A Review On The Cultist's Son
If you haven’t read my story “The Cultist’s Son” yet, this review may have summarized the effect I was trying to invoke:
….I actually shoot for that a lot.
Noah: The Movie Review (Mild Spoilers)
I used to think the worst casting of all time was Jack Nicholson in The Shining. The man looked like he was about to put an axe through your head the second he walked through the door, so it’s not like there was anywhere for him to go. But at least the rest of The Shining was successful, so the film worked around him.
Noah, however, collapses at the casting of Russell Crowe.
The central problem with Noah is that its main character ark (see what I did there?) is at odds with what Russell Crowe is known for delivering. If you’re looking to deliver a vegan soft-hearted guy who doesn’t want to kill anyone, Fighty McRussell is not your first choice.
And yet that’s what the film’s heart is, ostensibly, about: literally the best man in the world, someone shocked by the idea of eating animals, a man who, when confronted with the evils of the world, falls into despair and honestly believes that God wants to use him to save the animals and then let mankind die off. The journey of Noah is from good man to despair, a man who loses faith in his own children and comes to see them as sinful, worthy of being scourged. After all, he’s traumatized by seeing his Creator kill off every other living being in the world – given that mankind was what destroyed the Garden of Eden, is it that big a leap to believe that God wants his family to be the last of humanity?
But the film doesn’t back that. In the opening segment, we see three men perpetrating the shocking crime of killing an animal – for meat! And they threaten to kill Noah. And Noah becomes the Gladiator, slaughtering them with major karate moves without a second thought – the sort of glowering destruction that Russell Crowe is known for.
Problem is, that’s not what the movie actually wants to do. Russell Crowe-as-Noah kills them, shrugs, and moves on… which implies he’s killed a lot of men, and no longer cares. But since the whole point of this movie is Noah’s great love of mankind rubbing up against his hatred of man’s sins, turning this pivotal moment into a generic action sequence is precisely wrong.
My preference would be to have Noah not be a knife-slingin’ badass, the kind of man who kills awkwardly because he’s reluctant to do so – and if he has to be good at it, let it be that terrified Jackie Chan style of fighting where it’s mostly defensive and Jackie looks like he’d rather be somewhere else the entire time. But even if that’s not the case, if the goal is to show how Noah the compassionate man comes to despair, we need to see that reaction afterwards – the pain of him knowing that oh no, I’ve done this again, the terror of realizing that he too has once again been backed into the ways of Cain.
But nope. We get a shrug, and Russell Crowe stoically walks away to feel bad for the animal. And that defangs so much of the rest of the movie, it’s not even funny.
For we know plot of this movie – he’s going to build an ark, save the animals, float a while, bump into land, see the dove. So all that’s left along this journey is to provide us with surprising and fitting character moments. And having Russell Crowe, who swallows all of his emotions, be the vehicle to deliver a tale about curdled faith followed by redemption, is a wrong choice. We don’t see him struggle with his faith so much as rage against it, and “rage” is probably not the ideal choice.
I’m not sure who I would have chosen to deliver this Biblical epic – perhaps Viggo Mortenson? – but Crowe’s ill-matched.
Now, what I find fascinating about the film is that it’s criticized for elements I’d actually like to have seen more of. People complain about the half-science fiction elements of the world, with crumpled angels walking about and remnants of technology buried in the desert, but the Bible itself says the world was stranger in those days. This is a world shortly after the Fall, where the echoes of God could still be heard, where men lived a thousand years and routinely bred with angels. It was a different time – and while some are put off by Aronofsky’s interpretation, I wanted more weirdness, more of a reminder that the Earth has moved on. I wanted to see more of these great cities that drowned, instead of keeping the action to a small and distant forest. So much of the movie is just Noah in a boxy ark, with sleeping animals almost invisible in the firelight, and those shots could have been filmed in almost any warehouse.
You can complain about the weirdness of the murder angels, but seriously, read the Bible. There’s a lot weirder stuff in there, mang.
