Author: Chris McCoy

As anyone who has ever seen stock footage from World War II knows, living in London during the Blitz was very bad. It was not quite as bad as living in Berlin or Tokyo a few years later, but it was still very bad. Most of the population huddled in cellars and underground stations. A lucky few got to huddle in the Windmill Theater, where they could enjoy vaudeville and naked girls as the Nazis demolished their city from the air. It was, apparently, a very important part of the war effort, or so Mrs. Henderson Presents would have us believe.

Judi Dench has been nominated for an Academy Award for her performance as the title character, who, despite being tempted a couple of times, always remains fully clothed. When the movie opens, Mrs. Henderson has just lost her husband, and we soon find out that her only son was killed in the Great War and is buried in a military graveyard in France.

Unimpressed with the options available to proper aristocratic widows of the time, Mrs. Henderson decides to buy a derelict East End theater and hire crusty stage veteran Vivan Van Damn (Bob Hoskins) to run the place. After early success stemming from their decision to run five shows a day instead of the customary two, the theater falls on hard times. Mrs. Henderson rightly surmises that naked dancing girls will help put asses in seats again, an idea she shares with this film’s producers. To get the proper permits, she charms the stodgy Lord Cromer, played by the excellent Christopher Guest, who seems a little relieved to not be directing for a change. The catch is, the girls have to remain still as statues. The reaction of Depression-era Londoners to this new thespian frontier is captured by Henderson’s friend Lady Conway (Thelma Barlow), who exclaims, “Nudity! In England!” It is in this middle section of the picture where the prickly chemistry between Hoskins and Dench gets cooking, and for about a half hour the movie’s charms shine through. But then the war starts, stock footage of burning London rolls, and an episode of Masterpiece Theatre breaks out.

Mrs. Henderson Presents isn’t a bad film, it’s just lazily by-the-numbers. Director Stephen Frears never comes close to the highs of past successes like The Grifters and High Fidelity. At age 75, Dench still has plenty of charisma and a wicked sense of comic timing, but you can’t win an Oscar by just being funny, so the third act gives us serious speechifying and forced pathos, smothering what could have been a pleasant little vaudeville romp. Like the naked girls on stage, Mrs. Henderson Presents is never allowed to dance.

Mrs. Henderson Presents

Now playing

Peter Jackson is a man who appreciates architecture. From Helm’s Deep’s ancient keep to Minias Tirath thrusting from the mountain like the prow of a great ship, the director can’t resist swooping his camera to take in the walls and the scrollwork on the columns. His films have become architectural too: huge edifices whose crushing weight is inseparable from their terrible beauty. But Jackson is also the guy who made Bad Taste, a comically bloody movie about aliens who eat people as fast food. His roots are in horror, specifically the low-budget, high-body-count variety. It makes sense, therefore, that he’s always wanted to make King Kong, a movie where a giant, destructive monster meets his demise atop one of the crowning achievements of American architecture, the Empire State Building.

King Kong is also a movie about making a movie. Carl Denham (Jack Black) starts out trying to make an adventure film and ends up unleashing a giant ape on New York City. Black’s Denham used to be a successful filmmaker, but the studio wants to sell his new picture to be used as stock footage. He is so monomaniacal that he’ll lie, steal, and endanger other people’s lives to finish his film.

After the amazing financial success of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Jackson was paid a record $20 million to direct his dream project and then turned around and sank most of it back into the project to cover budget overruns. It is clear that he has as heavy an emotional investment in King Kong as he does a financial one, because he takes what could have been a well-compensated victory lap and makes an instant classic bursting with life and energy.

Black’s performance is a revelation. He has the kind of control over his face and body that a great actor must have. He just usually uses it to get a cheap laugh. Here he uses it to draw a complex character that goes beyond the original version’s well-meaning huckster. But he may have had the advantage of direct access to his subject. Early reviewers have compared Black’s take on Denham with Orson Welles, but Black is playing Peter Jackson. The director is living his dream of inserting himself into his all-time favorite movie. King Kong is such a dizzying trip because Jackson is along with us for the ride. When Black’s character announces to a Broadway crowd, “I am actually laying my hands on a 25-foot gorilla,” it is Jackson announcing his intentions to the movie house.

Most movies about making movies are ultimately kind of hollow, perhaps because the process is not as interesting as the product. But Jackson shows you exactly why he loves making movies by delivering the kind of incredible set pieces and action sequences not seen since Raiders of the Lost Ark. Mr. Bad Taste comes out in a scene on Skull Island where the party who set out to rescue Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) is attacked by a hideous variety of overgrown insects and huge phallic worms. Soon after, he gets one of the movie’s biggest scares by menacing his heroine with a millipede. In 1933, Kong fought a Tyrannosaurs Rex. In 2005, he fights three of them while juggling a screaming girl between his hands and feet.

