Tag: Anthony Hopkins

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Thor: Ragnarok

Since superheroes first ventured onto screens, one name rises above all others. He was the single most influential figure in the development of the tone and character of the genre, and his name was not Thor — it was Adam West.

From 1966 to 1968, West played Batman on ABC. He was a hero to millions of children all over the world, and he was still remembered fondly and respected throughout Hollywood at the time of his death last summer at age 88. The real genius in West’s portrayal of the Caped Crusader was that he realized exactly how ridiculous the premise of Batman was. A millionaire dresses up as a bat to fight crime because his parents were killed? Not only that, but there are a bunch of other people whose life experiences have led them to obsessively play themed dress-up and try to take over the world, from whom this Batman must protect us? It’s ludicrous.

West managed to look like he was taking the whole thing seriously on the surface, and yet still wink at the audience. Okay, yeah. A bubble with the word “POW!” appears every time I punch this guy wearing a “HENCHMAN” shirt. Just go with it and have fun. West was magnetic on screen and was zealous about making sure the Batman he portrayed was a good guy, even if that sometimes meant making fun of how square that made him.

The 1960s Batman series was a product of its time. The comic book industry had been creatively neutered after the Seduction of the Innocent Congressional hearings decided violent comics were the cause of juvenile crime and the Comics Code Authority was established. West’s Batman, as wildly popular as it was, cemented the image of the comic book superhero as a joke for kids. It wasn’t until Frank Miller and Alan Moore’s work in the 1980s that costumed vigilantes began to be scary again. Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman cast Michael Keaton as a brooding PTSD case in an attempt to get as far as possible from West’s vision of the World’s Greatest Detective. But that’s exactly what makes an artist influential — all subsequent people working in the same field or genre have to respond to him or her. In the influence game, total negation is just as powerful as embrace and emulation.

Over the years, Batman got grittier and grittier. His darkness infected even Superman, replacing Christopher Reeve’s charismatic blue Boy Scout with Henry Cavill’s charisma-free brood-a-thon. On the Marvel side, the X-Men traded their yellow spandex for Burton-esque black leather. The grimdark trend crested with Christopher Nolan’s insanely paranoid The Dark Knight Rises. In 2014, the worm finally turned with Guardians of the Galaxy, which made the argument that saving the universe in tights should be fun again.

Cate Blanchett plays Hela, Thor’s estranged older sister in Taika Waititi’s heroically funny Thor: Ragnarok.

Which brings us to Thor: Ragnarok. Despite the hunky presence of Chris Hemsworth, the Thor films have easily been the weakest link in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But last year’s Ghostbusters reboot proved that Hemsworth has comedic chops to spare, so Marvel mastermind Kevin Feige hired Taika Waititi, a New Zealander whose What We Do in the Shadows and Hunt for the Wilderpeople are two of the decade’s sharpest comedies, to take the franchise in a new direction.

In Thor: Ragnarok, Waititi lets Hemsworth go full Adam West. That’s not to say Hemsworth has adopted West’s glorious deadpan, but he has perfected the art of convincing the audience that we’re all in on the same joke. No longer a glowering tower of muscle, Thor now cracks wise and flashes lopsided smiles at the slightest provocation. When he and Loki (Tom Hiddleston) do schtick together, you believe they’re brothers.

Thor’s main job is to protect his home Asgard from Hela (Cate Blanchett), his estranged older sister who helped their father Odin (Anthony Hopkins) conquer the realm with violence before being banished as a threat to peace, but a pleasing subplot takes him to Sakkar, a garbage dump ruled by the Grandmaster (Jeff Goldblum, in fine form) where he is forced into battle against his fellow Avenger the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo).

As usual for these $100-million Marvel monstrosities, Thor: Ragnarok is busy and overstuffed, both visually and with characters. But it’s at its best when it’s being irreverent and meta — Waititi’s speciality. He recognized that the best thing that could happen to Thor is for the pendulum to swing back toward West.

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Horrortober: Silence Of The Lambs (1991)

Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter in Silence Of The Lambs

FILM TITLE: Silence of the Lambs (1991)

ELAPSED TIME: 100%

WHY DID I STOP WATCHING? Hannibal has an old friend for dinner.

