Tag Archives: Guy Ritchie

(Non) Super (Non) Direction

Posted on by

Superheroes are supposed to be amazing. They can leap tall buildings, run faster than a speeding whoosh, and see sights that no sighter has ever sighted.

And yet, on film, superheroes are, visually, banal.
 

 
That’s a little documentary about Kurosawa’s use of movement. At about 4:30, the video compares scenes from Joss Whedon’s the Avengers —and shows pretty definitively that Whedon does basically nothing with the camera, with his actors, or with his composition. The Avengers might be the world’s most powerful mortals, but Whedon films them with the dynamism of grey, flatulent paint (though I’m sure Kurosawa would film flatulent paint with panache, if he felt like it.)

Whedon is an unusually blah director, but superhero films in general aren’t known for their visual distinctiveness. Look at this sequence from Peyton Reed’s Ant-Man.
 

 
There’s some effort to promote visual interest there. The camera beings moving away from Ant-Man, and then flips so you’re moving towards Henry Pym and Hope. Once your close to Pym and Hope, the door slams, and then there’s a zoom towards the keyhole, followed by a shot back to Ant-Man, who races towards the door. The back and forth of the camera, from Scott to Pym to Scott to Pym, could be seen as mirroring the (humorously) repetitious failed attempts. And there’s a nice comic moment when you see him racing towards the door, and then the shot on the other side as he smashes against it, leaving his impact to your imagination.

But while the sequence is workmanlike enough, it’s not exactly impressive or memorable. The back and forth of the camera doesn’t feel especially regulated or meaningful. Notice the last shot of Ant-Man before we switch back to the door closing, for example. The camera is stationary; it’s no longer pulling away from him. the sense of motion is frittered away; the shot doesn’t add to the tension or the sense of motion. It just reminds you that Ant-Man is still standing there. Similarly, the first run at the door doesn’t really use the camera pacing to create suspense. Instead, after all the build-up, there are just a bunch of shots: moving in on the keyhole, cut to Ant-Man closing his mask with a flourish, then running, then watching him run through the keyhole, then a flash of blue, then the sound of impact. It’s haphazard and disjointed; there isn’t a clear rhythm or build, which means that there isn’t a sense of anticipation or failure. As a result, most of the work of the scene is up to the Foley artist, for the thud-into-the-door sound effect.
 

 
In contrast, the scene from Hitchock’s The Birds uses orchestrates shot/reverse shot movement to build suspense throughout. The cuts come quicker and quicker throughout the scene as the inevitable disaster looms, culminating in what are essentially freeze frame snapshots of Tippi Hedren’s horrified face as the explosion rips through Bodega Bay. And then of course there’s that marvelous move upwards to the bird’s eye view, looking down on the flames forming a slash across the city, with the bird’s squawking in triumph before they swoosh down to do more damage.

It’s kind of cruel to compare a couple of random big-budget hacks to Kurosawa and Hitchcock, obviously. But, on the other hand, Hitchcock, at least, was a Hollywood hack too; The Birds was a suspense picture that was meant for box office success (and did fairly well at that.) Given the buckets of money the studios throw at the Marvel films, it seems like they could find a director with rudimentary visual skill, if they wanted to.
 

 
Guy Ritchie’s not one of the all time greats of cinema or anything, but The Man from U.N.C.L.E. has some visual flair. I like the sequence at about :45 where the camera rushes in for a close up at the first car, then pulls back and in the same (presumably digitally enhanced take) rushes forward for a close up of the trailing car. It provides a nice sense of speed and urgency—again, not breathtaking, but fun—which is more than can be said for the direction in Avengers or Ant-Man.

Of course, Man From U.N.C.L.E. bombed, while Avengers and Ant-Man were mega-hits. The sameness of the Marvel films (and the fact that Daredevil, on television, is somewhat more visually adventurous) suggests deliberation. Marvel could have hired Guy Ritchie to direct one of their properties; they haven’t bothered because they figure boring is best. The direction is meant to be bland, because they figure (rightly or wrongly) that audiences wants superheroes who are bland. We want heroes, apparently, who are not too interesting, or surprising, or exciting. We want superadventures that keep to the superconventions.

