BRIGHT (2017)

Urban fantasy is a genre of popular fiction in which mythological creatures coexist with humans in modern cities. There are two broad categories of urban fantasy, one in which the fantasy creatures hail from the horror genre: vampires especially, but also werewolves and all the rest. In the other category, you have the creatures of Tolkienesque high fantasy: elves, dwarves, orcs and so on. David Ayer's Bright, now streaming on Netflix, is one of the first large-scale attempts to put that second type of urban fantasy on screen. Like many an urban fantasy book, it uses the cop or crime format, giving us as mismatched LAPD partners Daryl Ward (Will Smith) and Nick Jakoby (Joel Edgerton), the latter being the city's first orc cop. Orcs are hated for their looks -- Nick is a "pig" even before he becomes a cop because orcs normally have tusks, though he's filed his down to fit in better -- and for their apparently treacherous role a long-ago war between the Alliance of the Nine Races and the forces of the Dark Lord. While this event explains centuries of human hate for orcs, it doesn't seem to have had any other major impact on the evolution of human society. Bright's LA is pretty much our LA, except that wealthy, beautiful elves live in their own exclusive enclave and some store signs are in non-human languages. Daryl Ward lives a normal suburban life (though his neighborhood is going gangsta and he wants to move out) apart from the occasional nuisance of a fairy buzzing around and being a pest.

Slices of life in Bright's America

There's a certain lack of imagination at work, but the point of the genre is the juxtaposition of the fantastic with the here-and-now, so there'd be no point in altering the here-and-now beyond recognition. More practically speaking, elves and orcs (or vampires) play the role in urban fantasy that Chinatown used to fill in pulp fiction: a community nearby and yet a world away, where people live by different rules from ours and often can get away with stuff we can't. Inevitably the world of urban fantasy invites comparison with the increasingly uncomfortably multiculturalism of here and now, and Bright directly invites comparisons when Daryl jokes, "Fairy lives don't matter today" when he swats a winged mini-humanoid pest with a broom. Nick Jakoby could be the oppressed minority or the distrusted refugee depending on your perspective. Despised by most fellow cops and society at large, he's also looked on as an "unblooded" sellout by the orc underclass. Daryl has even more reason not to trust Nick after getting shot by an orc gangster while Jakoby was preoccupied with buying his partner a burrito, and still more reason when evidence suggests that Nick let a suspect get away. It's sure to be a long, difficult day when Daryl returns to active duty, but neither he nor Nick could guess how difficult it gets.

David Ayer may have formed an alliance with Will Smith after the dubious triumph of Suicide Squad, but the main reason he's here is his history of cop movies, beginning with his authorship of Training Day. His job is to maintain a veneer of verisimilitude as the proceedings grow increasingly fantastic. To a great extent, that's simply a matter of keeping the dialogue salty, or just the way Will Smith likes it. It's also a matter of restraint, and to the relief of anyone who saw Suicide Squad Ayer resists many opportunities to go over the top with special effects. Max Landis's story heads dangerously close to Suicide Squad territory as Daryl and Nick become embroiled in the hunt for a rare magic wand -- only a "Bright" of any race can use one without dying explosively -- that an evil elf (Noomi Rapace) wants to use to bring back the Dark Lord. A good elf (Lucy Fry, giving a strong Fifth Element vibe without the sex appeal) has the wand, but not only her evil sister but corrupt cops and both orc and human gangsters want it, hoping for everything from limitless wealth to a cure for the injuries that have left one crime boss in a wheelchair. Daryl has to kill four cops to stop them from taking the wand and whacking Nick, and from there the episodic chase is on, taking the three protagonists through a half-orcish, half-Hispanic underworld while the federal Bureau of Magic (led by an elfin Edgar Ramirez) scrambles to keep tabs on things.

You may have read some brutal reviews identifying Bright as one of the year's worst films. I've only seen the headlines in an effort to avoid spoilers, so I can only guess whether the reviewers have their knives out for Smith and/or Ayer, expressing reflexive hostility to the very premises of urban fantasy, or flinching from the implicit comparisons to real-world race relations. In all fairness, Bright is no instant classic and suffers from moments of gratuitous violence and story-sustaining stupidity -- e.g., why didn't the corrupt cops just blow Daryl and Nick away when they had a golden opportunity, or why does a sniper let the three protagonists run to shelter just after taking a deputy down with one shot? --  but it's easily better than Suicide Squad, to set the bar admittedly low, and not half-bad on its own terms. Smith and Edgerton develop a decent chemistry and Ayer maintains a better balance of fantasy and grittiness than he did in his previous effort. He passes one crucial test late in the picture by never having the portal or whatever the evil elf was working on open, and never showing us the Dark Lord. For the type of story he's telling this time, he didn't really need that extra spectacle. The climax, with an inevitable but still implausible revelation of another Bright, may induce groans, but by then the film should have earned just enough good will from indulgent audiences to be forgiven that ploy. 

This shot features some nice widescreen composition, some admirably grungy set design, 

and Lucy Fry's peculiar curiosity about restroom hand-driers.

Bright has a better overall production design than Suicide Squad, with Ayer's frequent cinematographer Roman Vasyanov also improving on his last collaboration. The real difference, I suspect, was that there was no nervous mega-corporation looking over the talents' shoulders throughout this production, which leaves Bright looser and sharper than the Warner Bros.-DC extravaganza. At the end of the day it's still an overblown B picture, and maybe too reminiscent of Alien Nation for its own good, but I found it a diverting experiment in translating pop fiction into a new movie genre.

Too Much TV: THE SHANNARA CHRONICLES (2016-?) and THE MAGICIANS (2016-?)

Rarely do you see a show so specifically tailored for a cable channel and its audience demographic as Miles Millar and Alfred Gough's Shannara Chronicles, which makes it ironic that the MTV series is effortlessly surpassed in what it presumably wanted to do -- make a world of magic accessible to a relatively casual contemporary viewer -- by Sera Gamble and Sean McNamara's The Magicians on SyFy. It's not just that Magicians is set in the present day, since Shannara bends over backwards to make its postapocalyptic setting as nearly contemporary as possible. The crucial difference is that Shannara tries to bend Terry Brooks's characters and concepts into a cliche of modernity, while Magicians, adapting Lev Grossman's trilogy of novels, relies on superior writing and acting to develop several strong, distinctive personalities who feel modern because they feel real. Shannara ends up a mirror of MTV's own fantasy of youth, while Magicians, for all its purposefully derivative trappings, is becoming a uniquely character-driven fantasy show, and the best new genre program of the 2015-16 TV season.

The Shannara Chronicles approximately adapts Brooks's novel The Elfstones of Shannara. Some time after a cataclysmic event destroys human civilization, once-fantastical species have evolved from man, the dominant species, apparently, being the elves. Culturally, on the show at least, the elves are much as you and I, only with pointy ears. The show begins on a note of progress as Princess Amberle (Poppy Drayton) becomes the first female to pass the grueling endurance test to become a guardian of the Elcrys, the magical tree on which the well-being of the elf kingdom (ruled over by John Rhys-Davies) depends. Progress comes too late, it seems, since the Elcrys is dying, and that puts the kingdom in danger of invasion and annihilation by hordes of demons. The druid Allanon (Manu Bennett), Brooks's badass Gandalf, reports that the cure for the Elcrys can be found in distant Safehold. After most of the Elcrys guard is massacred, Amberle takes up the quest to Safehold, accompanied by half-elf Wil Ohmsford (Austin Butler), a descendant of the hero of Brooks's earlier novel The Sword of Shannara. Wil possesses the mighty Elfstones, which get him out of many a jam but tax him physically, as all magic does to its wielders in this world. Along for the ride is Eretria (Ivana Baquero), a human Rover i.e. a brigand initially tasked by her leader and adopted father (James Remar) with stealing the Elfstones so she herself won't be sold into slavery. Meanwhile, Allanon has magical skirmishes with the big bad and mentors an elf with powerful and potentially dangerous abilities, while the elf king is murdered and replaced by a changeling in league with the demons.