I usually make a policy of not reading reviews of movies before I write my own, but after finishing (that’s right — I finished it. All of it.) Silence of the Lambs last night, I went on a minor googling tear about the movie’s creation and initial reception. Because as soon as you see a movie as good as Silence of the Lambs, the next thought is necessarily, “How the fuck did they do that?”

I found a Roger Ebert review, penned in 2001 following the release of Silence of the Lambs’ underwhelming follow-up, Hannibal. Ebert writes that though Silence of the Lambs is not slasher-film disturbing, it has several genuinely frightening moments: Clarice’s first meeting with the eerily still Hannibal, the Kafka-esque removal of the moth from a victim’s throat, the elevator scene after Hannibal escapes, the back-and-forth cuts between Buffalo Bill’s real house and the false one, and the extended sequence in Bill’s basement at the end. Ebert’s point is that these moments aren’t just gross or suspenseful, but psychologically unsettling in a way that makes them timeless. Because they take place within an airtight character drama, they feel necessary, rather than excessive.

Silence Of The Lambs would be a character drama, except this happens.

As a first-time viewer and someone with little-to-no horror watching experience, I have to say that Silence of the Lambs was revelatory for me. Imagine if you thought you hated comedy but the only comedy you’d ever seen was Joe Dirt 2: Beautiful Loser. You’d probably think comedy sucked, right? But then someone showed you Airplane! You’d realize you were wrong. I thought horror sucked because I’d never actually seen a horror movie before Horrortober, and of the handful of very good movies I’ve watched, Silence of the Lambs is the one that has felt the most worth it. The element of fear is engaging, not gratuitous, because it is presented a part of that old question: what, exactly, is evil?

Jodi Foster as Clarice Starling

I think the movie’s greatest accomplishment is that, despite the grandiosity of its subject matter, it manages to feel understated the whole way through. The scariest moment in the final sequence, when Clarice confronts Buffalo Bill, is not the scene where she sees his skin suits, but the scene where he contorts his face and asks of Clarice, faking ignorance of a previous victim, “Was she a very fat person?” It is scary because Ted Levine, as Buffalo Bill, perfectly captures the hairs-breadth difference between how that question would be posed by an innocent person, and by someone fucking crazy. It is way more unsettling than the half-decomposed body in the bathtub that we run into moments later.

Ted Lavine as Buffalo Bill, animal lover.

So, readers, I think I get it now. It is possible to make a great horror film if the point is not blood and guts, but if blood and guts are a necessary byproduct of a truly frightening inquiry of human darkness. Of course, it also helps if you have Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster leading your movie. But to make horror into art, you mostly just need to take Hannibal Lecter’s advice: “Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature? What does he do, this man you seek?” 

Horrortober: Silence Of The Lambs (1991)

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Hitchcock

I don’t care about the subject matter; I don’t care about the acting; but I do care about the pieces of film and the photography and the soundtrack and all of the technical ingredients that make the audience scream. I feel it’s tremendously satisfying for us to be able to use the cinematic art to achieve something of a mass emotion. And with Psycho we most definitely achieved this. It wasn’t a message that stirred the audiences, nor was it a great performance or their enjoyment of the novel. They were aroused by pure film.” — Alfred Hitchcock, interviewed by filmmaker François Truffaut

Hitchcock is not a straight biopic about classic Hollywood’s most famous filmmaker but rather a portrait of the “Master of Suspense” at work in the period between the launch of his great triumph, 1959’s North By Northwest, and the even greater success of his subsequent big gamble, 1960’s Psycho.

In capturing this time in the director’s life, Hitchcock weighs three related but distinct topics: It’s a marriage story, looking into the personal and professional relationship between Alfred Hitchcock (Anthony Hopkins) and his wife and underrecognized creative colleague, Alma Reville (Helen Mirren). It’s also a backstage procedural about how Hitchcock, along with agent Lew Wasserman (Michael Stuhlbarg) and assistant Peggy Robertson (Toni Collete), got Psycho — a nasty piece of work that made for an unlikely and groundbreaking project for an A-list Hollywood director of the day — made despite resistance from Paramount and industry censors. But it’s also at times — at its infrequent best — about “the pieces of film and the photography and the soundtrack and all of the technical ingredients that make the audience scream.”