And like all of Aronofsky’s films, it’s just flat-out beautiful. He has an eye for composition, and it’s pretty… but unfortunately, yanking the tension from the Noah plotline leaves the rest of the movie feeling turgid. Look beyond the acting and to the words of the script and you can see that place where there was supposed to be a crackle-and-hum of Noah, the best man in the world, being forced up against unthinkable amounts of sin and death. What psychological damage would that grind into even the best man? Is Noah, who literally holds the fate of the Earth in his hands, stable enough to rest such a burden on?
The answer we get from Crowe is, Yeah, I’m tough. Which is an excellent answer in many movies. Just not this one.
So Who Should Have Directed The New Star Wars?
When I expressed dread at the upcoming Star Wars movie yesterday, I got a lot of people floating their dream directors for the project. And I have to say: given the idiotic constraints Disney put on the film, JJ Abrams is probably the best director they could have gotten.
Which is to say that Disney treated Star Wars as “release date first, everything else second.” They’d locked down the date so all the other movie studios would get out of the way, and are now lurching towards that date come hell or highwater. As noted, it’s coming eighteen months from now, and they haven’t finished the script. (It took Lucas four years to write the script for the original Star Wars, and about eighteen months for everyone concerned to finish the script for Empire Strikes Back – and that was with Lucas’ overarching story notes.) Clearly, what the big D wants is “A huge profit center,” and the actual quality of the movie is secondary to dominating Christmas 2015 with the inevitable Star Wars juggernaut.
So given that a huge quality film often takes years to develop, and they needed to toss something together quick, JJ Abrams is a good choice. He’s flashy, he works quick, he’s clever.
But if we had infinite time, and Disney had treated the Star Wars films as though they were, you know, Star Wars and not some expensive direct-to-video sequel to the Lion King, who would have been best qualified to direct?
Not Kevin Smith. Disclaimer: I like Kevin Smith. He’s directed some funny movies. But I can’t recall a film of his where he’s had a memorable action sequence (and yes, I’m recalling both Dogma and Red State), and his characters are often all quips and no depth. The glory of Star Wars is that it has things both ways – Han is both snarky and a real character, as is Luke, as is Leia. Kevin Smith would certainly nail the quips, but would you really root for his heroes the way you did for Luke and Han? I doubt it. Plus, Kevin’s kind of a lazy writer.
In addition, Kevin’s a big Star Wars fanboy. That’s actually not a real bonus for me. When you have someone who treats the original material with such reverence, what you get is a sort of Christopher Columbus-does-Harry Potter movies thing where you have someone working so hard at emulation they forget to do anything actually interesting. I think Kevin, with no experience helming big-budget, high-SFX projects, would be a disaster. (Though script-doctoring? Oh, bring in Kevin!)
Not Joss Whedon.
I also like Joss, but when all this hooplah started he was committed to Marvel via an adamantium contract. I’ll hold out for quality, but I don’t really wanna wait until 2021 for my movie.
Plus, Joss needs to be restrained to work properly. When he has his own projects, he winds up making all his characters miserable. Do you really want Luke to die, Wash-style, at the end of this new Star Wars? I almost guarantee you something like that’d happen; Joss loves his heroic sacrifice, and who would be a bigger moment than watching Harrison Ford get the noble sacrifice he was pushing for all the way back in Return of the Jedi? You might see Luke and Han and Leia going out in a blaze of glory.
James Cameron.
Given that he’s obsessed with Avatar, you’d have to back a truckload of money up – maybe even buy him the sunken remains of the Titanic.
But seriously, gripe though you might, Cameron is the spiritual successor to Lucas. Corny dialogue that actually works for most people? Check. Ability to direct the best action sequences put to film, sequences that could only really be appreciated on the big screen in an age of video streaming? Check. Familiarity with SFX? Check. Overreliance on the Campbellian hero archetype? Checkity-check.
Yes, Cameron would probably bring his techno-fetish to the new Star Wars, and make it a little more military than I’d be comfortable with. And the new Star Wars wouldn’t appear until 2018 at the earliest, even if he started the day of the announcement. (The man takes his time.) But assuming you could get him to do the job, he’d be damned perfect for it.
But Cameron would probably have turned it down (who’s to say he didn’t?), so that leaves me with my next bet…
Brad Bird.
“Who?” You ask. The guy who directed The Incredibles, that’s who – perhaps the best superhero film of this century. The guy who directed Iron Giant, and don’t you dare tell me you don’t tear up when you hear the robot saying “Superman.”