Watt’s Darrow is also deeper than Fay Wray’s scream machine. She’s a struggling vaudevillian brave enough to tame a giant ape by doing pratfalls and walking like an Egyptian. The relationship between Darrow and Kong is not, as in the original, a strangely sexual one. It is more like the relationship between a person and pet, only in this case, it’s difficult to tell which one is the pet.

But the star of monster movies is always the monster. Based on a meticulous physical performance by Andy Serkis, this Kong is the standard by which all future computer-generated characters will be measured. He may not be as scary as the original, but he is more believable and more simian, both in movement and temperament. This is a Kong who enjoys watching sunsets and chases an Adrian Brody-driven Yellow cab through the streets of New York City like a cat playing with a Roomba.

Brody plays Jack Driscoll, a screenwriter shanghaied by Denham for the trip to Skull Island who becomes Darrow’s human love interest. Brody does the put-upon writer with Black pretty well, but when he and Watts are on-screen together, the sparks are only flying from her. When Driscoll leaves the rescue party behind to go after Darrow alone, he doesn’t seem to be doing it for any other reason than to advance the plot.

King Kong isn’t flawless. There’s no doubt it’s too long. As in Return of the King, Jackson uses an awful lot of slow motion for a three-hour movie. Sometimes, when he is particularly impressed with a set or monster, he’ll show three different angles where one would suffice. A subplot with a young sailor reading Heart of Darkness feels forced and corny, even for a film as proudly cheesy as this. The soundtrack never really equals the grandeur on the screen. But these are minor quibbles. By adapting the ur-text for all special-effects-based action movies, Jackson is trying to take plot out of the equation. He hangs baroque variations of movement and sound on the spare framework of the Kong story and has a rip-roaring good time doing it. In an era of reduced expectations, King Kong is one movie where everyone, studio and audience, gets their money’s worth.

King Kong Now Playing

Rent takes place in the New York City of myth. A place where archetypes run free. Where well-scrubbed people of different ethnicities and sexual orientations get along just fine, thank you very much, until the outsiders come in and mess everything up. A place where everyone has AIDS but no one seems very sick. A place where, when bar tables are pulled together, someone — probably several someones — is going to dance on them. A place where beautiful young people proclaim their love with white cornflake snow in their hair. A place where junkies mournfully shoot up in gloriously back-lit alleys. A place that kind of looks likes Streets of Fire. It is, in short, the New York that the middle of the country believes in. And that’s director Chris Columbus’ target audience for this film adaptation of the long-running Broadway musical, which was itself an adaptation of Puccini’s La Bohème with New York gentrification taking the place of Parisian class struggle.

The irony of a story where selling out to corporate interests intent on creating “Cyberworld” is the ultimate mark of weak character being told in a $40 million movie financed by a multinational corporation best known for making consumer electronics is apparently lost on the director of Home Alone. Or, if it did occur to him, there’s no sign in his film, which bears every mark of being a piece of intellectual property leveraged for maximum profitability, its ideal cultural moment allowed to pass because theater seats are more expensive than movie tickets.

Despite the fact that the audience’s viewing experience is similar, film and theater are two very different mediums. Adapting one to the other — and, increasingly, it’s a two-way street these days, as evidenced by the upcoming film of a musical of the film The Producers — is tricky. Doing a well-known stage musical on the screen requires either totally abandoning realism for artifice, like Baz Luhrmann’s superior Moulin Rouge, or attempting to shoehorn the ludicrousness of people bursting into song into a more realistic setting, like Fiddler on the Roof. Columbus takes the middle ground, creating huge but obvious sets for some street scenes and occasionally venturing into the real New York City (or a Canadian equivalent) and a postcard New Mexico desert for others. The result is jarring, especially for a movie that works so hard to smooth out any rough edges.

But really, we’re here for the singing and dancing. How is it? Well, it’s pretty darn good. With the exception of Rosario Dawson and Tracie Thoms, most of the Broadway cast has been retained, and they clearly know their stuff. Jesse L. Martin and Wilson Jermaine Heredia are exceptionally well-rounded for characters in a musical. It is their story, rather than Dawson’s Mimi, that provides the emotional core of the movie. Not faring so well in the celluloid transition is Idina Menzel as Maureen, a performance artist whose badly staged and downright stupid protest piece gets more attention than Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman” ever did.

But, as a whole, the cast is clearly working its collective butt off. Rent won a Pulitzer for bringing the subject of AIDS onto the musical stage, and one can’t help but wonder what the result would have been had a more adventurous director attempted to take the game cast in a more risky direction. But with Columbus in the driver’s seat, the film meanders for two and a half hours, occasionally hitting a high point but mostly just slogging through, leaving an audience who has not so much enjoyed as endured the experience.

