Polar Express Panned

Submitted by jim on Wed, 11/10/2004 - 11:33
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I would like to join the cinetrix in applauding this passage (emphasis added):

Tots surely won't recognize that Santa's big entrance in front of the throngs of frenzied elves and awe-struck children directly evokes, however unconsciously, one of Hitler's Nuremberg rally entrances in Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will." But their parents may marvel that when Santa's big red sack of toys is hoisted from factory floor to sleigh it resembles nothing so much as an airborne scrotum.

... from Manohla Dargis' NY Times review. And she manages to take a potshot at George Lucas while she's at it, so by all means, click through!

0dysseus11/16/2004

I thought about promulgating this review under the heading "Santa's Got a Brand New Bag." Or possibly "Squeezing the Christmas Out of Tom Hanks."

If you don't already know it, you're gonna love Ms. Dargis. The Grey Lady is certainly psyched to get their hands on her now that Elvis Mitchell has gone over to the dark side... and she doesn't even have to leave her L.A. castle.

She's become a great swashbuckler and has her priorities straight. Her jousting skills are impressive and can often be breath-taking. Plus, she pulls out the mace and hits it home more often then most. Here's part of the crown dashing that she bestowed upon King Arthur :

"Set in the rolling British wilds (i.e., Ireland)... an imperial soldier has led a brotherhood of knights in support of Rome and against rebelling British tribes. Led by Merlin (Stephen Dillane), these proto-hippies live al fresco in the woods and seem to be graduates of the Mel Gibson Academy of Extreme Performance, where they apparently majored in howls and body paint. Now with Rome in retreat, the knights and tree-huggers will find common cause in the big, bad, blond to the bone Saxon invaders, newly arrived from Germany and led by Cerdic the Entertainer (Stellan Skarsgard).

"A nutty, often enjoyable farrago of craft and cinematic sampling, "King Arthur" moves fast and loose, and is almost aggressive in its absence of an original idea, in and of itself a Bruckheimer trademark. The choral-infused soundtrack echoes the day-spa mewling of Enya a la "Gladiator"; an aerial view of the knights trudging across a mountain pass directly echoes a similar image in "Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring." A field littered with dead combatants is, inevitably, shot from on high as if from the point of view of a disproving god, a panorama of death recycled since at least "Gone With the Wind." When the tree-huggers race through the woods, director Antoine Fuqua and cinematographer Slawomir Idziak appear to be conjuring up "The Last of the Mohicans" albeit without the brilliance."

She's also taken her rapier wit to the Dread Spielberg, popped him open and showed him his own blinking silicon entrails.

So thank Tony Scott. This is going to enchant his already considerable skills and he'll play a fine Gabrielle to Dargis' Xena. Together they're going to punch up the entire NYTimes movie section.

Aiaiaieee!

jim11/16/2004

I'm new to Ms. Dargis, but so far I'm not at all upset that Elvis has left the building. That AI/Speilberg piece isn't a complete evisceration though:

Spielberg’s infidelity to Aldiss (and perhaps to Kubrick, who knows?) would be pardonable if it didn’t ruin his movie. In the end, he has failed to make a persuasive, smart movie about robots and people because he can’t bear the idea that human beings are imperfect, that they abandon their children, that they break minds and bodies, sometimes for sport. There’s an excruciating scene in A.I., in which Monica leaves David in the woods, that gets at everything great and terrible about this movie. The scene is important on a number of counts — it shifts the film’s look from its dreamy naturalism to a nightmarish surrealism, and combines Kubrick’s aesthetic of cruelty and Spielberg’s aesthetic of bathos into a single devastating encounter. At that moment, as David screams out that primal, defining fear — Mommy, don’t leave me! — Spielberg doesn’t just terrify us, he peels back our skin. Few other directors have the power to move us so effectively, so viciously, and it’s a good guess that if Kubrick thought Spielberg could take on his project, it was because he saw the total control with which the younger man could not just manipulate our emotions, but force us to weep. Time and again with Spielberg, sentimentality is nothing other than a polite form of sadism.

And hey, I liked that movie (and liked Minority Report even better)!

0dysseus02/11/2005

It looks to me as if Gabrielle (aka A.O. "Toby or not Toby" Scott) has raised his game... or at least gotten rid of the Hitch in his swing.

I actually think that Manohla has put the "dis" in "disembowels the Dread Spielberg." Serving the sentences consecutively: "...pardonable if it didn't ruin his movie." "In the end he has failed..." "There's an excruciating scene... that gets at everything... terrible about this movie." [actually, those could be positive words] "...aesthetic of bathos..." "...he peels back our skin." [those are certainly positive words] "Few other directors have the power to move us... so viciously... manipulate our emotions... force us to weep." "...with Spielberg, sentimentality is nothing other than a polite form of sadism." I interpret that not as an attack on the movie itself, but as a shank you very much to the Dread Spielberg.