MTV took on Shannara presumably because the success of its Teen Wolf series showed its audience had an appetite for genre stories. Just as Teen Wolf evolved into something far different and darker than its comic namesake, so Shannara became something quite different from Brooks's Tolkienesque fantasy. As already noted, the crucial decision seems to have been to underscore the postapocalyptic element of the fantasy world far more than Brooks ever has, to my knowledge. You are constantly reminded that the world of elves, gnomes, etc., was built on the ruins of our world, and the ruins often are shockingly well-preserved, given how much time presumably has passed in order for new species to evolve. In one episode our trio find the ruins of a 21st century high school, with many of the posters on the walls and other artifacts intact. In another, a human colony has salvaged artifacts of the distant (?) past and can generate power to play 21st century music for parties that clearly are meant to look inviting to the MTV audience. In other respects the show strives for contemporary relevance. As commentary on bigotry seems necessary again, we get a storyline involving elf-hating human hunters who take pointy ears as trophies, and in general interspecies mistrust exist to a greater degree, so I'm told, than it does in the novels. Relevance and accessibility are the twin goals, the latter theoretically achieved by having the elves and so forth talk in 21st century slang and idiom and by foregrounding the main heroes' romantic triangle and objectifying all three characters as sex objects. Shannara delivers much of the same soap opera many genre fans identify angrily with the CW network, but takes it to a shoulders-and-sheets level CW rarely indulges in. Add to all this an honest effort at fantasy action on a somewhat epic scale -- Manu Bennett often seems to be taking part in an entirely different, possibly cooler show -- and you get an overcalculated mishmash designed to please all-too-specific demographics without any real organic creative evolution. After Into the Badlands showed what Millar and Gough are capable of when they aren't pandering to a specific audience -- unless you can define an AMC demographic for me, that is -- Shannara was doomed to disappoint me. In its defense, while I compare it to the stereotype of a CW show it never really blunders into the kinds of stupidity that renders some CW programs infuriating, while it managed to maintain a dramatic momentum that other, more promising shows (e.g. The Bastard Executioner) never really attained. Its main problem -- perhaps a fatal one -- is that it was compromised by its choice of venue in a way that shouldn't be possible today. My presumption is that a Shannara Chronicles on a different channel would have been a far different thing, everything else remaining equal, but maybe I'm wrong.

On SyFy, The Magicians is part of an attempted renaissance through which the former Sci-Fi Channel hopes to reclaim the respectability it enjoyed a decade ago, when the rebooted Battlestar Galactica was one of the vanguard shows of a perceived new golden age of television, before the channel sold its soul for sophomoric laughs by making "SyFy Original" a byword for self-conscious, bad-on-purpose schlock. If SyFy's other new shows are as good as Magicians the channel is well on its way to redemption. It follows the parallel journeys of two friends from childhood, Quentin Coldwater (Jason Ralph) and Julia Wicker (Stella Maeve). As kids they were fans of a Narnia-like fantasy fiction series about the magical realm of Fillory, but Julia has outgrown that stuff and urges Quentin to do likewise. Almost by accident each wanders by a different path into an entrance exam for Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy, which I could swear is somewhere around here in upstate New York. Quentin passes the exam and is admitted to Brakebills, while Julia flunks and, according to routine, will have her memory of the exam wiped away. She improvises, however, and cuts her arm as a mnemonic device that overcomes the forgetting spell. As Quentin gets used to life at Brakebills, a campus increasingly under attack by a horrific power known as The Beast, Julia becomes obsessed with learning magic independently, falling in with an underworld of "hedgewitches" and embarking on a roller-coaster ride of brief epiphanies and nightmarish disasters. Since she clearly has considerable talent and possibly tremendous potential, you're left to wonder why Brakebills rejected her, why Brakebills has the authority among magicians it appears to enjoy, etc. But Magicians doesn't indulge in the paranoid fantasies (yet at least) that would render Brakebills itself suspect; the faculty's intentions appear benign, its concern for discipline sincere and necessary given the violence magic is capable of. If there's no clear why for Brakebills having no place for Julia, that's because the show doesn't offer simple answers for anything. Its lead characters grow increasingly complex as we go on, and while some people have objected that none of the main cast is likable, I think the show has gone quickly beyond a dependence on likability in its development of some of the most interesting personalities on genre TV.

At first glance, the high concept of Magicians is "adult Harry Potter" in several respects. There's sex, yes, and there's also a brazen amount of smoking, boozing, drug taking, etc., all without judgment from the writers. Leaving all that out, the students at Brakebills are not children, nor are they stock fantasy types. Along with Quentin, who, defined by his neuroses and obsession with Fillory, is arguably the least fleshed-out character on the show, we get to know his eventual girlfriend Alice (Olivia Taylor Dudley), the most studious and driven of the students, a gorgeous nerd who's socially repressed as a rebellion against her parents' orgiastic lifestyle and obsessed over the fate of an older brother who attended Brakebills; Penny (Arjun Gupta), who despises all trappings of fantasy (especially the Fillory novels) despite his own obvious talents and strives defensively to maintain a too-cool arrogant attitude even as he discovers his dangerous power as a teleporting Traveler; Eliot (Hale Appleman), at first glance the perpetual undergrad, dissolutely easygoing, omnivorous in his sexual and intoxicant appetites, under whose snarky demeanor -- he seems on first impression the most like someone you'd find at Hogwarts -- run deep, dark waters that surface when the Beast forces him to kill a lover; Margo (Summer Bishil), Eliot's BFF ever since they had to strip and reveal secrets to each other in an undergrad rite of passage, who often comes across as a Mean Girl in spite of herself and whose emotional neediness emerges as Eliot's attitude darkens; and Kady (Jade Tailor), who becomes Penny's girlfriend but has to flee Brakebills when her ties to hedgewitches (her mother's one) are exposed and ends up (as of the most recent episode) collaborating with Julia and a group of elite, relatively ethical hedges, in an attempt to summon a god. Even if Quentin seems shallow among them, Jason Ralph conveys the depths of the character's conflicts and confusions, supported by a formidable ensemble of young actors. The writers match the actors by constantly imagining original stuff for them to do as they learn more about magic in general and the dark truth behind the Fillory novels in particular. Of genre shows I watch only The Flash can compete with The Magicians on the high-concept level, and the speed with which Magicians opens up its fantastic universe -- apparently telescoping events in the first two Grossman novels drastically -- while keeping it all comprehensible (or comprehensibly mysterious) is arguably unmatched. I get a greater rush of vital novelty from each episode than I get from any other program, including those I still consider this show's superiors. Best of all, however freely the show adapts the novels, you never feel that Magicians is pandering to specific demographics, or stereotypes of demographics, the way Shannara does. It seems that people recognized the difference; while Shannara's future is uncertain, Magicians is assured of  a second season. Considering that the second season is when many shows hit their stride, that's really good news, and it will make the wait until 2017 (and season four for Black Sails and The 100) even longer.

Too Much TV: JONATHAN STRANGE AND MR. NORRELL (2015)

Susanna Clarke published her epic fantasy Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell in 2004. Her first and only novel to date, it is epic in size (782 pages) and scope, amounting to a kind of allegory of early modern England. It has at last been visualized by the BBC, in an seven-part adaptation written by Toby Haynes and directed by Peter Harness, that has just wrapped up on BBC America about one month after its original British broadcast. The challenge of adapting the novel is twofold (threefold if you count special effects): its size and its voice. Clarke wrote in something like the style that prevailed in the time she wrote about: early 19th century Britain. Her mock erudition extended to extensive footnotes that by definition could not be adapted for TV unless you wanted the show to sound like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Since Haynes and Harness do without a narrator after the first scene, it's up to the actors and their writer to sound like authentic creatures of their age, not to mention the authentic creatures of Susanna Clarke. Part of the entertainment of the novel is its recreation of a golden age of English prose -- I rather like Naomi Novik's Temeraire series of novels about the Napoleonic wars fought by dragon-riding armies for the same reason. The cast of the TV Jonathan Strange succeeds in bringing that language to life while dispensing with the narration. I'd like to say I took this success for granted from a British series, but I'd watched The Musketeers too recently to make such an assumption. This time everyone involved was clearly holding each other to a higher standard and the result is a largely faithful adaptation of a great novel. The funny part is that some of the episodes and incidents of the book that I remember most vividly didn't make it onto TV. All that means is that people turning to the novel after watching the show have even more of a treat in store for them.