“But those are cartoons!” you say, and I’ll counter that he directed the last Mission Impossible with its breathtaking “Tom Cruise leaps off the side of a Dubai skyscraper” sequence.
Brad Bird is the perfect choice, because he really cares about melding character with action, the old Star Wars way. He’s got good lines in him (especially if you get a Kevin Smith in to funny it up). And he really knows how to direct some amazing action sequences with ratcheting tension, which is what Star Wars is known for. It’s a shame he turned Disney down because they needed him to start directing ASAP, but I’m still looking forward to Tomorrowland (coming 2015 to a theater near you).
Gore Verbinski.
Okay, yeah, he just bombed and bombed hard with The Lone Ranger, so nobody would want him. And his work on Pirates of the Caribbean sequels were, shall we say, exactly the sort of crappy sequel that I fear (and that Disney rushed out in the same way that they are rushing Star Wars).
But my hope is that Gore has learned his lesson – and when he’s on his game, he makes the original Pirates of the Caribbean and The Ring. He’s visually inventive, and I’ll put the original Depp-vs.-Bloom duel in Pirates, complete with witty banter, up against anything in Star Wars. If he understands that his job is to fight the studio’s onrushing deadlines and work to get only quality, I think he’d actually do a damned fine job.
Darren Aronofsky.
Okay, the guy who brought us Noah, The Black Swan, Pi, and The Fountain would be a terrible choice, transforming the visuals into hunched dark landscapes and Luke into a zealot seeking redemption at all costs… but damn, if anyone’s going to wreck the series, I want to see the way he wrecks it.
Someone I Hadn’t Considered.
Hey, Peter Jackson was not on my radar when Lord of the Rings was announced, but he turned out to be a fine choice. “The guy who directed Evil Dead” would not have been my go-to for revitalizing Spider-Man. The Spanish guy who did that film about two dudes taking a roadtrip would not have been my pick for directing the best movie in the Harry Potter franchise.
If I was going to go for Star Wars, I’d probably skip the guys who’d had multimillion dollar hits and choose someone who’d had success with limited budgets, someone who knew how to take $1,000 and make it look like a million, someone with the same hungry eye that Lucas had when he started out. After all, if you were going to direct the new Star Wars, would you choose the guy whose biggest hit ’til then was a film about teenagers in the 1950s?
But you know, that film was American Graffiti and that director was one Mr. George Lucas, so it just goes to show: you never know.
Cleveland's Cross-Town Cancer Culture
We love the Meyers, but they are inconveniently located. We live on the West Side of Cleveland; the Meyers live on the East. And thanks to Cleveland’s bizarre reluctance to build a freeway anywhere near population centers, there is no direct route.
So instead of a twenty-minute trip, getting there is a forty-minute ride across buckled streets and dodgy neighborhoods. This makes scheduling tricky; I have to work eight hours, I have to write two hours, and if I want to see the Meyers then to the East Side’s inconvenience we must go and that’s ninety minutes vanished right there in transit.
Yet we must. Not just because they are our friends, but because our goddaughter Rebecca has brain cancer.
We don’t know how long she has. And we need to stand by our dear friends in their hour of need.
And Kat, seeing our stress, has been encouraging us to go to a cancer counselor – someone specialized in dealing with the grief and stress that comes from watching a loved one go through this. And it is stressful. We call Rebecca our godchild, but Gini pointed out to me that we were literally the first ones to lay eyes on each of the Meyer children as they arrived at the home. We’ve changed their diapers, bandaged their wounds, played with them regularly.
In a very real sense, the definition is closer to “grandchildren.”
In a very real sense, as Rebecca diminishes, so do I.
But I’ve been holding off on going to the cancer counselor, because I don’t have time to squeeze in yet another ninety minutes of driving on top of everything else. I’m glad Kat and Eric have someone to go to, but me? I can’t haul my ass over to the East side again, not for therapy, I really can’t.
Until Gini pointed out that there was also a clinic here. On the West Side. Ten minutes away. She seemed aghast that I’d think there was only one clinic to deal with Cleveland’s cancer-related psychological issues.
