2005 Preview

What a year for film biographies: Ray Charles, Bobby Darin, Howard Hughes, Alfred Kinsey, Peter Sellers, J. M. Barrie, Cole Porter, Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Napoleon Dynamite. Wait a sec, scratch that last one, he only seems more real than all the rest.
If you’re not into biopics you can wallow in the mediocrity of Blade: Trinity and wonder how long it will take for Ryan Reynolds to go from scene stealer to lead man to yesterday’s news.
Meanwhile Steven Soderbergh manages to make Ocean’s 12 his best film since Traffic, which is to say faint praise best describes the heist shenanigans on display in this superstar sequel with impossibly handsome actors. If Ocean’s 12 works well enough to please the undiscerning it’s because Soderbergh mixes the temporal displacement of Kill Bill and the cool soundtrack choices of Snatch. Soderbergh even seems to be nodding to the last Lord of the Ring since Ocean’s 12 appears to have at least three endings.
Don’t worry furry friends, it gets better. Here is a rundown of some of the crap headed our way in 2005. What is scarier, a horror flick called House of Wax or the fact that it stars Paris Hilton? Could it be a warning sign that the sequel to XXX stars Ice Cube instead of Vin Diesel? As usual summertime 2005 rolls out the tentpoles. We’re talking Star War: Revenge of the Sith, A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The War of the Worlds, and Batman Begins. At least the new Bruce Wayne, Christian Bale, gains back the weight he lost for The Machinist.
That’s just the first half of next year. We can also look forward to movies based on Bewitched, The Dukes of Hazzard (Burt Reynolds as Boss Hog?), a remake of The Longest Yard (Adam Sandler in the Burt Reynolds part), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and The Fantastic Four, although The Incredibles has stole some of their super power thunder.
As a lad I fantasized about what sexual positions the Fantastic Four could engage in. They were after all my favorite comic book heroes and the combination of stretching flesh, instant flame-on libido, invisibility and super strength sounds like, well, a TV commercial for male enhancement pills. In fact if I still had my collection of FF and Silver Surfer comics I could sell them on eBay and retire.
We’ve only gotten through the first half of 2005, with the best saved for the last half of the year. Rumor has it that Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo will be the first sequel of a PG-13 film to be rated R. One reason could be Rob Schnieder’s penis-to-nose skin transplant. Also, Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride finds him in the stop-motion territory he so artfully produced for The Nightmare Before Christmas. Saw was a great Halloween treat but do the filmmakers think the audience will fall for the old killer-is-really-the-dead-guy-on-the-floor routine twice in Saw 2? Will Antonio Banderas finally sheath his sword in Legend of Zorro? An adaptation of the Persian Gulf conflict novel, Jarhead, is skedded for November but how long until Hollywood makes a movie about the current war? Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Terry Gilliam’s The Brother’s Grimm, Peter Jackson’s follow-up to LOTR, King Kong, and the Chronicles of Narnia all grapple for space at the end o’ 05. We don’t really care though, because all we can think about is Kate Beckinsale in black leather for Underworld 2.

The End of the Ramones

The End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones seems more profound now than ever, seeing how one original member remains alive by the time the darn thing rocks theaters.
The film starts at the Music Hall of Fame where the then still alive Johnny and Dee Dee (along with Marky and other orig member Tommy) make wise before their admiring comrades. The filmmakers use plentiful clips to illustrate what music was like in the mid-70s. Clips from pop like Donnie and Marie contrast with inserts from the likes of Iggy & the Stooges, the New York Dolls, Television, Emerson Lake & Palmer. This examination of the times and the Ramones as youths and how they intertwined within their milieu occupies most of the first hour.
The Ramones were playing to other bands at CBGB’s. Here the film tastefully dredges up a snippet of the naïf Ramones covering “California Sun” and having equipment malfunctions at the same time. The Ramones are featured in a New York Times article and becomes darlings of Rolling Stone magazine. Later, Joe Strummer is testifying that to The Clash and The Sex Pistols, their main influence was The Ramones. Which brings up another point. In those pivotal mid-70s times a magazine like Rolling Stone was covering Nixon Resigning and Karen Silkwood’s death whereas today it’s a pale shadow of that. You’re more likely to see Lindsay Lohan on the cover.
Joey and Johnny and Dee Dee Ramone, all in separate interviews since they collaborated with the filmmakers, just not as a group, expound on the greater meaning behind their phenomenon. End of the Century covers a lot of ground, including a career turning collaboration with Phil Spector and the split between Joey and Johnny over a girlfriend (The KKK Took My Baby Away?). When the film concludes you’re tapping your foot with a Ramones adrenalin rush.