Though billed second in the title, Gilbert Norrell (Eddie Marsan) is the first of the two English magicians we see in the story. A solitary Yorkshire researcher, attended only by the vaguely menacing but ultimately benign John Childermass (Enzo Clienti), Norrell becomes a public figure by intervening dramatically in the debates of the local Friends of English Magic, who are little more than a discussion group. Norrell offers to demonstrate that he has mastered magic on the condition that the society disband and its members renounce magic. All but John Segundus (Edward Hogg) do so and feel justified by Norrell's apparent animation of a cathedral's statuary. The magician hopes to leap from local notoriety to national fame and national service. Despite his obvious discomfort, he strives to insinuate himself in English society to further his goal of rendering English magic "respectable." As the story develops, we learn that the respectability toward which Norrell aspires depends on purging magic of any dependence on the legacy of John Uskglass, the semi-legendary Raven King who flourished about 300 years earlier, or upon the power of the fairies whom Uskglass mastered. To succeed, however, Norrell becomes a hypocrite. When the wife of Sir Walter Pole, a Cabinet minister, dies suddenly, Norrell resolves to resurrect her and win Pole's support for his project. To restore her, Norrell must make a bargain with one of the fairy creatures he despises and fears, an arrogant character with thistledown hair known only as "the gentleman" (Marc Warren). The gentleman resurrects Lady Pole (Alice Englert) on the condition that he have half of her remaining years -- he knows she'll live to be 94. Rather than take a chunk of years, he takes her sleeping hours, forcing her to dance in an endless ball of Burtonesque boors in his manor at Lost Hope, leaving her virtually insane by day. He also co-opts the Poles' butler, Stephen Black (Ariyon Bakare), at once intimidating him and tantalizing him with the prophecy that a once-nameless slave -- Stephen had been rescued from a slave ship as an infant -- will become a king.

Meanwhile, a random encounter with a mystic tramp Norrell had chased out of London inspires Jonathan Strange of Shropshire (Bertie Carvel) to try his hand at magic. Inspired by his copy of A Child's History of the Raven King, Strange is curious about realms of magic Norrell would rather see closed off. He proves such a prodigy, however, that Norrell accepts him as a student and assistant in his contributions to the war effort against Napoleon. Norrell is a grudging teacher, reluctant to let Strange see any but a few of the books in the vast library he's accumulated. It becomes apparent to the viewer (or reader) that Strange will be more powerful than Norrell, if he isn't already, but Norrell is troubled less by Strange's power than by his curiosity. Strange's desire to learn more about the Raven King and the "King's Roads" he built through the fairy realm, with mirrors serving as portals throughout England, threatens to ruin all Norrell has done to make English magic respectable. Goaded by his co-author and literary agent (John Heffernan), Norrell uses his magic to censor a rival volume by Strange, making the text disappear from every copy published. Meanwhile, Strange's wife Arabella (Charlotte Riley) catches the eye of the fickle fairy gentleman, who affects contempt for Strange's magic while clearly fearing the newcomer's unsounded potential. He schemes to replace Arabella with a changeling, stealing the real woman to Lost Hope where, unlike Lady Pole, she rapidly loses her memory. The changeling proving short-lived, Strange appeals to Norrell to teach him how to resurrect her. Norrell's refusal causes a definitive break between the two magicians, driving Strange to Italy, where he experiments in madness in hopes of gaining access to the fairy realm and the knowledge he expects to find there. He succeeds mainly in destroying the barriers Norrell had merely cracked open but forces the gentleman to use nearly all his power to expel him from Lost Hope and place him under a curse that surrounds him with a funnel cloud of darkness.

If the TV series drops the ball at any point, it's in the final episode which drastically understates the crisis into which Strange has plunged all of England. The final part of Clarke's book is in part an allegory for the post-Napoleonic period of reaction that climaxed in the Peterloo Massacre, just as Norrell all along has represented a reactionary form of Enlightenment obsessed with control rather than freedom, while Strange embodies Romanticism (inclusive of the Gothic), the reckless genius to Norrell's cautious scholar. The TV series has jettisoned or truncated a military figure who becomes a major antagonist late in the book, and while the abandonment of historical context may have been a necessity of time constraints, the fates of Strange, Norrell and their circle are more than enough to keep everyone interested, especially those who don't know what they're missing. Whether the BBC America audience fully appreciates the meta-English context  is open to debate. If they've stuck with the show, it's because of the action and the acting. Eddie Marsan (who was Inspector Lestrade in the Ritchie-Downey Sherlock Holmes movies) takes top honors by conveying the at-once ambitious and cowardly, arrogant and insecure and ultimately well-meaning Norrell, tough Marc Warren, who may be remembered as the Dracula in a very bad recent TV production, nearly steals the show with one of the strongest TV villain performances I've seen in quite a while. If he'd put more of that into his Dracula we might have had something there. Also deserving of special mention out of an overall superior cast are Alice Englert as Lady Pole, whose righteous indignation is only compounded by the spell that cripples her ability to articulate it, and Vincent Franklin as Drawlight, a toady who takes credit for introducing Norrell to society and deteriorates during the series from Augustan pomposity to Dickensian wretchedness. I could be at the keyboard all night praising everyone who deserves it for this series, but to leave just the tip of an iceberg showing seems appropriate for a program that has the same relationship to its source material. I don't mention that again to diminish the miniseries. In fact, when I see an adaptation of something I've read that leaves out so much or changes so much and can still recommend it (in cinema Michael Mann's Last of the Mohicans comes to mind), it's really one of the highest recommendations I can give.

SOLOMON KANE (2009)

The Puritan wanderer Solomon Kane was one of the early creations of the short-lived, now legendary pulp writer Robert E. Howard, predating Conan the Barbarian in print by four years. In the movies, more than a quarter-century passed after the first Conan movie before Solomon Kane made it to the big screen, and then three more years passed before Michael J. Bassett's Euro production was released in Howard's homeland. At first glance, the picture owes its existence less to John Milius's Conan the Barbarian than it does to Gore Verbinski's Pirates of the Caribbean. I don't mean to suggest that Bassett's film is a comedy -- it takes itself very seriously -- but the Pirates films made the 17th century setting of the Kane stories a safe period to set a fantasy film in. In fact, Solomon Kane takes inspiration from many sources. Some of the interior sets and creature designs may remind you of Pan's Labyrinth, while some of the outdoor action suggests Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow. A scene in which Kane (James Purefoy) is crucified will even remind you of the Milius Conan, if not of another 1982 film, The Sword and the Sorcerer, in which the hero decrucifies himself. Alas, it can't live up to that picture's glorious idiotic moment when the hero leaps off his cross, catches a sword in mid-air, and goes to work slaying his enemies. Instead, Kane bellows with rage and flops into the mud.