Watching the Detectives

Posted on by

article-2106811-11EA7D18000005DC-621_634x752

 
Benedict Cumberbatch can’t throw a punch. At least not when he’s playing Sherlock Holmes. Khan in Star Trek into Darkness throws plenty of punches, but he’s a eugenically bred superman. Dr. Watson reports in A Study in Scarlet, Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes novel, that the “excessively lean” detective is “an expert singlestick player, boxer, and swordsman,” but we have to take his word on it.
 

sherlock-elementary-poll-2

 
I wouldn’t know what a “singlestick” is if not for Jonny Lee Miller’s portrayal of Holmes in the aggressively updated CBS series Elementary.  A singlestick, it turns out, is a stick you smack your opponent on the top of the head with. That’s what the BBC wanted to do to CBS when they heard the Americanized Holmes was premiering in 2012, because CBS had been in talks about producing a version of the BBC’s already aggressively updated Sherlock. But then the BBC would have to accept a head smack from Warner Bros. since Sherlock premiered a year after the 2009 Sherlock Holmes hit theaters.
 

downey sherlock

 
Sherlock is the bastard brainchild of two Dr. Who writers; Elementary midwife Robert Doherty cut his teeth on Star Trek: Voyager; and the Robert Downey Jr.’s Sherlock Holmes started life as a comic book that producer Lionel Wigman penned instead of the usual spec script. When director Guy Ritchie got his hands on it, he was thinking Batman Begins. The Marvel formula was succeeding at box offices by then too, so Holmes’ superpowered intellect would have to be “as much of a curse as it was a blessing.”

A young Holmes should have nixed the forty-something Mr. Downey, but who can say no to Iron Man? Especially when Ritchie planned to restore all of Doyle’s “intense action sequences” other adaptations left out. You know, like when Holmes sneaks aboard the bad guys’ boat in “The Solution of a Remarkable Case”:

“With a lightning-like movement he seized the hand which held the knife. Then, exerting all of his great strength, he bent the captain’s wrist quickly backward. There was a snap like the breaking of a pipe-stem, and a yell of pain from the captain. Nick’s left arm shot out and his fist landed with terrific force squarely on the fellow’s nose.”

Oh no, wait. That’s not Sherlock. That’s Nick Carter. I’ve been getting them confused lately, and I’m not the only one. Carter premiered as a 13-episode serial in New York Weekly in 1886, the year before A Study in Scarlet premiered in England’s Beeton’s Christmas Annual. Carter was created by John R. Coryell and Ormond G. Smith, but Street & Smith (future publisher of the Shadow and Doc Savage) hired Frederick Van Rensselaer Dey to write over a thousand anonymous dime novels between 1891 and 1915 when Nick Carter Weekly changed to Detective Story Magazine.

nick_carter_dime novel

Doyle wrote a mere four novels and 56 short stories, with the rare “action sequence” lasting about a sentence: “He flew at me with a knife, and I had to grasp him twice, and got a cut over the knuckles, before I had the upper hand of him.”New York Times film reviewer A. O. Scott labels Holmes a “proto-superhero,” one who’s “never been much for physical violence,” crediting the Downey incarnation for the innovation of making the detective “a brawling, head-butting, fist-in-the-gut, knee-in-the-groin action hero” (what one commenter called “The precise opposite of Sherlock Holmes”). The film opens with Downey in a bare-knuckled boxing match, displaying the skills Doyle only hints at. Apparently Holmes once went three rounds with a prize-fighter who tells him, “Ah, you’re one that has wasted your gifts, you have! You might have aimed high, if you had joined the fancy.”

Nick Carter, on the other hand, has the fancy: “He bounded forward and seized in an iron grasp the man whom he had just struck. Then, raising him from the floor as though he were a babe, the detective hurled him bodily, straight at the now advancing men.” Yes, in addition to all of Holmes’ sleuthing powers, Carter has superhuman strength. And a bit of a temper—the secret ingredient American producers feel is missing from all those stodgy British incarnations.

