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Colin Carman

~ Jane Austen Scholar & Culture Vulture

Colin Carman

Tag Archives: spielberg

Review: “War Horse”

26 Monday Dec 2011

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

battle of somme, black beauty, celine buckens, emily watson, horses, janusz kaminski, jeremy irvine, nick stafford, niels arestrup, peter mullan, saving private ryan, seabiscuit, secretariat, shakespeare, spielberg, the godfather, war, war horse, world war I

“More than the Somme of Its Parts?”
Grade: C+ (Rent It)

WHEN WILL HOLLYWOOD stop horsing around?  From “Black Beauty” and “The Black Stallion” to “Seabiscuit” and “Secretariat,” equus ferus caballus, otherwise known as “the horse,” is rivaled only by our other favorite quadruped, the dog, for sheer screen time.  Wouldn’t the lasting power of “The Godfather” be somewhat diminished had studio head Jack Woltz awakened not to the severed head of his racehorse buried in those satin sheets but to a headless Fido or Rufus?

Early on in the new Spielbergian spectacle called “War Horse” a British soldier named Perkins tells Albert, as he’s forced to let his beloved horse head off to war, “He’s a horse – not a dog!”  And there’s a difference: one is allowed to share its master’s bed and the other remains a beast of burden, capable of dazzling strength and speed but always left out in the rain.

It seems as if wherever “War Horse” has galloped, it’s garnered awards.  When British playwright Nick Stafford adapted the original 1982 novel by Michael Morpurgo for the stage, he met instantaneous critical and commercial success, winning a Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play in 2008 and the Tony Award for Best Play in 2011.  The stage production continues to pack theatres in London and New York.

Now there’s the major motion picture adaptation by Steven Spielberg, his first directorial effort since 2008’s “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” (more horses).  With a script by Lee Hall and Richard Curtis, Spielberg’s version is just the kind of visual intoxicant we come to expect from his bigger-than-life aesthetic.  The on-screen “War Horse” is also meticulous.  With the photographic help of longtime collaborator, Janusz Kaminski, Spielberg brings each locale to life.  When we’re in the English countryside, the hillsides pop in verdant greens whereas, later, in the rat-infested trenches of war-ravaged France, bullets whistle past and soldiers explode with all the sound and fury of the Normandy invasion scenes in a far more powerful anti-war film by Mr. Spielberg: “Saving Private Ryan” (1998).

The war horse of the title is a half-thoroughbred named Joey, purchased at the film’s start by a dipsomaniac named Ted Narracott (Peter Mullan).  Ted is still traumatized by his own service to the British Empire in the Boer Wars.  Taking a deep and intimate liking to Joey, Ted’s son Albert (a glow-in-the-dark Jeremy Irvine) sets out to break Joey’s wild nature.  Alongside Emily Watson as his mother Rosie, Albert inhabits a rural town in Devon so small that nearly every villager comes to watch as Albert puts Joey to the plow.  From there, the plot is a fairly simple one: bridging cultures and breaking down the barriers constituent of warfare, Joey repeatedly changes hands and owners: from English to German hands with a brief stop along the way in a French farm operated by a jam-maker (a stirring Niels Arestrup) and his angelic granddaughter (Celine Buckens).  Still, the charms of “War Horse” are chiefly visual: the most striking scene involves little more than a confrontation between Joey and a tank, all life and organicism on one side and steely death on the other.

Weaker yet, there’s something not a little perverse about representing World War I, in which an astounding 8,700,000 lives were violently lost (including 780,000 British – nearly a entire generation of English men), through the eyes of a boy and his horse.  This is the great trauma of the twentieth century in which poison gas was introduced at the Second Battle of Ypres and the British use of tanks on the Somme (both in 1915).  The great moral and political potential of fiction is that it can be used to teach us something about history, even if it exists in the background, but “War Horse” relegates history too much to the sidelines and, paradoxically, uses the cacophonous battlefield to shake the viewer out of its default setting: sentimentality.