It might be argued that writer-director Bassett takes influences from everywhere but the Howard stories, but we have to concede that Bassett got the look of the character pretty much right. Like Milius's Conan, Bassett's Kane doesn't adapt a particular Howard story. Instead, Bassett gives us an overdetermined origin story, and while Milius's film is also an origin, it had the simplicity of a revenge tale as well, while Bassett ensnares himself in nearly every origin-story plot thread that could be imagined. For starters, it's a tale of redemption, starting with Kane as a freebooter sacking a North African fortress, only to find himself attacked by a Devil's Reaper claiming his soul. His narrow escape leads Kane to seek shelter in a monastery, adopting ways of peace in the belief that the devil will take him should he ever kill again. But Solomon Kane is also about "fathers and sons," but more about sibling rivalry. Flashbacks reveal that Solomon, the second son of honorary Englishman (and Conan alumnus) Max Von Sydow -- is it that the great Swede now speaks the language better than most natives, or do some people think he is English? --  was to be relegated to the priesthood (a dangerous profession in Elizabethan England) but ran away from home after accidentally shoving his bully of an older brother off a cliff. This pretty much gives away the identity of the bad guy stomping around in a leather mask, but Bassett muddles things by insisting that this menace is only a minion of the real big-bad, the priest-turned-sorcerer Malachi (Jason Flemyng), whom we don't even see until the film's last act. His face is tattooed with Latin script in another apparent homage to the Milius Conan, and that's the most interesting thing about him. He ends up overshadowed not just by Solomon's final duel with his brother, who gets set on fire during the fight, and by his own summoning of a giant fire demon out of a mirror. Needless to say, by now Solomon has done a lot of killing, but he's been assured by the dying vow of the late Pete Postlethwaite that any killing he does to save Pete's daughter is O.K. with God.

Is there an original idea to be found in Solomon Kane? It seems not, though there are a few creatively directed moments. One of the best, it turns out, is a tangent from the main story in which Solomon encounters a minister whose congregation has been cursed by Malachi and transformed into flesh-eating subhumans. The slow torchlit reveal of the lot of them, both sexes bald and greenish in the light, packed in a cellar beneath a trapdoor, is the most genuinely creepy moment in the picture. The main story is a dispiriting muddle of "begins" cliches, again begging the question of why modern movie audiences supposedly can't accept the idea of a hero walking the earth without knowing how or why he does so, or being reassured somehow that he is reluctant, conflicted, etc. To my knowledge, Robert E. Howard never felt a need to account for Solomon Kane's childhood or family rivalries. Bassett's attempt to do so doesn't enhance the legend but serves only to make his film more like all the other modern films that find heroism so exceptional that it must be explained by factors other than a commitment to justice or the common good. This grows tiresome and seems to reflect a distrust of moral certainty, if not heroism itself, at least among self-styled creators. There's certainly room for skepticism about moral certainty (or certitude) in movies, but by now it's gotten monotonous. Solomon Kane is itself a monotonous picture, more often merely miserable than spooky and too predictable to be epic. The picture isn't awful, but it's disappointingly uninspired and a disservice to Robert E. Howard's legacy.

DVR Diary: TURN BACK THE CLOCK (1933)

The Great Depression must have left many people wondering what they would have done differently before the great crash, had they a chance. A fantasy story in which one man gets the chance, even if only in his dream, had natural potential in 1933. The comic potential is obvious, too, and that's why we have Lee Tracy starring in Edgar Selwyn's film, co-written by the director with ace scripter Ben Hecht. Selwyn counts as a singular Pre-Code fantasist for making this picture as well as the future-war prophecy film Men Must Fight, in which he visualizes the bombing of New York City. Tracy plays Joe Gimlett, who's struggling through the Depression running a cigar store and doing better than many. He and his wife have a few thousand dollars salted away, When an old buddy made good invites him to invest in a business proposition that could make him $20,000 in a year, Joe's wife vetoes the idea. Frustrated with his lack of progress in life, Joe dreams himself back into his past under anaesthesia after a car accident. Anticipating Peggy Sue Got Married, Tracy inhabits his younger self circa 1910, which makes for some cute initial confusion between Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt. Discovering that he seems to have a fresh chance, Joe accepts a business proposition he'd rejected in his past past and marries the vivacious girl who would have become his rich friend's wife, the friend marrying Joe's real-time wife instead. Joe is able to exploit his foreknowledge to some extent -- he strikes it rich by investing in trucking at the start of World War I -- but at other times his predictions and warnings only make him look crazy. Audiences in the last days of Prohibition would certainly laugh when Joe, noticing the open abundance of alcohol, talks about bootleggers and speakeasies to universal incomprehension. The fish-out-of-water angle becomes most bizarre, in retrospect, when Joe heckles some musicians performing at his wedding reception for singing old-fashioned songs. The singers are the unbilled Larry Fine and Moe and Jerry Howard -- the Three Stooges unaccompanied by Ted Healy, and the weird thing about their one scene in the picture is the way they play complete straight men for Tracy, baffled by his requests for songs as yet unwritten. Moe and Larry have tamed their signature hair into period styles, and none of the Stooges do anything characteristic -- no slapping or insults of any kind. This must have been the sort of work that made Columbia Pictures appealing to them.

Anyway, Turn Back the Clock acquires some bite whenever Joe gets to play a Cassandra, though you get the sense that Tracy could have attacked the material more strongly. A scene where he addresses recruits bound for the World War that he fought in his past/real life seems set up for an anti-war tirade, but Joe only offers a mild debunking of patriotic cliches, warning the troops to expect mud and cooties but also promising them their own private bonus from the local bank -- a telling promise when real veterans still hoped for early bonuses from the government. His ability to change history is thwarted by an often self-righteous and more often crazy-sounding foreknowledge; appointed head of war industries by President Wilson, he's fired shortly before the armistice for protesting too much against profiteering. Striking even closer to home for Depression audiences, Joe warns people against investing in the stock market, even though he doesn't remember the exact day of the Crash. The story seems to have come full circle when he simultaneously warns his dream wife against playing the market while making essentially the same invitation to his pal, who now has Joe's original place (and wife) in the cigar store, that was made to him. But the dream Depression is even worse than reality for our hero, whose wife had invested their entire savings in the market behind his back and whose bank board is setting him up to take the fall for their shady practices. He dreams all the way to the starting point of the picture -- the Bank Holiday of March 1933, immediately following FDR's inauguration -- and realizes to his horror that he can't predict the future anymore. Dream becomes nightmare at last as he tries to flee the country, is captured by police who form a firing squad and then a lynch mob -- but as you might have guessed, death is but a prelude to awakening and the summing up of lessons learned. In its eccentric fashion, Turn Back the Clock belongs to the same category of retrospective "what went wrong" films as William Wellman's Heroes For Sale and Midnight Mary. It's meant to be more lighthearted than either of those doomy films, and Tracy strives hard to milk humor from the fantastic situation, but the implicit message that foreknowledge could not prevent the economic disaster makes the picture somewhat less funny than the studio claimed. It may well have seemed less funny when it came out than it does now, but on the other hand Pre-Code audiences were a hard-boiled lot, we assume, so maybe they got some gallows humor out of it. Since we're more likely to think of this as a fantasy than as a comedy, we may judge it by a different standard that gives Selwyn credit for creativity, if his was as new an idea as the advertising claimed. Apart from its largely unacknowledged place in the history of fantasy cinema, Turn Back the Clock is an item of real historical interest for its commentary on the Depression and the generation before. It may have more historical than entertainment value, but for those who find this sort of history entertaining this picture is definitely worth a look.

Once again TCM comes through with the original trailer, including most of the Stooges' footage.

HOLY FLAME OF THE MARTIAL WORLD (1983)

Think of Chinese kung fu movies and, if you're my age, you think of the stuff that used to play on the local independent channel on weekend afternoons. This was almost always pretty mundane material: dudes punching, kicking, leaping and avenging their masters. You didn't see as much of the swordplay movies, which often got much more fantastical. In part, that's because Chinese folklore and pop culture imagine a "martial world," something like an American comic book "universe" where men and women with amazing superhuman abilities battle one another. American audiences started to get more of a feel for this world as 21st century Chinese filmmakers took advantage of modern CGI to stage their fantasies on a competitively epic scale. But they'd been trying to render those fantasies on film for decades before, and Lu Chin-ku's 1983 extravaganza shows the influence of FX-driven American films like Star Wars and Superman that opened new possibilities for heroic fantasy cinema. Movies like Holy Flame exerted their own influence on global genre cinema. The rapid cutting and frantic, dynamic wirework on display here clearly influenced Sam Raimi's early work, which would exert a further influence of its own. Holy Flame also resembles a Raimi movie in its relentless inventiveness and an overall tone bordering on delirium. It'll often seem absurd, but you won't think it's stupid -- you'll think it's crazy.

