Catching up on recent "Cort and Fatboy" appearances:
Friday, Jan. 22 podcast: "Topics include: What it takes to be the new Conan, 'Legion''s merits as a film, whether Stephen King deserves awards or not, the best way to dip your toes into the world of Hitchcock, Tiger Woods, 'Avatar' porn, and the humble tale of a man with fry-basket hands."
Friday, Jan. 29 podcast: "Fatty gets thwarted by Tri-Met and his own idiocy, Cort gets creeped out by Mike's marital bliss, Mel Gibson's latest movie could have been about tree people but wasn't, Jimi Hendrix's hypothetical longevity is argued to the point where people are ordered to jump from buildings, and what was really in JD Salinger's safe? Plus other things -- including beavers, Lou Ferrigno, and PSAs about smothering." _____
Slight variation on a reviewin the Friday, Jan. 29 Oregonian....
"Edge of Darkness" feels like a movie that wants to bare its fangs, but only manages a mild gumming.
The raw ingredients for a nasty eye-poking thriller are certainly there. For one thing, "Edge" stars Mel Gibson in his first leading role in eight rough-and-tumble years. And his character -- a Boston cop grimly trying to track down the killer(s) who shotgun-blasted his daughter right in front of him -- is like a greatest-hits remix of all Gibson's obsessions as an actor and director: He's suffering, vengeful, borderline insane and furiously throwing the rulebook in a dumpster all at once. (The deep slashing lines age has carved in Gibson's face accentuate his character's woe rather nicely.)
Even better (potentially, anyway), "Edge" is a remake of a provocative, politically charged and much-loved 1985 BBC miniseries, and some of the original talent is still at the wheel. It's directed by original miniseries helmer Martin Campbell, a guy who generally employs a steady hand when it comes to genre material ("Casino Royale," "Zorro," "Goldeneye") -- and the six-hour original was boiled down to feature length by William Monahan, a man with proven remake-adaptation experience ("The Departed").
So why does the end result feel so ... compromised? And padded out? And vaguely sloppy?
The 2010 "Edge" takes the same general form as the 1985 version: Cop loses mysteriously ill daughter in gun-blast assassination, everyone thinks cop was target, cop suspects otherwise, cop is haunted by daughter's ghost, cop digs into labyrinthine/bizarre/cynical conspiracy, cop crosses paths with intelligence agent (played in 2010 by Ray Winstone) who may be friend or foe.
But the '85 original (recently released here on DVD, by the way) also went to some extreme, spiritual, politically charged places -- most notably making angry comments about nuclear proliferation while invoking cosmic notions of nature rising up against mankind. (Miniseries writer Troy Kennedy Martin, who recently passed away, infamously wrote a draft of his teleplay in which the vengeful-cop character actually turned into a tree, only to have the idea vetoed by pretty much everyone involved in the production.)
"Edge of Darkness" 2010 has little if any of that "Twin Peaks"-y weirdness, and what's there instead is frankly sort of scaled-down, pedestrian and dull. You can pick the movie apart in all sorts of small ways. For example, how can Gibson's character be standing right next to his daughter when she takes a full shotgun blast without catching some buckshot himself? And why are the police-procedural bits of the movie so shabbily plotted?
But the bigger problems are problems of script and pacing and thematics. The dialogue and characterization are remarkably flat on the page. Gibson does his best to overcome this -- the movie sparks up a bit whenever he gets enraged or creaks into action -- but he's fighting against a tide of mediocrity in which nothing coming out of anyone's mouth is particularly interesting. (When you make Ray Winstone boring, and he's playing a morally gray assassin, you have failed to a remarkable degree.)
The movie's also oddly paced, and not in an artful way. It lingers too long on redundant scenes of Gibson's grief -- the movie fades dully to black as he cradles his dying daughter, he stares into space for a while, he wakes up in a mad sweat, he rages at the coroner, he takes his daughter's ashes to the beach -- before launching into its mystery story. The bad guys are given introductory/exposition scenes that rob the film of its suspense tension and feel like studio notes, even if they aren't, and the ham-fisted placement of these villains in the film makes the movie's larger critique (of something I shouldn't spoil) feel cynical and cheap. And there's an action bit plopped into the film in which Gibson's character eludes a mysterious tail and menaces a mysterious contractor (Danny Huston) that feels arbitrary and amounts to almost nothing in terms of the larger story -- a letdown, given Campbell's usual craftsman's skill with big-screen action.