It’s all eerily similar to Shakespeare’s Richard III who, deranged and defeated, has lost sight of what’s truly important when he hobbles across stage, shouting: “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!”

Review: “The Thing”

19 Wednesday Oct 2011

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

a. wilford brimley, alien, black christmas, E.T., eric heisserer, final destination 3, horror, howard hawks, jaws, john carpenter, kurt russell, mary elizabeth winstead, matthijs van heijningen, men at work, men in black, prequel, psychology, ronald d. moore, sigourney weaver, spielberg, starship troopers, the thing

“Take Me to Your Bleeder”

Grade: D (SKIP IT)

WHAT ALIEN IN movie history has ever come in peace?  With the exception of E.T. and the space-oddities of “Men in Black,” how many little green men touch down with nothing but the best intentions?

The lethal leviathan at the gory core of “The Thing” is no exception to the rule.  Jeannette Catsoulis, a film critic at The New York Times, has already remarked on the creature’s resemblance to a “toothy, tentacled vagina,” which neatly sums up the film’s conflicted relationship with the gentler sex.  Not since the hideous “Starship Troopers” (1997) has the vagina dentata (that psychoanalytic trope of male horror) roared quite as ferociously as this gyno-gremlin.  It’s a shame that we see so much of the creature in the film’s latter half – have screenwriters Eric Heisserer and Ronald D. Moore learned nothing from Spielberg who intentionally left his man-eater half in the shadows to scare the bathing suits off us? – when the film’s most unnerving scene is also its least expensive:  every guy on base must subject himself to a dental exam and prove, since the alien spits out metals as it parasitically absorbs its victims, that he’s not the creature incognito by showing his fillings.  “What?” one member protests.  “So I’m the alien just because I floss?”  Open wide!

Perhaps the saving grace of this prequel to John Carpenter’s 1982 “The Thing” (itself a remake of Howard Hawks’s “The Thing” of 1951, inspired by the John W. Campbell story “Who Goes There”) is that a strong female has been dropped down in the center of it all.   That’s scream queen Mary Elizabeth Winstead (“Final Destination 3,” “Black Christmas”) as paleontologist Kate Lloyd recruited to the lunar landscape of Antarctica where an unidentified object, lodged in the ice for 10,000 years, has been unearthed by a team of Norwegians.  Kate, who is cleverly listening to Men at Work’s “Who Can it Be Now?” when called to action, is later caught star-gazing by the only other woman in this remote base-camp.  “I’ll never look at them the same way again,” Kate tells her short-lived friend.  What the team exhumes looks like a tarantula the size of an Escalade encased in ice.  It’s hard to believe that this sophisticated team of “experts” has only a power drill to break that ice and reach the specimen.  Once that happens – and yes, the team’s only black member, in the grand horror film tradition, is the first to leave the party to grab a six-pack stashed behind the Alien Popsicle – all hell breaks loose.  Because the creature can replicate itself on a cellular level, the remainder of “The Thing” is Dr. Kate repeatedly putting out fires.

This doomed Norwegian team’s first (and fatal) encounter with the Third Kind is hinted at in Carpenter’s earlier version, which makes Dutch commercial director Matthijs van Heijningen’s version here something of a “prequel.”  When franchises such as this one can’t keep growing forward, they regress backwards.  Thus this “Thing” ends with a husky having escaped into the tundra and huskies, if you recall the original gross-out, get a raw deal in “The Thing” of ’82.  Apart from the gore, there was nothing really innovative about Carpenter’s version except A. Wilford Brimley (sans moustache) wielding an axe and shooting at a shaggy Kurt Russell.  Painfully derivative of the great “Alien” of 1979, Carpenter’s “The Thing” featured a no-thing that fixes itself on your face like a surgical mask, lodges in your abdomen only to explode in the worst form of indigestion known to man.  Just close your eyes at the film’s finale and think of its real inspiration: Sigourney Weaver, as the indomitable Ripley, walking the vertebrae-looking halls of the alien’s hideout, blowtorch in hand.  Now that’s a real gut-buster.

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