The Holy Flame is, at least as far as this film is concerned, the ultimate weapon of the martial world, the one that'll give its owner mastery over all rivals. Naturally, it's coveted by all the major factions of the realm. It's an interesting feature of this film that the Shaolin Temple is presented as just another of these factions, and nowhere near first among equals. The Shaolin grandmaster we see is, like his peers, an egotistical blowhard and a bit of a coward. The exception to the rule is the all-female Taoist order of Erh Mei, or more specifically its grand master Jing Yin (Leanne Lau). She's more ruthless and apparently more powerful than her peers, and she has a balance-tipping ally in lone-wolf menace "Monster" Yu (Jason Pai Piao). They lead the hunt for a heroic young couple who know the "creed" of the Holy Flame -- knowledge of its secret location and how to acquire it. With their infant son and daughter in tow, this pair opens the film on the run, and they are quite doomed. The children survive, however. The son is rescued through the heroic intervention of "The Phantom," aka the "Yama Elder" (Phillip Kwok), who repels Jing Yin and Monster with his overwhelming Holy Laugh. In a good humor he can summon a tempest that can rip you apart from the inside out if it doesn't dash you against some solid object. He might have destroyed the bad guys if he didn't fear harming the baby boy, whom he takes under his wing and trains to avenge his parents on a date set 18 years from now. The baby girl, meanwhile, had been thrown clear when her mother was killed, and is found by Jing Yin, who raises her as a Erh Mei nun who believes that the Phantom killed her parents.

Meet the villains: Jing Yin (Leanne Lau) and Monster Yu (Jason Pai Piao)

After teaching the boy the Holy Laugh, the Phantom sends Wan Tien Sau (Max Mok) on a mission to fetch the Holy Flame, which he'll need to take revenge on the still-more powerful Jing Yin and Monster Yu. A charismatic young minion of Monster is also on the trail of the Flame, but our hero saves his life and earns his friendship while rescuing him from some animated flesh-dissolving ghosts. After Wan gets the Flame after a lengthy battle with giant flying Chinese ideograms, he and his new pal get sidetracked when the lovely daughter of a friendly snake wrangler is kidnapped by the Blood Sucking Clan.

It turns out that too many cartoons are bad for you.

Regrettably, the Hong Kong edition of The Electric Company was cancelled due to excessive violence.

They don't do any blood sucking themselves, apparently, but use the blood of virgins to awaken a green, English-speaking undead whatsit just in time to fight the good guys -- and that's after the clan leader had brought monsters painted on banners to violent life. After much mayhem, the Holy Flame serves as a stake to take out the quasi-vampire. The snake wrangler's daughter (Mary Jean Reimer) ceases to be a helpless damsel once she gets infected by the blood from a snake bladder. As often happens in such cases, she acquires the power to shoot bolts of energy from her infected "Mighty Finger," and Phantom agrees to train her in using her new power.

At the Erh Mei temple, Jing Yin carefully guards her adopted daughter Wan Dan Fung's virginity, in keeping with the order's vows of chastity. Holy Flame is a family film, albeit an extremely violent one; there isn't the least hint of lesbianism within the Erh Mei ranks -- though as if to make up for that the young anti-heroine is befriended by the Peter Pan-like Golden Snake Boy, the resemblance consisting of "his" obvious portrayal by a woman. Dan Fung's virginity is essential because it'll enable her to read the instructions for the other Holy Flame that Jing Yin already has in her possession. The girl will be the abbess's instrument for ruling the martial world and her safeguard against whatever vengeance Phantom is planning. The masters of the other orders still don't realize that Jing Yin already has a Flame and continue to pester her for information. They end up as the comedy relief of the picture, lamely threatening the abbess by running in a circle around her, none of them brave enough to make the first attack. All the while the bored villainess fans herself while her minions complain that the other masters are leaving puddles of sweat on the floor. While this is going on, Monster sends his increasingly conflicted protege to steal Jing Yin's Flame from Dan Fung to give himself more leverage with the abbess. Despite this betrayal, the two villains team up to finally exterminate the other annoying masters.

Once Golden Snake "Boy" sets Dan Fung straight about her history, she reacquires the Yin Flame and teams up with her long-lost brother and his Yang Flame for the ultimate 18th anniversary showdown with Jing Yin and Monster. The siblings are going to need all the power they can muster, because the bad guys have developed an immunity to Phantom's Holy Laughter, making them potentially invincible. That may neutralize the old man, but the snake girl and her Mighty Finger are ready to even the odds if the villains try anything funny. The stage is set for climactic minutes of non-stop superpowered mayhem, filmed with the naive enthusiasm of a child throwing his action figures at each other and making up new abilities as he goes along.

Holy Flame powers, activate!

There's a certain childlike joy about the whole film that transcends some of its technical limitations. Wirework wasn't what it would become, and the flying characters often look out of control as they careen about the often-impressive sets. The Holy Flames themselves are very unformidable looking. In fact, they look like plastic paddles with detachable fake diamonds in the middle. But their existence is really just a pretext for special effects that are flung about with infectious glee. Holy Flame has a lot of the inventive nuttiness of more horrific contemporary films like The Boxer's Omen, without anyone vomiting snakes and worms. It also benefits from a cast of committed performers who sustain the story's fairy-tale quality. Leanne Lau, a 23 year old actress playing a middle-aged "hag," makes a great villainess, menacing and amusing at the same time in a Wicked Witch of the West sort of way. She's so charismatic that you're tempted to root for her against the comparatively bland good guys -- the better fantasy movies often leave you this option -- but you don't mind her getting a well-deserved comeuppance. This is the sort of movie that keeps you wondering what the filmmakers will come up with next, and keeps you eager to find out. Arguably a classic of its kind, it's one of the most purely fun movies I've seen in a long time.

MICMACS (MicMacs a Tire-Larigot, 2009)

Jean-Pierre Jeunet declares his influences early in his latest film. He shows his hero watching The Big Sleep and lip-syncing Bogart's dubbed-French dialogue. The opening credits are in black and white, and in English, and the music of Max Steiner plays over them, as it will through much of the film. All the zaniness to come, then, is a riff on classic Warner Bros. melodrama -- or is it more of an homage to the cartoons of Tex Avery, one of which is excerpted in the scene when the hero finds himself fired from his video-store job? MicMacs is definitely more plausible as a cartoon homage, but all these overt acknowledgments of Hollywood influences strike me as misdirection after the fact. For one thing, the overall flavor of the thing remains very French. For another, if it reminded me of Hollywood at all, it was reminiscent less of any Warners or Steiner-scored story than of a Frank Capra film. If you're a cosmopolitan film buff with a long view of history, think of MicMacs as a mix of Les Vampires and You Can't Take It With You and you've just about nailed it.

There's a little Mel Brooks in the mix as well. Our hero hears the Steineresque score swell up on the soundtrack, but the camera reveals a symphony orchestra behind him -- or is it just a brain-damaged hallucination?

The Capraesque revenge tale deals with Bazil (Dany Boon), who as a child is orphaned when his father is killed by a land mine in the Western Sahara and his grief-stricken mother is taken to the nervous hospital. As a grown man, Bazil is the archetypal video-store clerk until he's shot in the head through a freak accident. The bullet can't be removed without rendering Bazil a vegetable; left there, it could kill him at any moment. Released from the hospital, he learns, as you learned a moment ago, that he'd been laid off. He becomes an almost Chaplinesque figure, pantomiming for coins, until he falls in with an eccentric extended "family" of junkyard scavengers, inventors, contortionists, etc. They join him in his madcap quest for revenge on the arms dealers whose mines and bullets have marred his life. A human cannonball, an African conspiracy, Benito Mussolini's eye and Marilyn Monroe's tooth all figure in, and Bazil must often literally think fast to keep himself from dropping dead on short notice.

