BEN-HUR

Lamentable as the triumph of Gladiator over deeper material like Amores Perros and Traffic for the Best Picture win at the 73^rd Academy Award was, it could hardly have been surprising to anyone with even a modest understanding of the industry. Epics of the ancient world lead themselves to gigantism and in Hollywood size covers a lot. If Gladiator proved anything else, it’s that in the world of the Academy, some things never change.

            There was much historic evidence to assure Ridley Scott and DreamWorks that they had a sure-fire bet with Gladiator, for its spiritual ancestors dominated both the screen and Awards some forty-five years earlier. Mightiest of all was William Wyler’s Ben-Hur which, similarly, swept away the Oscars in 1959, pushing aside North by Northwest and Some Like it Hot.  It was simply too big to fail, despite its uncertainty in message and limited understanding of its characters.

            This is not to suggest that Ben-Hur is not praiseworthy. Neither is this a complete rebuttal to it being labeled a “thinking man’s epic”. More than anything, however, Ben-Hur is an entertaining circus of a movie with awesome moments and a chariot race sequence that deserves its reputation as a cinematic landmark.

            Wyler, more or less, takes Lew Wallace’s book to heart and follows Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston) from his days as a beloved prince in Judea to his imprisonment under Roman rule and his change of heart as he grows from seeking vengeance to finding salvation (a parable for Christ’s salvation of Judea). But Wyler also cuts some of Wallace’s strongest points short and the picture never reaches the level of profundity worthy of a masterpiece.

            Perhaps for the sake of neutrality, Wyler never specifies Ben-Hur’s conversion to Christianity after witnessing the crucifixion of Christ, but he also makes other, less understandable and more damning, cuts at the heart of the picture.

            There is in the relationship between Ben-Hur and Roman commander Messala (Stephen Boyd) a poignant story of childhood friends now torn apart by politics and the dominance of the Roman Empire over the people of Judea, but Messala gets the short end of character development. We know enough about Ben-Hur. He comes from noble blood and loves his people, even treating his slaves well. He resists violence and respects his old friend, but refuses to surrender the land of his people to Rome.

            We are left with a shoddier portrait of Messala. He is an ambitious commander appointed to Jerusalem by Caesar himself. He respects Ben-Hur and honors their friendship, but his loyalty is to the Empire. Messala is a torn man, but the movie jerks his image around from reasonable ruler (“This was their land before it was ours”, he reminds his guard) to tyrannical brute abruptly and without gradual transformation. As a result, any motivation behind his brutality (he arrests Ben-Hur, his mother, and sister, even though he knows their injuring of a Roman general was accidental because he wants to “make examples” of them) is arbitrary. Likewise, there is little understanding of his final decision to help his old friend after being fatally wounded during the chariot race.

             According to The Celluloid Closet, the documentary based on Vito Russo’s 1981 book, Gore Vidal, who worked on the screenplay for a number of weeks, attempted something deeper in the bond between Ben-Hur and Messala that suggested a homoerotic connection; a suggestion that Heston denied and insinuated that Vidal could not have contributed as much given that his tenure as screenwriter lasted only three days.

 From there on it became a minor battle of accounts between Heston and Vidal, who stood by his account.

            “Over the years I have told the story of how I wrote a love story for Ben-Hur and Messala, and how only Stephen Boyd, who played Messala, was told what the scene was about because, according to director William Wyler, ‘Chuck will fall apart’,” Vidal said.

            “In numerous accounts of a marvelously dull life, Chuck has told us of his triumph as Ben-Hur. With each version he adds, alas, new lies. The facts: Ben-Hur was the third picture that I, as a contract writer at M-G-M, wrote for producer Sam Zimbalist. I arrived with Zimbalist and Wyler in Rome not for a ‘trial run’ but as The Writer. Since I could stay only a couple of months, Christopher Fry was on hand to replace me. Zimbalist died in the middle of the picture, and the credits were totally confused.