Hopkins, abetted by heavy makeup and a fat suit, plays Hitchcock as the droll, morbid caricature from his film trailers and television appearances. He doesn’t seem like Hitchcock, but at least he doesn’t seem like Anthony Hopkins either. Mirren gives a better and deeper performance even as the plot lines centered on her threaten to sink the film. A secret writing partnership between Alma and Strangers on a Train scribe Whitfield Cook (Danny Huston) is suspected to be something more intimate by Hitchcock, and the soapier aspects of this tangent feel like a sop to the middle-aged demographic, tapping into which is probably the film’s only hope of becoming a hit. Mirren, at least, brings this detour home by nailing her Big Speech.

On the studio lot, there’s plenty of material of more interest to film buffs, from stray asides — Hitchcock turning down an offer to make the first James Bond — to re-creations of Psycho‘s three great set pieces: the opening afternoon tryst, the staircase killing, and, of course, the shower scene. But much of this material is more dutiful than inspired. (And that goes double for Scarlett Johansson’s nonperformance as shower-scene victim Janet Leigh.)

Attempts at plumbing Hitchcock’s psyche in these scenes pales next to what the man himself does in his own films. And, on a related note, the use of real-life Psycho inspiration Ed Gein in a series of fantasy sequences is a stillborn gambit.

Hitchcock only truly finds a groove in its final stretch, when Alma tells Alfred at the breakfast table, “I suggest for everyone’s sake we start whipping Psycho into shape,” and we’re suddenly in the editing room with those “pieces of film,” snipping strips of celluloid, looking at individual frames, and cutting together a shower scene that, as Hitchcock told Truffaut, took seven days and 70 camera set-ups to produce 45 seconds of footage. Next, Hitchcock is negotiating with composer Bernard Herrmann about the film’s iconic, piercing score; devising an ingenious marketing scheme; and, in the film’s best and no doubt fanciful moment, standing in the theater lobby on opening night, stabbing along with Mrs. Bates to a helpless, orchestrated audience response, literalizing the notion of movie murder weapon as conductor’s wand.

This little grace-note tribute to “pure film” is true to Hitchcock but mostly out of step with Hitchcock, which, unlike its subject, must rely on performance and audience familiarity with its source material to generate interest.

Hitchcock

Opening Friday, December 14th

Ridgeway Four

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Fracture

In Fracture, a cuckolded husband, Ted Crawford (Anthony Hopkins), shoots his cheating wife (Embeth Davidtz). Events play out for the audience so that there is no doubt of his guilt. Arrested, Crawford confesses; along with a gun and no alibi, the authorities have an airtight case. So why does Crawford seem so smug and confident that he will get off?

Ryan Gosling plays assistant district attorney Willie Beachum (yes, he’s a young, hotshot D.A. with a 97 percent conviction rate), brought in to prosecute Crawford. Gosling was great last year in Half Nelson, which garnered him an Academy Award nomination. But Gosling’s work in Fracture may put his coronation ceremony on hold: His Beachum is an over-studied panoply of mannerisms and physical quirks. Gosling’s hands and face are always doing something, and it is evident in every moment that he is acting. (The Oklahoma accent the script saddles him with doesn’t help.)

Hopkins plays — surprise — a smart guy. Here he’s an engineer or something who investigates airplane crashes, able to preternaturally determine where the break in the plane happened with his keen ability to sniff out weaknesses. Will he be able to apply that talent to pulling off the perfect crime and outwitting his foes on the other side of the law? As one good guy says to another, “The guy’s screwing with us. He’s stacking the deck.” Er, too bad the script can’t keep pace with its premise.

Fracture is directed by Gregory Hoblit, who has a couple of very good films to his name: Primal Fear (1996) and Fallen (1998). Primal Fear was a small miracle of a movie, where the confluence of brilliant typecasting (Richard Gere as a sleazy defense attorney), the presence of great, then-untapped actors (Edward Norton and Laura Linney), and a morally diffuse script were foisted on an unsuspecting audience.

Though Fracture is a return to the crime-trial genre for Hoblit and another in a line of kinda-thrillers, he directs the movie as if he’s never seen his kind of movie in a theater before. Action is muddled and indistinct; the image crowds the frame, leaving little negative space; and the camera often twirls in circles as if it were a particularly carefree 6-year-old. The whole mess is disorienting and a little sickening. Fracture may be the first movie I’ve seen that I think will be better to watch on the small screen. Not that I’ll bother to find out.

Fracture

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