Whimsy: above, a weightlifting robot; below, Jeunet mascot Dominique Pinon as the record-seeking human cannonball.

With a filmography ranging from Delicatessen to Amelie, Jeunet should have any viewer on whimsy alert. I've been able to tolerate and even enjoy his past work (excepting Amelie, which I haven't seen), but MicMacs is the first Jeunet film I've actually disliked. Its heart is in the right place and it picks the right targets, but the fatal flaw of self-amusement poisons the atmosphere throughout. The film is too cute, too quaint, too self-consciously adorable for its own good. Maybe French viewers and Europeans in general have a greater tolerance for such labored whimsy, but I found it insufferable from an early point. In the film's defense, I think Jeunet is quite consciously employing groaner humor, such as the historically inevitable joke on the phonetic intersection of French poetry and American one-man army films. An arms dealer boasts to his son that he compared himself to Rimbaud in a speech. "Do you know who Rimbaud is?" he asks the boy. "You need to work out more," the child answers.

Overall, however, the best I can say is that it didn't get that much more insufferable as it went on. The complicated maneuvers of the plot may keep people interested, and the film grows slightly more tolerable as it gets more active. In sum, MicMacs seems like a step backward for Jeunet following his least generic film, A Very Long Engagement. But to be fair, for a contemporary fantasy film you could probably do worse. I tremble to think what an American MicMacs would look like.

WOLFHOUND (2007)

Economists and historians have suggested that slavery is a fundamentally inefficient and thus ultimately untenable institution. One factor rendering slavery inefficient is the risk that comes with overworking your slaves. For instance, let's say you have a bunch of captive kids turning a mill wheel in the middle of nowhere. If you work any one of those brats hard enough, he'll get big and strong enough to turn the wheel all by himself. At that point it's probably a good idea to sell him to somebody who can use him as a pit fighter. Slavery can be dangerous because it strengthens the slaves.

Consider another scenario. You've bought a brat off a bunch of raiders who wiped out his village and his tribe and you put him to work in your mine in the Crystal Mountains. You try to keep him good and terrorized by beating him regularly and scarring his face, but as long as he keeps swinging that pickax he's going to build up some muscles. One day he isn't going to take your crap anymore, and on that day he'll be so strong that he can just wrap his shackled hands around your neck and it'll be all over. The wonder is that you don't have dozens of brawny mine veterans throttling their overseers when they come of age. Then again, in this particular scenario we should probably concede that the slave is someone special.

The ex-slave, Volkodav -- Wolfhound to us -- is the hero of a series of novels by Russian writer Maria Semyonova. He came to life on film in 2007, played by Aleksandr Bukharov in a movie directed by Nikolai Lebedev. From what I read, Russian readers recognized Semyonova's debt to Conan the Barbarian, or at least John Milius's movie version of the character, as soon as her books appeared. The Wolfhound movie opens Conan-style with Li'l Wolfhound watching his father forge a sword. The sword is promptly taken from Dad's cold, dead hands by a band of raiders, one of whom runs through Wolfhound's mom just to be mean. For some reason, the kid is spared for sale into slavery.

Aleksandr Bukarov as Wolfhound

We don't see how Wolfhound gets out of that predicament until much later in the picture. Lebedev saves that stuff for a flashback, maybe because Semyonova does it the same way, but probably in part because flashbacks are just what movies do. So the next time we see Wolfhound after his enslavement, he's a free (or fugitive) adult on a mission of vengeance against one of the men who killed his people, the charmingly named Man-Eater. Our hero kills his man and rescues a girl and a blind old man along the way. The old man is helpful because he knows heat-based healing magic, which he uses to mend up Wolfhound's beloved pet, the world's smartest bat.

Wolfhound has inadvertently tipped the balance of power in his world. Man-Eater had fallen out with his old partner and fellow-druid Zhaboda, a forbidding fellow in armor and what looks like an ape skull for a helmet. Each of these rivals hoped to release Morana the Deadly, an evil goddess, from her imprisonment in the faraway Celestial Gates. Zhaboda holds a trump-card with which he hopes to control the goddess: the magic sword forged by Wolfhound's father. Now, with Man-Eater out of the picture, Zhaboda can dream seriously of performing the ritual, which involves shedding the blood of a princess of Galirad, and gaining godlike power. Unfortunately, his band encounters Wolfhound while he's guarding his way to Galirad with a caravan, and the hero cuts off Zhaboda's sword hand, getting the sword in the bargain.

Zhaboda

Arriving in Galirad, Wolfhound gets involved in the usual intrigues and makes some more friends. The city is under a curse, condemned to suffer under a CGI cloudscape, but the curse may be lifted if Princess Elen -- who had been in the caravan incognito -- agrees to a marriage to Man-Eater's more reasonable son and heir, Vinitar. After clearing up some confusion over his identity -- some folks assume, given the sword, that he's Zhaboda -- and saving a wispy young priest from religous persecution, Wolfhound hires out as a bodyguard for the Princess as she travels to her wedding with Vinitar, while his pals head out for the Celestial Gates on some exploratory mission. They're captured by the bad guys, of course, and in time everyone ends up at the Gates for a battle on a stone bridge. Will they stop Zhaboda from releasing Morana the Deadly? Why would anyone want to stop that? What kind of ending would we have then?...

Galirad (pronounced "Golly-rod" by most of the English-language dubbing actors)

Wolfhound is a film that gets better as it goes along, but it doesn't really get good until more than halfway through, and the first hour or so is a tough slog. Saving the hero's self-liberation for a late flashback leaves you asking how he got free for most of the picture, and not knowing how he did it is actually kind of frustrating. It might have worked better if his whole past were shown in flashback and we were introduced to him as a bitter adult whose agenda is revealed a little at a time. A deeper problem is Lebedev's lack of skill as an action director. He's like a director of bad musicals, more interested in editing than in showcasing virtuosity on screen. Many of the fight scenes are cut up nearly to the point of incoherence. Then again, Bukharov may have simply lacked the virtuosity needed for decent fight choreography, making the editing necessary to cover his inadequacy. I've never seen the man before so I can only speculate, but I can say more certainly that the action scenes make the film nearly painful to watch until it finally hits its stride.

The last half -hour or so of the film, from the big flashback that finally answers our early question to Wolfhound's delirious battle with a goddess seen only as a maelstrom of boulders, is clearly where most of the budget and most of Lebedev's inventiveness went. It's wild fun on a primal level to see Wolfhound's sword transform into the world's longest light sabre so he can engage in cosmic-scale combat with Morana, and the effects mostly live up to the occasion.

Once I felt better about the film as a whole I could more fully appreciate some of the exotic, goofy details. Perhaps most exotic, and definitely most goofy, is Wolfhound's bat, a pet he's had since it injured a wing and fell into the young slave's mine. "Ragged Wing" ranks up there with Lassie and Trigger as an educated animal. In a pinch, it can grab a rock and drop it on an enemy's head. It can untie knots with its paws and free prisoners. It does everything but turn into a vampire, and I think my friend Wendigo would agree that Ragged Wing is the best bat effect of all time. I find it nearly impossible to dislike a movie with such a wonderful nutty element in it. For that reason, I recommend Wolfhound with reservations to fantasy fans. It advertises itself in America as some amalgam of Conan and Tolkien, but its idiosyncrasies are what make it worth a look.

Wendigo Meets FIANCEE OF DRACULA (2002)

Once again, Wendigo meets Dracula, and it should be a big moment, since this is the first time that Jean Rollin, the definitive director of French vampire films, has used Dracula in a movie. Unfortunately, though perhaps not surprisingly, Dracula is probably the weakest element in a film that's otherwise wild with weirdness and really quite entertaining. With vampires, insane nuns, cannibalism and a dwarf, how could it not be?

