Tag: Ewan McGregor

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Film Features Film/TV

Birds of Prey

Ah yes, the first superhero movie of the year. It’s like the sighting of the first robin of spring, only with more tedious fighting.

For 2020, it’s Birds of Prey. For a mercenary enterprise that shows every sign of being constructed out of spare parts and leftovers by a corporation determined to wring every last penny out of the increasingly threadbare Batman brand, it’s not bad.

Everything about this film’s concept is schizophrenic. The primary title suggests it’s a superteam story, but make no mistake, this is Harley Quinn’s movie. More to the point, it’s Margot Robbie’s movie. She not only stars as the Joker’s former special lady friend, she’s also the top-billed producer.

Crazy for loving you — Margot Robbie (above) as Harley Quinn breaks up with the Joker and takes charge of her life in Birds of Prey.

Birds of Prey began life as a spinoff of 2016’s Suicide Squad, an abominably bad movie that teamed up a bunch of Batman-adjacent bad guys for a once-in-a-lifetime mission. Suicide Squad is one of those movies that you think might turn the corner and be so bad it’s good, but then you try to watch it, and it’s just painfully Highlander II bad. So Robbie, director Cathy Yan, and writer Christina Hodson had a pretty low bar to clear.

One theory goes that Batman is so beloved because he fights the best villains. Harley Quinn is the last great addition to his rogue’s gallery, introduced in 1992 as part of the first season of the beloved Batman: The Animated Series. The original Harley (Dr. Harleen Quinzel) was unambiguously a victim in an abusive relationship — a psychologist at Arkham Asylum assigned to help the Joker. But she fought the crazy, and the cray-cray won.

The Joker had always had nameless henchmen to carry out his evil clown games, but never a sidekick or a love interest. Even though Harley Quinn was conceived as a throwaway character, she caught on and actually proved to have some depth. She would periodically try to break away from the Joker’s domination, only to go crawling back. Consequently, she became one of the most sympathetic characters in the Batman mythos. When Robbie gave the character a live action debut in Suicide Squad, she was reimagined as a polychromatic roller derby girl, reduced to a damsel for Joker to rescue.

When Birds of Prey opens, Harley and the Joker’s volatile relationship has finally exploded for real. As she explains in her voiceover, she’s bound and determined not to go back to him this time. Her post-breakup ritual is relatable. She moves into her own apartment. She changes her hair. She spends nights on the couch watching Looney Tunes while eating a carton of ice cream. She gets a pet hyena and names him Bruce, after that Wayne guy. She rekindles her love of ultraviolence at the roller derby. She gets blotto drunk and blows up the chemical plant where her ex transformed her into a metahuman.

In the early going, when it’s focused on Harley’s character beats, Birds of Prey is actually fun to watch. I’ve been a Robbie skeptic, but I have to admit she has grown into a good actress. As Jack Nicholson, Heath Ledger, and Mark Hamill have proved by playing the Joker, it’s fun to watch someone with chops chew the scenery.

Harley gets a McGuffin to chase — a diamond inscribed with the information needed to claim a great fortune — in a nested set of voiceover-enabled flashbacks. When the birds of prey start assembling, things get more conventionally punchy. There’s Mary Elizabeth Winstead — who should be in everything — as Huntress. Jurnee Smolett-Bell as Black Canary, introduced singing a torch song version of James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.” The great Rosie Perez is Renee Montoya, a Gotham City detective who talks like she’s from a 1980s cop movie. She’s balanced out by Ewan McGregor who serves up the ham as Roman Sionis, a villain who looks like a refugee from a Miami Vice episode.

The closest Marvel analogs for the R-rated Birds of Prey are the Deadpool movies. Director Yan wears her influences on her sleeve: Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and Kill Bill are most prominent. As with all these endless superhero movies, the little character moments are the best parts, while the action sequences all kind of blur together. But the stakes are pleasingly low (the world is never in any danger), and Robbie’s charisma saves the picture from getting overwhelmed by corporate IP service diktat.

The journey of Harley from henchwoman to antagonist, and her determination to get out from under the shadow of her more famous boyfriend, is where the energies of the all-woman creative team have been directed. Their candy-colored enthusiasm is infectious.