Rent

Opened Wednesday, November 23rd

In life, sometimes you do good things and sometimes you do bad things, but usually the results are the same. That’s John Cusack’s character Charlie Arglist’s outlook on life in the noir/comedy The Ice Harvest. Arglist is a mob lawyer in Wichita Falls, Kansas, proving that even small-time wiseguys need quality representation. When the film opens, Arglist, egged on by his friend, a strip-club owner named Vic (Billy Bob Thornton), has decided to make a play for the big time and rip off his boss, Bill Guerrard (Randy Quaid), to the tune of $2 million. The two have clearly considered every angle, even scheduling their heist for Christmas Eve when Guerrard will presumably be spending time with his family. Every angle, that is, except for an ice storm that turns the city into, in Vic’s words, “an ice hockey rink” and fatefully delays their getaway.

Protagonist trapped in a small town by inclement weather is a road director Harold Ramis has been down before in his 1993 masterpiece Groundhog Day, but that’s where any similarity to his previous work ends. For while darkness has always been a part of Ramis’ humor, The Ice Harvest is so black that it may even surpass the Coen Brothers’ chilliest films. If Groundhog Day revealed a previously unseen depth in Ramis’ clowning, this film makes his pessimism seem bottomless. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The Ice Harvest is a fairly faithful adaptation of a novel by Scott Phillips, deviating only to lighten up the book’s even-more-of-a-downer ending. The pacing is unhurried and natural, like the great crime movies of the 1940s. All of the familiar noir elements are here: the femme fatale with killer gams (Connie Nielsen), the perfect crime that unravels in a flurry of double-crosses and bad luck, and the nonjudgmental treatment of characters who would, in real life, be way too slimy to hang out with on a regular basis but who are fun to visit for 90 minutes or so.

Cusack’s trademark sad-sack performance is the glue that holds the rest of the film together as he shambles through a procession of strip joints, convenience stores, and restaurants. Sometimes he bears a passing resemblance to Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity, his wink to the audience barely perceptible behind a stoic exterior. He and Thornton have a great time wallowing in the sleaze and bouncing disparaging one-liners off each other. Cusack and Oliver Platt also crackle as the former and current husbands of money-grubbing, two-timing Sarabeth (Justine Bentley), whose severe demeanor explains Platt’s show-stealing enthusiasm for liquor.

A film whose most moral action is breaking a woman-beating guitarist’s fingers should be on some level rather depressing, but Ramis’ existential take on the material is strangely infectious. Life sucks, and all is corruption, he seems to say. We might as well have a laugh about it.

The Ice Harvest

Opened Wednesday, November 23rd

Message-movie melodramas have a long history in Hollywood. From Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner to Silkwood and Norma Rae, the genre has proven itself effective Oscar bait. Charlize Theron probably hopes so, as the upcoming Aeon Flux adaptation isn’t likely to lead to a repeat of last year’s Best Actress award she (deservingly) won for Monster. But all of the elements are in place in North Country: working-class character of, ahem, questionable character; acclaimed, up-and-coming director; solid supporting cast; and a script about sticking it to the Man. Or, in this case, men.

North Country is based on the story of Lois Jensen, a single mother working in a Minnesota iron mine who endured brutal sexual harassment and successfully organized the first class-action sexual-harassment suit in American history. The film is at its best when it paints the hard-drinking, claustrophobic world of northern Minnesota from the point of view of the people who make a living by tearing takonite ore from the frozen hills.

Theron, here named Josie Aimes, is one of the first women to make inroads into the male-dominated world of the mine, and the men show their displeasure at the intrusion through increasingly intense acts of harassment. Aimes, who has recently left an abusive husband, doesn’t take the job as a feminist statement. She takes it for the sixfold pay increase over her former job as a hairdresser in order take care of her two kids. That hard physical work breeds macho camaraderie is obvious, but director Niki Caro (whose last work was 2003’s excellent Whale Rider) makes it clear through a deftly handled series of flashbacks that Josie has been dealing with the same attitudes her entire life. Theron effectively disappears into her character, although she doesn’t ugly up nearly as much as she did for Monster. As one of the characters remarks early in the film, “She’s kinda girly for a miner.”

The supporting cast is uniformly good. Frances McDormand plays Glory, the sole female union representative, as an earthier version of Fargo‘s Marge Gunderson. (She’s in Aeon Flux too). Sean Bean is Glory’s husband, who gives a particularly good speech to Josie’s son as tensions mount and the town turns against Josie. Woody Harrelson, as Josie’s lawyer, does the best he can with the worst written major character in the film. It’s when North Country veers into courtroom drama that it falls down. The proceedings are so trite and full of soap-opera conventions, especially when compared with the gritty verisimilitude of the rest of the movie, that these scenes threaten to derail the whole enterprise.

The melodrama with a message wouldn’t be a tried and true Hollywood formula if it didn’t work. It was probably ordained from the beginning that the ending of North Country would be pure schmaltz, but isn’t that what you sign up for when you buy your ticket to a movie like this? Theron and Caro deliver the goods, and North Country will probably at least get Theron a repeat Oscar nomination. But the viewer can be forgiven if she thinks she’s seen it all before.

North Country

Opening Friday, October 21st