The concept of Dracula, as we've seen it handed down from Bram Stoker to generations of filmmakers, doesn't really seem to mean anything to Rollin. He brings nothing of Dracula's accumulated mythology to his story. Instead, the blandly handsome creature in the puffy shirt who seems to live in a grandfather clock is "the Master," worshipped by the "parallel people," the strange, happy-go-lucky evil folk who are the true protagonists of the picture. Wendigo sees Rollin's Dracula as little more than a Latin Lover in gothic trappings, that little more being something like the fairy-tale Beast whom Beauty must free from a curse.

Dracula is imprisoned in the clock, or else the clock is his only portal for communicating with the world, but he can be freed if the parallels can get him married off to Isabelle, the self-styled "Queen of the Sabbath," an attractively insane young woman in the custody of the Sisters of the White Virgin, an order of nuns who find her madness contagious. Their goal is to keep Dracula permanently imprisoned by keeping Isabelle confined in the convent. Presumably sharing their objective are a pair of, shall we say, parallel hunters, The Professor (a modestly imposing old dude) and Eric (a dolt with a Boltonesque shock of hair). We meet them as they watch the dwarf Thibaut,in his jester's uniform, summon the love of his life, "the Vampire Woman," from her tomb to drink some of his blood. Our hunters later interrogate a local madwoman, little suspecting that by night she is "the Ogress," a buxom baby-eating bitch. Dwarf, vampire and ogress are parallels dedicated to getting Isabelle out of the convent and out of the mad nuns' clutches. They're abetted by a couple of elderly witches who try to convince the nuns that Isabelle is their daughter. She may be for all we know.

"Are we there yet?" The Professor and Eric wait impatiently while the Dwarfmobile (below) races to get Isabelle to the crypt on time.

Isabelle manages to break out and is sped by midget-driven motorcycle to some of Rollin's typically picturesque ruins. Thibaut has brought a baby basket along with an offering for the Ogress, who gives them directions (between bites) to a grandfather clock through which Isabelle can communicate with Dracula with the help of "the She-Wolf" (Brigitte Lahaie), a tall lady in a red dress and press-on talons. The hunters have followed and manage to rescue some imprisoned nuns, whom the Professor entrusts to Eric with directions to take them to safety. The next thing we know the nuns are on their own, one gets her heart cut out by the witches, another succumbs to apoplexy after watching Lahaie swallow a Rosary, and another is bitten by a bare-assed Vampire Woman.

Above, a wounded Ogress -- Shrek never had it so good.
Below, the Butt of the Vampire.

Where's Eric? Why did he leave the nuns in peril? Search us, but he never does seem like the sharpest stake in the coffin. He does manage to shoot the Ogress (a marksman, he puts a hole in each breast) but she manages to recover by allowing the Vampire Woman to drink her blood. They're parallel people, so maybe things work backwards for them; if someone drinks your blood, you gain strength. Maybe we just shouldn't think about it. Instead, think back to that nun we left with her heart cut out. She gets better, sort of. The witches didn't have any particular use for her heart, so they left it sitting on her chest. When she comes to, she gets up, grabs the heart, wanders about the ruins for a bit before finding a fireplace she can throw it in. Well, she doesn't seem to need it, does she?

Heartburn

After the parallels went to all that trouble to get Isabelle out of the nuns' clutches, Dracula tells her that she has to turn herself back over to the White Virgins so they can perform a sacrifice to a local Beast. They'll think that doing so will seal Dracula's permanent imprisonment, but he tells Isabelle that going through the ordeal will actually bring her to the place where she can free him once and for all. But first, the parallels have to get her back from the hunters, who took her home amid all the confusion. The female witch heads over and utters the significant incantation of the picture: "The presbytery has not lost its charm, nor the garden its colors." It sounds like the sort of cryptic instruction the BBC used to give resistance fighters during World War II, but if you say it with just the right emphasis and hand gestures, you can knock Eric out cold. Honestly, it doesn't seem like that much is ever required to stop the poor man's brain. With him out of the way, the parallels pack her on a boat and send her to an island where the nuns have been sacrificing their own to the Beast for quite some time. They tie her to some ruined pilings at the water's edge, expecting the high tide to take her.

Talk to the hand, Isabelle, or talk to the water.

The hunters try to thwart the sacrifice, the Professor storming the scene with a gun while Eric is sent into catacombs to contemplate a chess game between skeletons in bishops' finery. The Prof can communicate with Eric telepathically, we now learn, which probably explains some of Eric's higher functions like driving, shooting and so on. Once the parallels do away with the Professor, Eric's on his own, which means wandering around the vicinity of the Clock Chamber in his natural state of confusion. Meanwhile, just when the tide should carry the diaphanously clad Isabelle away, she vanishes. This irks the nuns, who take their annoyance out on the parallels, who despite their various supernatural abilities are no match for angry women with knives. "Be careful!" Thibaut warns, "These nuns have gone totally berserk!" You know, as opposed to when they were only sacrificing their own and collecting the remains for religious relics. Be that as it may, his warnings are in vain, though while Dracula's parallel minions suffer at the hands of the sisters, Isabelle has made it to her crucial tryst with the Master, which happens just as Eric blunders into the chamber to complicate things, perhaps....

So we have Dracula, sort of, and we have a Vampire Woman (if not the Vampire Woman), but Wendigo deems Fiancee of Dracula less a vampire movie than a fantasy movie that happens to have vampires in it. In simplest terms, it's a Jean Rollin movie, taking place in the director's personal fantasy world. Vampirism as such isn't especially relevant to the story. Dracula does nothing vampiric, and the VW's vampiric behavior isn't exactly crucial. We're not dealing with vampires as cursed or evil monsters. They're really just magical creatures, parallels for the present purpose. Their blood drinking is exploited to kinky effect occasionally, but Fiancee isn't about the lust for blood by any stretch of the imagination. Wendigo's willing to believe that Rollin only used the Dracula name as exploitation, to play on people's diverse images of the legendary vampire.

Wendigo would rather call Fiancee a "dark fantasy," which was what folks read before there was "urban fantasy" or "paranormal romance" in bookstores. The fantasy here is definitely dark, and who the heroes are has nothing to do with goodness or virtue. After all, we're apparently supposed to be rooting for the parallel team, which includes a baby-eating cannibal, for crying out loud. She's no hero, of course, but the charisma is all with her and her pals. This is one of those stories where you have monsters, and then you have real monsters -- the nuns, and to a far lesser extent the hunters. You're invited to empathize with the hunted, the hated, -- "monsters to be pitied, monsters to be despised" as one writer put it. They can't help what they are and, as Wendigo observes, they never really seem mean spirited in their wickedness.

In a way, the parallel world is also the world of the fantastic literature Rollin read as a boy, invoked here like it was in his previous film, Two Orphan Vampires. Isabelle flaunts an old book called La Reine de Sabbat and the Ogress, under hypnosis, recites a litany of fantastic scenarios as the stuff of her dreams. The world of fantasy, of genre fiction overall, pervades our real world, and Rollin may be saying that, just as Isabelle's madness infected the nuns, he himself, through his films, is contaminating us with a similar fantastic madness. Wendigo and I agree that Rollin achieved a more powerful homage to his childhood influences here than in Two Orphans, which had a pretentious, last-testament quality to it that the director has thankfully outlived. The one key thing Fiancee has that Orphans lacks is a strong narrative thread. Rollin does more justice to the power of his fantasies when he makes a story from them rather than a collection of reveries. Orphans suffered in Wendigo's opinion from Rollin's casting of overaged actresses in the title roles; they often seemed retarded rather than childish to him. In Fiancee we're definitely dealing with adult women, and Rollin can dispense with the inhibition that had kept nudity to a minimum in Orphans.