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Film Features Film/TV

Doctor Sleep

Stephen King famously hates The Shining. To be clear, he hates the 1980 Stanley Kubrick adaptation of his 1977 novel, despite the fact that it is widely considered to be one of the greatest movies ever made. I’ve never really understood why. I’ve read The Shining, and sure, it’s a lot different from the movie. But different things work onscreen than work in print. That’s just the way of the world. Both the film and the book work great for the medium they’re presented in.

Maybe that’s the gist of King’s distaste. Writing is such an intimate medium. A writer can literally make you hear voices in your head. I’m doing it right now. King’s book wasn’t just a Psycho-type horror potboiler, it was about his own struggles with alcoholism. Seeing it abstracted into the third person had to be uncomfortable, especially given Kubrick’s cold, analytical style.

Ewan McGregor (above) plays an older Danny Torrance plagued by alcoholism and PTSD.

In the sequel, Doctor Sleep, which King released in 2013, the writer explored the implications of the end of The Shining. Jack Torrance, the alcoholic writer driven murderously mad by the spirits of the Overlook Hotel, has frozen to death, leaving his wife Wendy and son Danny alone. They move to Florida, and Danny tries to come to terms with his psychic powers and PTSD. Thanks to the help of the ghost of the ill-fated Overlook Hotel employee Dick Hallorann, Danny gets a handle on his shining. Not so much on the PTSD.

The film adaptation of Doctor Sleep is something unusual in the world of the Hollywood studio: an auteurist work. Mike Flanagan scores the remarkable triple bill of writer, director, and editor, something rarely seen outside the low-budget indie world. The older I get, the more skeptical I become of auteur theory, the notion that the director always puts his personal stamp on a picture. I think the interplay of talent on the production team is more important in the long run. But with Doctor Sleep, Flanagan makes a good argument, at least for the notion that he knows what he’s doing.

Kubrick’s work on The Shining was transformative, while Flanagan seems content to be translative to the text. And that’s okay. His visual style is attractive and well designed, but not flashy. King’s strengths in plotting really shine through. Every action is motivated and logical, even to a fault. Danny is played as a child by Roger Dale Floyd, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Danny Lloyd, Kubrick’s Danny, and then as an adult by Ewan McGregor, who brings a satisfying depth to the performance.

The film’s second act takes place in 2011, when Danny is taking after his alcoholic father, drifting from job to job, pounding shots and running lines on a weeknight. When he is drawn to a small New Hampshire town that seems to be perpetually bathed in autumnal night, an act of kindness by Billy (Cliff Curtis) convinces him to go to AA and clean up. He takes up residence in the town, and gets a psychic pen pal, a tween girl named Abra (Kyliegh Curran). But the pair discover that they’re being stalked by a clan of psychic vampires called The True Knot, led by Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson).

The funny thing about Doctor Sleep is that it is not so much a horror movie as a good, old-fashioned supernatural thriller. It’s more Dark Shadows than Halloween. It’s also pleasingly retro in its structure. Flanagan takes his time introducing all the players before they start bouncing off each other. Its three acts take place in three different time periods, but within the acts, there’s a lot of craziness.

King has always excelled at bringing supernatural-tinged horror down to Earth by setting the action in the most mundane of places. Hitchcock liked to set the climax of his films in recognizable landmarks, like Mount Rushmore and the Statue of Liberty. King puts a climactic set piece in a crappy little New England state park. He has a knack for finding the haunted spaces in our collective imaginations: lonely highways, abandoned factories, musty attics. Flanagan is at his best when his characters are digging up bodies in a dusty wilderness, lit by truck headlights.

Doctor Sleep is not an all-time classic, but it is a solid genre piece for horror fans that will hold up to repeat viewings. At 152 minutes, it’s long, but it doesn’t feel self-indulgent. Flanagan adds to King’s legacy and does no damage to Kubrick’s masterwork by not slavishly imitating it. Yes, during the climactic scene in the crumbling Overlook Hotel, he recreates the elevator blood-flood gag. But come on, given the opportunity, would you be able to resist such temptation?