Jonny Lee Miller’s Holmes doesn’t hurl men like babes, but he has broken a finger or two sucker punching serial killers. The leap over the Atlantic has made the Elementary detective’s passions more violent than his London predecessors. He also has a tendency to wander onto screen shirtless, displaying tattoos and a well-curated physique. His drug problems seems to be a carry-over from his Trainspotting days, which means the English accent is as authentic as Cumberbatch’s. In fact, Miller and his BBC counterpart co-starred in a London production of Frankenstein in 2011. You’ll never guess who played the doctor and who the monster. Literally, you’ll never guess—because Miller and Cumberbatch swapped parts nightly. Mr. Downey was busy completing the sequel Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, and so was not available for matinees.

Jonny-Lee-Miller-and-Bene-007

Plans for a Sherlock Holmes 3 have been in talks too, but Downey was busy with Avengers, Iron Man 3 and now Avengers 2. Why settle for a proto-superhero when you can play a real one? At least the long-delayed season 3 of Sherlock finally arrived. It was perfectly fun watching a barefoot and CGI-shrunken Martin Freeman chat with Cumberbatch’s growly dragon in Hobbit 2, but nothing beats the Holmes-Watson bromance—a delight the otherwise delightful Jude Law and Lucy Liu can’t quite deliver with their Frankenstein partners. Sherlock is also the last show my family still watches as a family, so I don’t mind the BBC cauterizing the Nick Carterization of the character.

Of course Nick has evolved since the 19th century too: a 30s pulp run, a 40s radio show, a 60s book series. I have the anonymously written Nick Carter: The Redolmo Affair on my shelf. It’s a musty James Bond knock-off I found in a vacation house and kept in exchange for whatever I was reading at the time. I can’t bring myself to flip more than a few pages:  “I streamrollered my shoulder into his gut and sent us both crashing to the deck. I got my hands on his throat and started squeezing. His fist was smashing down on my head, hammering into my skull.”

In Nick’s defense, Doyle considered Sherlock Holmes schlock too. He hurled him over a cliff so he could stop writing his character—but the detective keeps bouncing back. Elementary is certain to be renewed for a third season, and the Sherlock season 3 finale is a cliffhanger with the next two seasons already plotted. The biggest mystery is how they’ll keep Cumberbatch out of a boxing ring.

bbc-sherlock1

elementary-sherlok-holmes

2009sherlockholmes3

Luck of the Assholes

Posted on by

Both Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) and True Romance (1993) end in flamboyant, modern deus ex machinas. By “modern” I mean that there’s no god cranked down on a wince. Instead, salvation is attained through the entirely materialist force of dumb luck, also known as the scriptwriters finger on the scales. In Lock, Stock, director Guy Ritchie’s four bumbling lads stumble into wealth when about a billion other tougher, badder, smarter armed factions all happen to conveniently shoot each other, leaving our heroes as the only ones standing. In True Romance, director Tony Scott and writer Quentin Tarantino’s bumbling couple stumble into wealth when about a billion other tougher, badder, smarter armed factions all happen to conveniently shoot each other, leaving our heroes as the only ones standing.

In both films, the unlikely denoument is intended to be a tour de force; you’re supposed to admire the intricate mechanism of the plot just as, perhaps, the ancient Greeks admired that intricate mechanism which dropped the God onto the proscenium. And by that measure, at least, both films succeed; their narratives are energetically and pleasingly tangled. A plethora of bit characters — Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper in True Romance, Vinnie Jones and Lenny McLean in Lock, Stock — roll about amidst the strands like profane kittens ingratiatingly farting. It’s maybe a little too cute, but overall not a bad way to kill a couple of hours.

In both films, though, one thing rankled. I was meant to like these people. As a viewer, I’m supposed to be rooting that Guy Ritchie’s four bozos don’t have their fingers chopped off, and that Sting (playing a sympathetically tough working-class dad to one of said four bozos) doesn’t lose his sympathetically tough working-class bar. I’m supposed to cheer because Christian Slater’s movie-star-tough-guy dreams all more or less come true rather than ending in a hail of bullets and a pool of his own blood. Plus he gets to bang Patricia Arquette for all eternity, or thereabouts. Yay!

