As I briefly mentioned ages ago, one could hardly call me a fan of these movies. The first two were utter failures--Chris Columbus's direction was awful. Maybe kids enjoyed them, but there was nothing in them for adults, and I was of legal drinking age when TSLF dragged me to the first one. Once Alfonso Cuarón took the reins in The Prisoner of Azkaban, the series was rebranded. Cuarón's successors, Mike Newell and especially David Yates, have continued on following his example, and the results have been mostly good. Yes, the series is still a bit hokey at times, but it has gotten slightly more adult as the characters have aged.
Now, as I mentioned in the aforelinked article, TSLF had some concerns upon finding out that the final installment of the series was being split into two parts. The primary concern lied with the fact that nothing happens in the first half of the last book*. If the final book were to be split in to, it would stand to reason that it would be split roughly in the middle. What does that mean for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1?
*For the record, I have not nor do I intend to read any of the books. I have bigger fish to fry.
Longest.
Camping movie.
Ever.
So for 153 minutes of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and now 146 minutes of The Deathly Hallows: Part 1 essentially nothing has happened. Think of it like a really long Empire Strikes Back. Now as we all know, that doesn't equate to it being bad necessarily. In the case of Empire, much of its worth is tied directly to the fact that George Lucas's involvement in the film did not include either a screenwriting or directing credit, but that doesn't mean that it isn't similar in spirit to this film. Both are penultimate build-ups to what should be a huge ending. Fortunately, there will be no goddamn Ewoks in Part 2. Unfortunately, no gold bikini, unless I'm reading this series entirely incorrectly.
As for the cast, well, we all know what they're bringing to the table. Daniel Radcliffe brings this...
Emma Watson is cute and pulls off bookish well. The kid (or dude, now, I guess) who plays Ron* does that thing that he does.
*His name--and yes, I had to check the credits for this--is Rupert Grint.
And it's all fine and good.
It's just nothing really happens. If you go to movies as much as I do, this probably won't bother you too much. In an eight-film series, 299 minutes isn't really that much time in which nothing happens. Hell, nothing really happened in the entire second season of Lost.
Now, if the ultimate installment, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 blows ass, then you'll be dealing with a camper almost as unhappy as Peter Johansen after the finale of BSG, but until then I'm willing to allow for this to have been the longest camping movie ever.
For me to not be irritated at the fact that not much happened meant that Yates & Co. pulled off what they aimed for. Some of the best movies ever (Rear Window comes to mind) have virtually nothing happen and succeed because of the masterful building tension. Deathly Hallows One is no Rear Window, but for the most part it works in spite of the fact that very little happens. In that regard, kudos, David Yates. Kudos.
Weird Side Note: I was totally weirded out by the fact that the only song on the soundtrack was "O Children" by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. I bet he never thought that a bunch of nerdy kids who love magic were going to discover his music via the Harry Potter franchise.
I guess the good thing about not having an opportunity to write anything of substance for a week or so is that when I do get a chance to write something, I have more than one thing that I could tackle.
First on the IP agenda is a reflection on the new Alex Proyas film--oh, who am I kidding--the new Nicolas Cage star vehicle Knowing. Now, any reader of this blog knows of my Nic Cage fandom, of my adoration of his more recent decisions to simply make the movies he wants to make while giving little thought to how these decisions will further his career/profile. This means Cage is generally doing films that aren't simply pandering for Oscars. It also means he's doing schlockier films that I would generally rather see than bullshit like Doubt or The Reader or Atonement.
Knowing finds Cage teaming with Alex Proyas, director of The Crow and Dark City, for an overtly religious* apocalyptic film. Luckily, the audience is treated to a Nic Cage movie with a large budget, meaning that Nic Cage's movie selection skills are then augmented by money--a great thing, if you ask me.
*As a, well, less than religious person, I am honestly not that bothered by a little religion in the media I am consuming. After all, I was raised by an ordained Presbyterian minister (and Presbyterians require their ministers to go to seminary).