Fiancee looks like a bigger production than Orphans because Rollin uses more locations. As ever, he has a great eye for ruins and relics, often coming up with striking compositions. Wendigo still prefers Rollin's mid-period, comparatively impersonal vampire films, Fascination and The Living Dead Girl, but Fiancee has a strong enough story to lead you through Rollin's world and leave you willing to accept what you see. Wendigo recommends Fiancee as an interesting, idiosyncratic dark fantasy that proves that Rollin can still tell a compelling tale.

For a while while watching the film, we wondered what the hell Rollin meant by "The presbytery has not lost its charm, nor the garden its colors." Wendigo will close for this week by suggesting that Rollin refers to the memories that persist after the presbytery has fallen into ruin and the garden loses its color. In simpler form, he could have said, "We'll always have Paris." At the end of Fiancee, Isabelle tells Eric that he won't be able to follow her until he learns the meaning of the cryptic phrase. She seems to be saying that Eric needs to learn to treasure both memory and fantasy while accepting change. She may also mean that Eric has to learn to go wild or mad in some way beyond his simple capacities for now. She says it all to him, but she's saying it to us as well. Wendigo is actually amazed that he came up with an interpretation for this gibberish. It may only prove him a good BS artist, but maybe he's got a little bit of the old madness himself.

In Brief: PERCY JACKSON AND THE OLYMPIANS: THE LIGHTNING THIEF (2010)

It's a Chris Columbus film, so it can't really aspire to be more than competent. In many ways, this adaptation of a popular children's book series is an utterly generic special effects fantasy. It certainly wears the Harry Potter influence most obviously in the concept of a training camp for demigods, though we learn very little about its rules and rituals from this would-be tentpole of a would-be series. The hero, I understand, has been aged from his original form so he could be sold as a hottie, and he is played by a blandly handsome young man. He's seconded by a blandly handsome young woman and a blandly humorous young black man, the latter perhaps unfortunately cast as a satyr. They could all have been more forceful (especially since the girl is supposed to be a mighty warrior) and funnier. Percy's early exasperation at the outlandishness of his situation is quickly set aside, and the movie suffers for it. There's a mystery, but the solution leaves a "who cares?" aftertaste since the ill-concealed villain of the piece is as bland as the heroes and declares his motivations as if reading a press release. If he's the "big bad" of all the books then I doubt I'll miss much if there are no more movies in this series.

I've described a pretty mediocre movie, and that's what The Lightning Thief is, but I hasten to add that, as a doorway to Greek mythology and a hint of its wonders, Columbus's movie hits the Clash of the Titans remake with both a lightning bolt and a water tower and dunks it in the river. Percy Jackson still falls short of the ideal in some respects; like Clash, it shows us the Olympian pantheon but neglects to identify most of them, and there's clearly an urge to make poor Hades a Bad Guy in a way he really wasn't in his own time. But in happy contrast to the "divinity sucks" attitude of the 2010 Clash, Percy is unashamed of indulging in fantasies of power and the heroic things that can be done with it. It may not be profound to observe that being a demigod could be cool, but if you're making a film with one as your hero you could draw worse conclusions, as has been proven this very year. I'll concede that Clash has the better action scenes, but without the right spirit encompassing them they aren't enough for me to recommend that miserable film. Whatever Lightning Thief lacks, it has the right spirit for the sort of story it wants to tell. I can state one thing for certain: this is not the worst film of 2010.

ASTROPIA (2007)

Our ongoing tour of the wild world of cinema takes us to Iceland, which presents a comedy that was the country's box-office champion of 2007. I don't know if it ever played theaters in the U.S., but Vanguard Cinema has taken a chance on the film in DVD form on the fairly safe assumption that its subject matter has some cross-border appeal. "Reminiscent of Clerks," says the box-cover blurb, if for no other reason than that the main character becomes a clerk at a comic-book store (for which the film is named) and falls in with its all-too knowledgable staff. That character is Hildur, whom the cover copy tries to sell as an Icelandic Paris Hilton. She looks the part but lacks the wealth. For her, the simple life becomes all too real when her car-salesman boyfriend is arrested on a racketeering charge. Her looks and her relationship with the suspect turn her into a media celebrity, but she hardly benefits from it. The Astropia store represents her last best hope for a job, and the management is so stunned by her mere presence that they hire her on the spot, with no questions asked, despite her near-total ignorance of comics, anime, RPGs, etc.

Hildur (Ragnhildur Steinunn Jonsdottir, above right, in her movie debut) travels a desperate career path from car dealership hostess to the door of Astropia (below, with Borg exiting).

Gunnar B. Gudmundsson's film stakes out its own territory when Hildur decides that she should learn about fantasy role playing in order to sell the product better. She discovers a dark, stuffy basement with the usual suspects diligently rolling dice and doing their character-development paperwork. She's handed a sheet and told that that's her character. The situation looks doomed from the beginning, but once the game master begins to narrate, the walls of the basement literally explode, immersing Hildur in a fantasy world. The writers prepared us for this by opening the film with another fantasy scene inspired by Hildur's reading of romance novels, one in particular with an Old West setting. She has an inner life and an imagination after all, and while she initially questions the conventions of D&D or whatever the gang is playing -- she never calls her character anything but "Hildur," for instance -- she gradually gets into the whole experience. It helps that she's starting to fall for another player, but she's also discovering her inner nerd, or if you prefer, her receptivity to new concepts and experiences. And that does make her a better salesman: she can move the product by telling laymen that it's "just like daydreaming, only with game rules."

But Astropia isn't finished yet. Hildur's old boyfriend breaks out of jail and takes the entire prison population with him. He wants a necklace he's left with Hildur; inside is a flash drive or something with Cayman Island bank account numbers and other goodies he needs. He and Hildur have grown estranged since his sentencing as she questions his constant demands (cigarettes, a blow-up doll, etc.) and finds her new life more congenial. But that doesn't stop Jolli, who kidnaps her with his new private army. One of the gamers has witnessed this, however, and calls for aid....and suddenly the real world becomes a fantasy landscape as the elf, dwarf, wizard, etc. ride to the rescue against the evil lord and his army of monsters. Our heroes use their powers and skills (which range from light saber combat to administering oversized wedgies) to rout the evil ones until it's down to Hildur and Jolli battling with swords and martial arts to decide the battle. And when it's over the Icelandic paparazzi arrive, and the scene shifts again to show a devastated real landscape of burning cars and escaped cons strewn along the street. Real havoc has been wrought -- don't ask me how -- and good has triumphed over evil.

There's something nearly Scorsesean about this absurd triumph of delusion over common sense; the finale somehow reminded me of the end of The King of Comedy, though the devastation it reveals is also just slightly reminiscent (albeit bloodlessly) of Taxi Driver, but I suppose there's less ambiguity about the truth of Hildur's triumph. It sounds ridiculous to invoke Scorsese while reviewing an Icelandic nerd comedy, but I calls 'em as I sees 'em. But maybe it's just me. In any event, don't get the wrong idea. Astropia isn't really a very good or very funny film. Most of its humor is based on Hildur's fish-out-of-water presence among the gamers, and on pop-culture name dropping. Before watching Astropia I never appreciated how much the comics-store culture is an American colonization of the world (allied with Japan), but the Icelandic nerds wear Star Trek costumes, read American comics and novels and recite Star Wars dialogue in English. These details unto themselves were probably funny for Icelandic audiences, but it'll probably leave American viewers shrugging off the thought that nerds are the same all over the world. That might make Astropia more accessible to Americans, but it might also make most of them question the point of looking at it. Gudmundsson and his writers had some interesting ideas, but in translation at least they lacked the wit and visual inventiveness to turn those ideas into a great comedy. I can only recommend it to people from the comics-RPG milieu with a sense of humor about themselves, and to people making a similar world tour to mine who can't find another Icelandic film....Or anyone who likes what they see in the American trailer, uploaded to YouTube by njd666