The End of Alexander and the Ramones

What determines whether a film will bomb often has nothing at all to do with said film. Take for example Alexander. We’re not calling it film of the year, yet it’s far from a poorly written excuse for mythology like Troy.
Oliver Stone was somewhat of a counter culture hero after the blaze of such films as Platoon, Salvador and JFK, but that was over a decade ago and his last film, the hyperactive and under-appreciated Any Given Sunday came out five years ago. That’s like a century in Internet time.
Alexander is a brooding morass of ideas produced in exotic settings and featuring strong technical work in all departments in support of a stellar cast. The score by Vangelis was especially welcome. Many of the threads that weave through the film would seem relevant to today’s headlines: An obsession with one-world unity; multi-cultural marriage and political loyalty. Since Alexander makes repeated mention of Babylon the parallels to the current situation in Iraq require no second-guessing. Most rags pounded every ounce of sexual innuendo out of the impossibly handsome cast while the film was in pre-production and as such it’s doubtful they would devote the same amount of ink delineating, say, what is historically known about Alexander the Great’s sexual and political conquests.
Baz Lurhmann also has an Alexander project starring Leo DiCaprio and Nicole Kidman (as his mom), fully scripted and scouted, presumably financed (The producer is Dino De Laurentiis.) that was pushed back to 2006. Maybe the heat was on with two competing Alexander projects, maybe Baz wanted to spend more time directing stage operas, more likely it’s the typical Hollywood way of spending money and time on dream projects that fail to materialize.
Alexander was a dream project for Stone and while there’s a banquet of food for thought the film seems to wash over you rather than blow you away. Despite battles scenes appropriately huge and executed with the precision of a Kurosawa film, Oliver Stone makes his best films when grounded in the politics of the modern day.
At the start of Alexander, Ptolemy (Anthony Hopkins as an aged statesman who walks with a Yoda stride) recalls the life of Alexander the Great (Colin Farrell). Hopkins, basically acting as the narrator in scenes that bracket the movie, dictates his version of Alexander’s life to a scribe in the world’s first great library. Only at the end Ptolemy tells his listener to tear everything up for he has decided to rewrite history. He wants to leave out the part where he plots to kill Alexander and all that, ah, conspiracy stuff. Alexander died at age 32 and when he exited stage left he had conquered the known world.
Stone has also made documentaries on Fidel Castro and Yasser Arafat in the last couple of years. He actually re-shot the Castro docu at the insistence of HBO (the producers) after Castro executed some rebels. How appropriate that Alexander makes an issue of changing facts for the sake of the historical record.
In Alexander, Stone directs in a classical yesteryear film mode. The titles blend Roman with Cyrillic alphabet. Stone chooses to play it straight here, dumping the flashy style he toyed with in films like U-Turn and NBK. Frankly, even director of photography Rodrigo Prieto, the cutting edge shooter of Amores Perros and 21 Grams, has never shot such graceful scenes. Only at the end does the film start to saturate its colors in the style of today’s filmmaking.
In this Babylonian era, Alexander’s view of sex can best be described as Aristotelean (Christopher Plummer) in nature and the God one prays to can depend on the type of prayer one evokes. That is to say that sometimes it can be a good thing to exclaim “By Dionysus!” or even “Great Zeus!” to really make a direct point.
Angelina Jolie as Alexander’s mother Olympias gets the best lines. Jolie can dominate a movie, and early on in Alexander she blasts forth with a primal release of emotion that sets the bar for the rest of the film. She also handles snakes throughout the whole affair, and at one point you realize that these slithering creatures are purring like kitty cats wrapped around her arms.
Farrell pulls off his part without a hitch in his skirt, but his shining moments are the ones filled with indecision and uncertainty. We can feel his confusion battling inside as he finally takes a wife (Rosario Dawson) from a conquered tribe despite his obvious affection for fellow officer Hephaistion (Jared Leto).
This dichotomy works for the film. Hollywood’s dichotomy is that they spend as much money and time promoting and slamming the high falutin as the umpteenth sequel to American Pie. If you prefer a film that requires no thought but provides a very enjoyable two hours of popcorn infused fun see National Treasure. It also plays with cultural myths but in a non-threatening way.