But really, deep in my heart, I’d subconsciously hoped that what we were going through wasn’t that common. Watching Rebecca is tearing us to shreds. Watching the Meyers is breaking our hearts. Watching ourselves struggle to face this cold reality is slicing time off our lives, the stress weighing on our bodies. I can feel the anxiety shortening my time here, and though I knew it was possible to die of heartbreak, only now do I truly feel how such a thing could happen.
I’d hoped that it was just us. But it isn’t. It’s a hundred people, a thousand, maybe hundreds of thousands over the years, dealing with this goddamned disease and the helplessness you feel as some sickness ravages someone you love, and it was okay when it was just me but knowing this is replicating across the city, the state, the nation, the globe, feels like a door has swept open and all the evils in the world are walking in.
I wanted just one clinic. Inconveniently located. Infrequently used. And the goddamn thing all but has franchises, and today that seems so unfair it makes my fingers tremble.
The New Star Wars Will Be Like A Bad Beauty Queen: Pretty and Vapid
I saw Star Wars well over fifty times in the theater.
I met my wife in a Star Wars chat room on Compuserve, where we debated the dubious wisdom of the Death Star Trench approach.
When we got married, we put Luke and Leia on top of the cake. (I’m not a Han, and you can’t make me.)
And I am dreading the new Star Wars movie.
It’s not that I’m not excited about the idea of a new Star Wars movie, but it seems that “an idea” is all Disney had… well, that and a release date. Which they aren’t changing. So the new Star Wars is coming out next year – and they may not have finished the script, or finished casting, but by God they sure are shooting footage because when the date is looming, dammit, you start filling celluloid.
And what we’ll get, barring some miracle, will be something like Pirates of the Carribean 2 and 3 – also Disney productions that started shooting before the scripts were finalized, pretty things with plots and motivations that hold together only long enough to carry you to the next scene, stitched together with a lot of witty one-liners that you never quite remember because they’re witty like some Twitter status, not witty locked into characterization.
(“Witty locked into characterization” is like the first Pirates, where someone told Jack Sparrow “You’re the worst pirate I’ve ever heard of” and he riposted, “But you have heard of me,” which told us everything we needed to know about the Captain.)
And I like JJ Abrams, but he’s only done an okay job on Star Trek. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the movies… but I enjoy ’em largely because I’m a Star Trek fan, and I tend to forget about them when they’re not around. Yeah, people like the new Star Trek, but do you see half as much fangirl squee about it as you do, say, Sherlock, or Doctor Who? Hell, I’ve seen more happy posts and image memes devoted to Adventure Time than I have these two movies.
The new Star Treks are fire-and-forget summer blockbusters – a good place to be, don’t get me wrong, but it’s coming from a show that was the formative fandom, literally the first adult sci-fi frenzy in history. Those old Star Treks were so popular that the fans went seven years of isolation, not a film or a show or a bone, and still they threw conventions, warming themselves by the fire of old episodes. Those old Star Treks were so popular at the time that they made Doctor Who fandom look tiny.
And now we have two movies, and if there was never a third, I don’t think anyone would have a great uproar the way people still moan for a Firefly reunion. We like those movies. They made us happy. But there’s a difference between “That’s cool” and “ZOMG I CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT THIS,” and I’d argue Doctor Who and Sherlock and even Downton Abbey fill that role more than JJ Abrams’ remakes.
And Star Wars? A high bar, man. And JJ Abrams has already shown us what he’s capable of with infinite time to work with: he’ll come up with something sleek, clever, and ultimately dispensable. I’m not bashing JJ Abrams – trying to recreate that magic is all but impossible – but JJ really does like ZOMG PLOT TWIST over character-building any day, and what people ultimately stay for is character. And what happens when the script – the thing that builds character – is being back-written to accommodate Big Splashy Action Sequences?
So I’m pretty sure what we’ll get. It will be pretty. It will be fun to watch. It will be entertaining. And it will slide out the back of our heads, getting dumped into the neglected back yard of Blockbusters We Enjoyed, and won’t take up residence in our souls. It’ll be something we’ll be happy to watch if it comes on late-night television and we’re bored.
But will it be like Princess Bride, or Galaxy Quest, or any number of other films where we don’t just consume it, but actively crave it time after time?
I hope. But I doubt.