Unfortunately, there’s been a slight miscalculation — that being that there’s nothing remotely likable about any of these characters. Guy Ritchie tries rather desperately to distinguish his four young boneheads one from the other or, indeed, from anyone, by giving hiply incongruous voice over tidbits about each one. It’s nice to see him try, but the main effect is not to make you like the characters, but rather to make you wonder why the so enthusiastically declaimed personality quirks don’t actually figure into the film anywhere else. For example, Eddie (is his name Eddie? oh, who the fuck cares) is supposed to be incredibly good at reading people — but he never reads anyone that I can tell. He just pals around with his pals and fucks up and gets into trouble and then gets out by screwing other people over and then gets really drunk, which is supposed to be endearing. He’s not even an irritating loser; he’s a hollow trope posing as an irritating loser.

Christian Slater (is his name Vince in the film? again, I refuse to care) is a bit more complicated. He’s a comic store clerk and an exploitation film freak — he tries to pick up a girl by asking her to a Sonny Chiba marathon; on his first date with Arquette (Alabama; I remember her name) he reads to her from some Spider-Man comics. He’s a nerd and a geek; eccentric and kind of sweet.

Supposedly. I think it may have worked in Tarantino’s original script. However, thanks to the direction by Tony Scott and a flat, unmotivated performance by Slater, the geek eccentricity never coheres. Instead, Slater quickly moves from loving fictional violent heroics to engaging in successful violent heroics himself — shooting pimps, stealing cocaine, screwing a movie star, and generally behaving like a movie star himself. Tarantino’s writing undercuts the heroism — Slater leaves his driver’s license at the scene where he killed the pimp, and his stupidity causes the death of his own father. But Scott and Slater are too dense to hear what Tarantino’s telling them; neither Slater nor the film ever realize that what’s interesting about Vince (or whoever) is not that he’s the star of the film, but that he isn’t.

For Tarantino, I think, Slater’s a fuck-up trying to be the hero he’s seen on film and failing. That’s a sympathetic and interesting character…and you’d have cared when he died, as he did in Tarantino’s original script. But the Slater we get instead is just another tough guy whose mistakes are never brought home to him, both in the sense that he doesn’t ever get to integrate them into his character and in the sense that he doesn’t suffer from them. Patricia Arquette is a more charismatic actor by far, and she is able to capture more of the vulnerability in Tarantino’s script even as she beats a mafia boss to death. But the happy ending, and the general drift of the direction, undoes her as well — her individuality is crafted in the teeth of the rest of the film, and the storybook happy ending cheerfully undoes her efforts, turning her into the beneficiary/victim of yet another Hollywood romance.

The protagonists in both these films, then, are heroes not because of anything they do or anything they are, but just because they’re there. They’re the young white guys on the marquee; God (or the director) loves them, and the world is organized for their benefit. There’s a depressing verity to that; the world really is in many ways organized for the benefit of young, stupid, boring white guys, especially if they’re attractive movie stars. But having that driven home in as gratuitous a fashion as possible is not quite the happy ending that the directors seem to think it should be.
________________
I was thinking about these films in relation to the new Green Lantern movie — which I blissfully haven’t seen, though I’ve read Jog’s review, which is undoubtedly more entertaining as well as more informative. Anyway…I was thinking that a superhero’s real power isn’t super strength or super speed or a magic wishing ring, but unearned luck courtesy of some overinvested creator. In Lock, Stock and True Romance, the luck is backloaded; it comes in at the end after lots of plot manipulation. In superhero stories, it’s frontloaded — being bitten by a radioactive spider gives you amazing strength rather than cancer; having a shelf-full of chemicals fall on you gives you superspeed rather than chemical burns; you’re chosen out of everyone on earth because you’re a showboating dipshit, etc. etc. But backloaded or frontloaded, the power of luck works the same — providing both the mechanism for victory and the supposed justification of it. Hal Jordan is the hero because he’s chosen to have the ring, and he’s chosen to have the ring because he’s the hero. The logic is, appropriately, perfectly circular.

Superheroes are generally seen as power fantasies…and obviously, they are that. But Lock, Stock and True Romance suggest another possibility too…which is that the power fantasies are closer to real life than might be altogether comfortable. Those (mostly) Western (mostly) white (mostly) guys who generally get to be superheroes…in real life, they really can wave their hands and destroy large portions of Afghanistan, just like Iron Man. They really can display some mystic green and bury themselves in ephemeral glowing toys. The fantasy isn’t the power so much as the adulation — the assurance that the luck is earned and that the whole world loves to be grist for the remorseless grinding of someone else’s plot.