            “Now my eight weeks in Rome became three days, according to Chuck. This is very bold. But then, recently, in Palimpsest, I did describe how no one at M-G-M wanted him for the film. Only after Paul Newman and Rock Hudson were unavailable did Zimbalist, glumly, accept Heston.

            “Despite Chuck’s denial of the famous ‘love scene’, the reviewers who watched The Celluloid Closet saw very clearly what I had done and said so. Incidentally, one Celluloid Closet producer got a message from homophobe Heston, assuring him that a character he had also ‘acted’ on the screen, Michelangelo, was in no way homosexual. But what is one to do with the spokesperson of the National Rifle Association, who, when he ‘acts’ now, wears two toupees, one on top of the other, in the interest of verisimilitude?”

            The truth is, there is evidence of something deeper going on between Ben-Hur and Messala even without Vidal’s account. They reminisce about their childhood game of throwing a lance (an unmistakable phallic symbol) and intertwine their arms when drinking wine. Be that as it may, it’s unlikely Vidal could have explored this further. Wyler, if he suspected anything, never spoke against it, but it probably would have been stopped dead by Heston.

            In any case, the film’s Achilles Heel was a common one for Wyler; it brings up talking points just to leave them hanging. By undermining Ben-Hur’s conversion to Christianity, Wyler makes a film of a somewhat inconclusive stance. Is his Ben-Hur the story of a kind prince turned vengeful by political tyranny in his ancestral homeland or is it about something bigger? Is it resolved satisfying his hate (he does challenge and defeat Messala at the chariot race) or does he learn to embrace forgiveness after witnessing the crucifixion and the miraculous healing of his mother and sister who were cast out of society when they were discovered to be lepers? Certainly, his family’s cure further muddles our understanding and not just because it’s an odd ending, even for one of forced optimism. If this is about a redeemed Judean and the salvation of his people, the micro focus on a miracle detracts from the bigger picture. Wallace’s message was a religious one; Christ is risen, the people of Jerusalem were saved, and Christianity was born. Wyler’s is more modest. Christ is crucified, two sick women are healed.

            Wyler had some hesitation in tackling a “DeMille picture”, perhaps accounting for his uncertainty with the scope of the thing, but his difficulty in finding a soul for the picture was a reoccurring pratfall in his oeuvre. In The Best Years of Our Lives, for instance, he questioned the benefit of war through the ranting of a detractor at a bar, making claims (e.g. America had no business getting involved in Germany since the Vichy had no beef with the United States) that Wyler, a Jewish immigrant who served in the Air Force during WWII, would certainly have shunned. But Wyler’s exact attitude is hard to guess judging solely by what transpires on film. The only retort to the charlatan’s big mouth is a sock in the nose from a veteran. Effectively, Wyler’s lack of a thoughtful response kills the scene’s power of stimulation.

            Surprised though he may have been, Wyler seemed a likely candidate to direct the remake of Ben-Hur since Sidney Franklin left the project in 1957. Back in 1925, when he had been in America for no more than two years and was not yet a citizen, Wyler had served as assistant director and production manager of M-G-M’s first version of Ben-Hur, one of the most impressive of silent films and a sizeable moneymaker for the studio.

            Even before M-G-M decided on Wyler, however, a remake of Ben-Hur was practically a certainty at the studio by at least 1953. Quo Vadis had been a hit for the studio in 1951 and created a demand for Biblical epics. By the summer of 1953, when M-G-M was in financial straits, this new fad became a solution. Studio president Dore Schary met with general manager E.J. Mannix, Quo Vadis producer Sam Zimbalist, and Nicholas Schenck of Loew’s Inc. to announce plans for a remake of Ben-Hur.

