week, I had to watch the film again, and it continues to hold up. It stars Tia Carrere as the voice of Nani, and she turns up in…
Rising Sun (1993)
The launch of a new format provides some subtle clues to what the film companies regard as their major potential sellers. 20th Century Fox launched widescreen VHS with Die Hard, Alien and the original Star Wars trilogy, and this film, which turned up on DVD three years after the format launch, is one of Fox’s first back catalogue releases on Blu-ray. Clearly, there must be some kind of audience out there waiting to snap it up in high definition. This isn’t a cult audience eagerly awaiting the arrival of Donnie Darko (2001); this isn’t an audience that’s set up websites to discuss the fascinating topic of precisely how many minutes of screen time take place in cars driving between buildings during both night and day so Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes can fill us in on the plot and provide what passes for character development in the Michael Crichton universe (this isn’t a diss; I like Michael Crichton’s work a lot). Rising Sun must have been a solid, consistent seller on DVD over the last 8 years for it to reach the head of the high definition queue. Yet as a movie, it’s only solid rather than spectacular, a chance for Philip Kaufman to assure executives made nervous by the NC-17-rated Henry & June (1990) that he’s still a commercial filmmaker. It’s one he made for them, rather than for himself.
Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008) *
So where does that leave Guillermo Del Toro’s highly touted and eagerly awaited (especially by me) sequel to 2004’s original? Del Toro has received extensive critical approval for the films he’s made in Spanish - Cronos (1993), The Devil’s Backbone (2001) and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) - whereas his films in English have for the most part been more financially successful but subject to a fair number of sniffy reviews. Even though, for someone like myself who’s seen all of them, they have mostly been constructed from terribly similar personal obsessions - clockwork, insects, surrealism, and so on - and in a weird kind of way have fed off each other and enabled each individual project to come to fruition. Hellboy II only started to seem like a bankable idea again (Hollywood watchers will note that this sequel has been produced - maybe uniquely - by an entirely different corporation) after the critical praise dealt out to Pan’s Labyrinth, and the original Hellboy only fell into place after Blade II (2002) was a major hit. Del Toro has made the sequel more him and less Mignola, when what made the original work so well were all the quirky Mignola-style character notes that were especially emphasised in the Extended Cut of the original. So the sequel looks fabulous, every dollar of the budget is on the screen, and yet it’s nowhere near as interesting. It has a straightforward narrative, more old school Dr Who-style running around in tunnels, and an action beat (read: fight scene) every 10 minutes. The emotional heft of the story has been lost, which in the wake of the strong impact of Pan’s Labyrinth, is especially disappointing. All we can hope is that Del Toro will rediscover his mojo with The Hobbit films, and there won’t be quite so much running around in tunnels, except perhaps under the Misty Mountains. And in Smaug’s cave (I think Smaug lives in a cave, right?). Oh.
The Big Lebowski (1998)
Maybe Del Toro should take a leaf out of the Coens’ book, and never make a film for them, meaning the studios, although there was Intolerable Cruelty (2003) and The Ladykillers (2004), and they’re better than you think, cause, y’know, it’s the Coen brothers. I’m still learning to like the Lebowski, but I’m getting there. It is really unusual for a major studio release, though, and you can see why this film has become a cult and Rising Sun hasn’t.