I love Seven Swans, the Sufjan Stevens Christian record. There is a lot of religion to be found in the works of Dylan, Springsteen, Cash, and many other prominent musicians. The Indiana Jones franchise has certainly veered into the religious, and IJ: KOCS** notwithstanding they were all pretty damned entertaining. That being said, most material that errs toward being overtly religious is made for a religious audience, which frankly makes most of it unwatchable. There is a fine line between using the tradition and history of religion to add depth and richness to a story and using a story to disseminate religious propaganda.
**Holy shit. How fucking terrible was IJ:KOCS? Seriously. I urge everyone to see it (but for God's sake, do not pay for that privilege), just to see how fucking awful Lucas and Spielberg have become. Remember when they didn't make movies that were a) fun, and b) not retarded? What happened?
From here on out, I am going to be going into the realm of the revelatory, so beware of spoilers. Knowing, if you weren't aware, is about a professor in astrophysics at MIT, Dr. John Koestler, who has recently lost his wife (as we discover a little later in the movie) in a hotel fire. Having lost his way, he has become detached from nearly everything, holding fast to the belief (in his grief) that there is no meaning to anything. The only thing that brings him out of his depression is a drunken delving in to a series of numbers his son got from an unearthed time capsule. He finds that the numbers predicted every disaster for the previous 50 years, with three events remaining on the list.
As he finds himself (by chance) at the site of the first of the three remaining predicted catastophies, the numbers are validated.
In this first event, Nic, er, John sits in an accident-caused traffic jam and realizes that the numbers following event dates and death tolls are latitudes and longitudes and the next one is directly where he's sitting. As he gets out of his truck to inspect the accident scene, presumably suspecting that the pile up is the disastrous event, a plane comes screaming from the sky and a wing rips through the rain-soaked highway directly behind our hero. What follows is an especially intense tracking shot with John Koestler rushing to the wreckage, surviving passengers and fuselage both afire. Objectively (read: Cage fandom withheld), this scene works very well and sets the bar pretty high.
As the film dives deeper into the significance of the numbers, there is the introduction of the Aryan Child Whisperers. If there is one thing Proyas brought with him from Dark City, it is the creepy otherworldly entity. The others in Knowing clearly owe a bit to Village of the Damnedand a bit to Dark City. They are basically the poster children of the Aryan ideal in trench coats who whisper telepathically to children. It is a little fucked up if you think about it. As I imagined it in the theater, they were what became of the Nazi super soldiers, complete with the powers of telepathic communication, control of others' willpower, and emittance of blinding light from their mouths. Oh, and until the end, you think they might be pedophiles*.
*Courtesy of "The I.T. Crowd":
It turns out the Aryan Child Whisperers are just guardian angels/aliens (they eventually shed their earthly forms to become buff, incandescent prototypical bipedal aliens, insinuating that aliens are actually angels, which is a semi-interesting marriage of the two), and the final seemingly incomplete sequence of numbers is that way precisely because--as Professor Koestler pieces together--the entire world is about to get wiped out by a solar flare.
In between the plane crash and the solar flare realization, there is also a screechingly violent subway wreck sequence in New York that should be recognized at least for the effectiveness of the spectacle on the big screen with maxed out decibel levels.
Back to the apocalypse, wanting to investigate a mother's prescience (her mother, Lucinda, was the one who wrote the numbers on the sheet in the time capsule), John seeks out Diana Wayland (played by Rose Byrne) in his quest for answers, and Diana's daughter, Abbey*, turns out to be another target of the Child Whisperers. At first, Diana pushes John away, but after the New York incident, she turns up at his stoop.
*How the hell did the casting director find a little girl who I joked in jest was Rose Byrne's younger self before I knew Rose Byrne was in the film? Good work.