            From the start, Ben-Hur was going to be big. M-G-M treated the picture as their all or nothing gamble and would spare no expense. It was to be filmed in Rome with a budget of $5,000,000. A top ranking cast and crew was considered including Karl Tunberg as screenwriter, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Richard Burton, and Rock Hudson considered for the title role, and Ava Gardner as a hopeful for the female lead.  Surviving stars of the 1925 film, including lead Ramon Novarro who had been living quietly in retirement, offered to travel to Rome as consultants.

            Alas, this vision would prove too grand to keep for the financial and production woes that took M-G-M by storm, pushing the start of production to 1956. It was still possible to shoot in Rome, but the lead hopefuls were all beyond grasp. By the year’s end, Schary parted ways with M-G-M, ending his five year tenure as head of studio.

            Still, the media kept the production of Ben-Hur alive and helped attract bankable names to the lead role including Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas. But by the time Wyler was announced as Franklin’s replacement as director, M-G-M had narrowed their choices for lead down to Burt Lancaster and Paul Newman. Lancaster refused from the outset, thinking the script a “crashing bore”. Zimbalist, who was managing the picture almost single-handedly by now, tried desperately to sign Newman on. Newman was a friend to Gore Vidal (who had now joined the crew as a screenwriter along with Christopher Fry, Maxwell Anderson, and S.N. Behrman) , but even as such he could not bring himself to appear in another Biblical epic after his disastrous experience with Warner’s The Silver Chalice in 1955. 

            It was at this point that Heston came into the picture, in large part because of his previous collaboration with Wyler in The Big Country. With the casting of Heston in January of 1958, things finally seemed to be falling into place. Irish actor Stephen Boyd was cast as Messala and Israeli actress Haya Harareet was guaranteed to be making her Hollywood debut as Esther, Ben-Hur’s former slave turned lover.

            The initial budget estimate had more than doubled by the start of production, but the buzz that this generated for Ben-Hur, which was being touted as the most expensive film of all time, proved to be effective advertising. While the media kept the anticipation of Ben-Hur sizzling in the States, the crew was hard at work in Rome’s Cinecittà, where M-G-M had filmed Quo Vadis. Now, the M-G-M crew needed Cinecittà to house the 18 acre set they built recreating Jerusalem after filming was suspended in Israel.

            For filming, M-G-M took out the big guns. The camera they trusted for the extreme wide angle shots they were striving for was their own; the MGM Camera 65, named for its capability to shoot at 65mm and equipped with new lenses built by Panavision especially for Ben-Hur to capture footage with sharply. 

            Even in the soundtrack department, Ben-Hur broke barriers with over three hours of music by Miklos Rosza, who said of his work; “Ben-Hur with its sweeping human dramas, personal conflict and pageantry, needed music which grew out naturally from its atmosphere and became an integral part of it. All the music which is used on scene I wrote in Rome. For inspiration I walked long afternoons in the Forum Romanum and other places of Roman antiquity.”

            For all the grief it put M-G-M through during five years of production (Sam Zimbalist died of a heart attack in November of 1958 while working on the film in Rome; a tragedy certainly not helped by the turbulent rode to the completion of the picture), Ben-Hur paid off financially not only for M-G-M but restored other studio’s faith in epics as cash cows. The next few years saw a number of them, most notable among them Universal’s Spartacus. M-G-M was well rewarded for their faith and gamble when its box-office earnings exceeded calculations.

            On its own end, Ben-Hur is a big fun handsome film. Despite its shortsightedness, there is more substance to the leads than was typical in big studio splurges. Ben-Hur himself especially benefits from what is arguably Charlton Heston’s best performance.

            But the film’s greatest accomplishments are all a matter of cinematic wizardry. The visual triumphs of the legendary chariot race scene are not just triumphs for their own end but the very realism they create sucks the viewer into the carnage and terror in a way that could not have been possible without M-G-M’s push for camera superiority. In a visual sense, we are tossed beneath the horse hooves and wooden wheels along with the trampled riders. It’s a roller-coaster of a sequence done with subtle but brilliant audience manipulation tactics; our response to it depending on the camera’s point of view. When the eye of the camera is on the benches, we get caught up by the rousing action and share in our excitement with the other spectators. When the lens takes us into the arena, we feel as endangered by the brutal games as Ben-Hur and his competitors. Our constant shifting from cheer to fear makes for one of the greatest spectacles the movies have ever offered. And it didn't come easy.