It's not all bad: The film does build to a nicely merciless ending with a few twisty shocks, for one thing. But the movie doesn't get to that ending (or earn that ending) in a compelling way. "Edge of Darkness" fails as a comeback vehicle, as a remake, and to a lesser degree as a popcorn thriller. If this is a portent of Mr. Gibson's future outings as an actor, he may want to stick to his far pricklier and more fascinatingly angry and obsessive directorial career. __________
Discussed during the Friday, Jan. 15 "Cort and Fatboy" podcast: the Jayne hats pictured above (a thank-you gift from "Sarrava" for our efforts on "Firefly at the Mission") -- plus "The Lovely Bones,""Daybreakers" and "The Book of Eli." All this in addition to Fatboy's Dirty Laundry, Cort's Backstage Blog, and dear God another soul-destroying installment of "Fan Fiction Friday."
I want to make this clear right at the start: "The Book of Eli" is derivative as all get-out. It's an action movie smashed together from the pulp of seemingly every post-apocalyptic flick ever made -- from "The Omega Man" to "Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome" to "Children of Men" -- with Westerns and Biblical epics thrown in for good measure.
But as derivative movies go, "Eli" goes down fairly smoothly, thanks to an unusually strong cast and strong visual ideas from co-directing brothers Albert and Allen Hughes.
The story sort of plays like a thrill-ride version of "The Road," with healthier-looking cannibals and a sillier ending. Eli (Denzel Washington) plays that most clichéd of apocalypse heroes: the lone man walking the post-nuclear wasteland in slo-mo, looking incredibly cool and somehow possessing morals and ammunition the rest of society lost long ago.
The twist here is that in addition to his machete and 9 mm (and working iPod -- don't ask), Eli also carries a Bible. It's apparently one of the last tomes of Christian scripture on Earth, and our hero is bringing it west with a holy sense of mission.
Unfortunately, Eli's scavenging, slo-mo walking and well-choreographed brawls with man-eating rapists are interrupted when the leader of a startup community (Gary Oldman) decides he needs the Good Book all to himself. Oldman is always fun to watch in genre pieces, because there's a chance he'll indulge his hilarious tendency to yell his lines and twitch (see: this moment from "Leon: The Professional"), and he doesn't disappoint here -- snarling at his henchmen that he wants the Bible because "It's a WEAPON!!!" he can use to control the illiterate masses.
(Of course, if no one can read or remembers that the Bible even existed 30 years after a nuclear war, I'm not sure why Oldman can't just crack open any old book and tell the townsfolk it's the Word of God. But whatever. This is the sort of movie that pretty much crumbles into dust under that sort of analysis. Best not to bother asking why the roads and machined metals are in such good shape, either.)
I enjoyed "Book of Eli" for exactly what it is -- a slicker-than-usual genre piece with some nicely bleak special-effects landscapes -- but I'm also well aware that it's a movie that wants to have its cake and eat it too. Eli is decidedly Old Testament about protecting the New Testament, for one thing.
The Hughes Brothers and screenwriter Gary Whitta thieve mightily from other future-wasteland flicks (they even seem to work in a few nods to "The Postman," I swear), but frankly they're fairly skilled thieves. Of note is one single-take gunfight that plays like a Joel Silver-ized "Children of Men."
The movie also makes the goofy-but-fascinating choice of taking Eli's mission from God very, very literally in a genre environment that's usually a lot more punk-rock about its cynicism. This makes "Eli" sort of wonderfully silly toward the end, as if the Hughes brothers set out to make the first-ever faith-based "Mad Max" movie. _____
(118 min., rated R for some brutal violence and language)Grade: C-plus
"Youth in Revolt," possibly Michael Cera's finest hour to date.
"We Live in Public," a fascinating documentary about a holy fool who kept having great ideas about the Internet 10 years too early.
My 10 favorite movies of 2009.
And also: The various idiocies of NBC. President Obama vs. "Lost." "Avatar" and "G.I. Joe" sequels. The "A-Team" trailer. And dear Lord another "Fan Fiction Friday."