Now, this is a PG-13 movie (despite the disturbing people on fire and fairly graphic subway sequence), but the night before the end of the world, each parent finds him/herself comforting their child rather than finding warmth with one another, which I guess is plausible, but that is not where my mind went. If I'm John Koestler, I'm totally doing working the "Hey, it's the end of the world..." angle on Diana Wayland.
But I digress.
As they prepare to leave for a cave, something strikes John. Diana decides they cannot wait, and takes the kids, just as John finds that the location that was cut off was the site of Diana's mother's trailer. Then, when Diana stops for gas to make it to the cave, the Aryan Child Whisperers become Aryan Child-Whispering Kidnappers. Diana dies in a fairly violent car crash whilst in pursuit of the Child Whisperers, just as her maternal shrieking reaches a breaking point.
What follows is an odd Noah's ark space sequence, with each of the kids carrying a pair of rabbits on board the alien space ship, where they are going to reboot humankind, presumably by procreating in the manner of the animals they carry with them, and the children play on a planet that looks like a meadow in Scotland with the Tree of Life atop a hill, as other ships drop off their chosen. Meanwhile, EARTH GETS WIPED OUT BY THE SOLAR FLARE. Everyone fucking dies, including John Koestler, who returns to his estranged parents' home. The entire planet is wiped out. No one saves the day by blowing up the sun--well, obviously that wouldn't work because the whole world would blow up, but this is a fucking movie and they usually blow up the asteroid/comet that's going to kill Earth. Everyone fucking dies, but there's a sci-fi Noah's Ark scenario which is not exactly what I was suspecting.
Now, if only I could get the other part of the movie with the kids who get to carry bears with them on their space ark...
P.S. Fuck the joyless film critics who don't get the appeal of Neo-Cage and want their movies to make sense.
One might think that when a group of men wait nearly 20 years for the right script to come along before they make a fourth installment in a much loved series that the end product should at the very least have a good script. Were one to operate on that assumption one would be giving the men behind some of the more entertaining films of the last 40 years too much credit because the newest Indiana Jones film is not very good and much of the film's shortcomings stem from its (to be kind) weak script.
For starters, this film is basically the combined plots of National Treasure Book of Secrets and The Last Crusade with a few of the sets looking like they probably just repainted the old National Treasure sets just for good measure. The dialogue is shockingly bad, devoid of any wit whatsoever, and was apparently written under the idea that their entire audience was going to actually be developmentally disabled adults. Following the crew's final escape to safety, Indy actually says, "Knowledge was their gift. Their gift was knowledge." I think I'd rather hear the pimp line from Southland Tales another three times than phoned in dialogue like that.
Apart from the completely cribbed plot, they also made the decision to incorporate an absolutely retarded alien plot line that was simply baffling. Not baffling in the way that the plot was just too complex for my feeble mind to comprehend it. Baffling in the way that I had no idea why the fuck it was even there. It was completely out of place in the series and, honestly, has no place in the genre. Seriously, if I had told you that the newest Indiana Jones flick was going to have aliens, you'd have punched me in the junk. Hard. There are fucking aliens in the new Indiana Jones movie. What the fuck?
Shit script aside, there really isn't a lot to like about this film. Shia LaBeouf did what he could with a crap role loaded with cliche-ridden, greaser dialogue. Cate Blanchett's hair looked good. There's something about Ray Winstone I generally like, I guess.
Back to the garbage...
The special effects are terrible. There are inserts of CGI animals in the opening that look comically bad. Their effects during the intra-jeep sword fight are cartoonish at best. Indy getting hurled somewhere in the vicinity of a mile inside a refrigerator (and getting out immediately without any problems at all) in a nuclear blast was both unrealistic and unbelievable.
I could keep going. I could complain about the lame wedding and the hat blowing to Mutt's feet with a heavy-handed opening for a spin-off. I could elaborate on a bunch of things that left me wanting, but Spielberg and Lucas have worn me out. I don't want to spend any more energy (read: time and/or money) on them.