Doctor Sleep

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Film Features Film/TV

Beauty and the Beast

Disney’s 1991 production of Beauty and the Beast was a success by any measure. It was a huge box-office hit, earning 16 times its budget, a fact made even more remarkable because it was an animated musical with an original score. Those songs, including classics “Be Our Guest” and “Beauty and the Beast,” swept the musical categories at the Academy Awards. But one scene in particular stands out as historic. When Belle and the Beast waltz together for the first time, the camera swooped and soared through the beautiful, cavernous ballroom with a freedom never before seen in animation. The ballroom was modeled by a computer in 3D, using techniques and technology developed by Pixar, which at that time was a technology company started by Steve Jobs. The scene signaled a seismic shift in animation away from hand-drawn images to increasingly sophisticated computer renderings. Four years later, Pixar’s first feature, Toy Story, which was entirely 3D-rendered, closed the door on the classical era of animation.

In a way, Disney has come full circle with its “live-action” remake of Beauty and the Beast. I used the quotes because there is very little in this beast that hasn’t felt the touch of the cursor on a monitor in California. The CGI modeling techniques introduced in 1991 have become so sophisticated that they are virtually indistinguishable from “live-action” images. The production’s most astonishing accomplishment is Cogsworth, the fussy old head of the Beast’s household who has been transformed by the Enchantress into an ornate clock. Voiced by Ian McKellen, the incredibly detailed creation features layers upon layers of moving clockwork, and yet has enough expression and movement to do physical comedy with Lumière, the enchanted candelabrum voiced by Ewan McGregor.

Cogsworth is just one element in a rush of onscreen visual wonders, and it would be easy to miss his awesomeness. And that’s the biggest problem with this Beauty and the Beast — if I had to choose one word to describe the movie, it would be “cluttered.” The 1991 version often exploded into a riot of movement, especially in the centerpiece “Be Our Guest” dinner party sequence, but the minor abstractions introduced by traditional animation tempered the visual impact of those sequences. This time around, when the army of china comes whizzing at you, they’re fully rendered plates glinting in meticulously modeled candlelight. Beauty and the Beast is a frequently beautiful film, but it’s also sometimes hard to watch.

Fortunately, Emma Watson’s Belle is never hard to watch. Of the group of exceptional actors who came out of the Harry Potter franchise, Watson is the most talented. For the generation who grew up with her as “The Brightest Witch of Her Age,” she has come to represent millennial feminism. She’s the perfect choice for the live-action adaptation of the heroine who inspires the simple townspeople of her not-very-French village to sing “what a puzzle to us is Belle.” Seeing as she was about 18 months old when the original movie came out, she likely grew up watching the cartoon version of the bookish commoner who is ultimately wooed by the size of the Beast’s library. Her singing voice, while not the equal of Paige O’Hara’s work in the original, is more than adequate to the task. She commands the screen without ever really seeming to break a sweat.

Watson’s Beast is Dan Stevens, who gets considerably more screen time in this version of the story, which leans heavily on the Broadway adaptation. His shutter-rattling, no doubt enhanced baritone serves to flesh out the motion-captured character. Even better is Luke Evans as the anitheroically square-jawed Gaston. He is the very picture of toxic masculinity, ready to go full demagogue at the drop of a hat and lead the torch-waving visitors to go all Frankenstein on the Beast.

Much better than last year’s Jungle Book remake, Beauty and the Beast almost justifies the enormous expense poured into it. It reinforces the contention that Disney is the only contemporary studio that knows how to make a good movie. With her effortless brush-off of Gaston’s boorish advances, Watson’s Belle is coded as appropriately woke. But one wonders at the feminist subtext of a kidnapped woman who falls in love with her captor and changes the brute into a handsome prince by sheer force of her womanly charms. Amid all the ballyhoo and singing, its corporate perfection often feels flat. With all rough edges rounded off, this version of Beauty and the Beast is just another girl meets anthropomorphic water buffalo, girl loses man-buffalo, deus ex machina makes everything OK story.

Beauty and the Beast
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