            Three months were spent on training the actors (and by all accounts Heston became an adept charioteer by the end of the shoot) and seventy-eight horses. A Roman company was contracted to build eighteen chariots, some of them used only for the training. In the end, the ten minute sequence required the use of as many as 7,000 extras, created a dispute over directorial credit between the two co-directors assigned to it (Andrew Marton and Yakima Canutt), destroyed one of the $100,000 cameras built for the film, and caused the injury of three members of the crew. But it immortalized the film.

            The other classic scene is the sweeping though unnervingly claustrophobic shot of Ben-Hur and other sweaty prisoners oaring a Roman battleship below deck. Filmed in a lake built in Cinecittà, the scene impresses not so much for its realism (it’s suffering in the way Hollywood heroes suffer, after all, with movie blood and no togas), but for the way the horror creeps up. Before it rams the Roman ship, we see the approaching Macedonian enemy ship through a tiny window below deck, sharing the view with the oarsmen chained there. We can see the inevitable doom coming and know that while some soldiers may escape the prisoners (and Wyler cleverly “puts us” in the same spot as the prisoners) are trapped and will not be able to escape death but only watch it come.

            Ben-Hur is able to escape when the enemy ship crashes into the wall and we follow him above deck where he rescues commander Quintus Arrius (Jack Hawkins), but the shot of the doomed prisoners’ arms as they desperately wave for help that never arrives from a shaft on the sinking ship’s floor is harrowing in a way that only a truly humanistic director knows how to be. Paradoxically, it says something about Wyler’s limitation as a director that he follows this scene with a disturbingly confused scene. Quintus Arrius and Ben-Hur escape the battle and before being rescued make peace while adrift at sea. Upon arrival in Rome, Quintus Arrius adopts his savior and makes him a Roman. The juxtaposition of tone would not be so jarring but for a brief moment that betrays everything we have come to know of Ben-Hur up to that point. Upon climbing aboard the Roman ship, the Judean sees the prisoners below deck, remembering that he once was one of them but is now in the good graces of Rome. Does he feel he has betrayed his people or is he simply relieved not to be chained any longer? It’s an impossible moment to grasp because of Wyler’s own dismissal of the implication.

            There is little levity in Ben-Hur, the only hint at humor is at the expense of Hollywood’s favorite stock type, the hot-headed Arab (Hugh Griffith); here a sheik with the finest horses in Judea. He befriends Ben-Hur and trains him for the chariot race. The rest, as they say, is movie history.

            For all its narrative and humanitarian shortcomings, Ben-Hur is a movie milestone. If nothing else, it brought attention to technology as a filmmaker’s magic wand, no matter how shallow the core. Of course, this legacy is a mixed blessing at best and a case could be made that Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments contributed to the rise of big budget as a cover for small ideas. But for all his trouble with the soul of the film, Wyler pulled off a rousing picture with more complexity than DeMille would have bothered with. For better or worse, Ben-Hur is the kind of movie measured mostly by its legacy and in this regard it has few competitors. Its greatest contributions to cinema are two sequences that deserve a top ranking place on any list of cinematic landmarks. 

YOUR WITNESS

                 Robert Montgomery had been acting for nearly twenty years when he began personalizing his films. He had done well as a leading man in the 30s and, maybe because even from early on it was obvious he was worthy of diverse material, he was given a chance to go bad in Night Must Fall where he proved to be at his best playing maniacs in the guise of an all-American gent.

            But even the there was always something of a system outsider about Robert Montgomery. Perhaps his conservative politics in a town already functioning as the Mecca of the Left set him apart, but it seems more likely that he always believed in a different approach to storytelling than the studios offered.

            Tellingly, his first attempt to make a film his own (besides stepping in for a few scenes of They Were Expendable when John Ford fell ill during production) was an experiment. But Lady in the Lake remains regarded widely as an interesting failure, mostly by fans who felt cheated by the minimal shots of Montgomery offered by the point-of-view camera.

            M-G-M learned and was reluctant to let him play with their cameras again. But after watching him resign to two safe pictures for Universal (Ride the Pink Horse and Once More, My Darling), Warner Brothers allowed him to direct a modest picture at the studio branch in England.

            Though a conventional mystery tale in many respects, Your Witness (or Eye Witness, as it was released in the States) is a livelier thriller with more personality than most of the second-tier noirs released in America at the time. It’s set some years after the war and memories of combat still linger in the mind of Adam Heyward (Montgomery), now a brilliant New York lawyer. Early in the film he receives a telegram from England from the wife of a war buddy who saved his life in battle. Sam (Michael Ripper), his friend, has been jailed for murder and will be hanged unless it can be proven he acted in self-defense. To repay his debt, Heyward sets off for England to help his friend.

            Your Witness doesn’t dwell on post-war trauma. Rather, once Heyward reaches the crime scene, it hits the ground running and makes for an entertaining little yarn, forsaking genuine suspense for cross-cultural humor, taking some good-natured jabs at the British legal system along the way. Even scenes that would be the exciting parts of other thrillers (such as Heyward’s night chase of the mysterious bicyclist who he believes to be the witness who can prove Sam’s innocence) here provide more amusement than thrills.

            On its own unique terms, Your Witness is cheerful fun. Montgomery’s elegant humor turns Heyward into a naïve good sport, a bit taken aback by the peculiarities of the little village. Most of the humor, however, is at the Britons’ expense, especially the ineffectual police department in which no one in charge seems to be around when Heyward arrives.

            As writing Your Witness is an untidy effort with many ends hanging loose. For instance, when Heyward first arrives at the local inn and states his business for being there, the locals abruptly hush up and back off in discomfort. It suggests a version of the familiar town with a secret trope, but the opinion or gossips of the locals regarding the murder trail are never really addressed again.

            There is another inexplicable scene in which Heyward is introduced to the local clergyman who invites him to stay in the church once he must leave the inn. This is followed by an extended shot of the altar boys and the church choir during mass. Nothing of this sequence connects to anything else in the movie.

            Finally, after the trial is resolved, the movie foolishly attempts a heartwarmer for an ending, something it didn’t lead up to. The two characters involved, the widowed colonel Summerfield (Leslie Banks in his last film) and his neglected teenage daughter (Ann Stephens), were treated by the film so whimsically up to that point that any emotive revelation about them was bound to feel arbitrary. For all that, however, the conclusion is not quite the embarrassment it could have been, thanks largely to the strength of Stephens’s performance.

            Within the unruly structure, however, Montgomery and screenwriters Hugo Butler and Ian McLellan Hunter do some interesting things, especially in the treatment of the female leads. Noir isn’t typically very trusting of women; the genre that cultivated the femme fatale wouldn’t be. Interestingly, though, in the two that Montgomery directed, this and Lady in the Lake, the women ultimately prove trustworthy. Lady in the Lake, of course, came from Raymond Chandler who often thought of his female leads as valuable partners.

In Your Witness, it’s Sam’s wife Mary (Jenny Laird) who summons Heyward and initiates her husband’s defense. But the one who truly defies expectations is Alex (Patricia Cutts), the Colonel’s widowed sister-in-law who serves as Heyward’s keys to the town. From the first encounter she seems destined to be the love interest and does follow through, but when Heyward learns that the murdered man was a known womanizer and had a lady in his shed at the time of the murder that then fled the scene, Alex becomes the suspected missing witness who can testify Sam acted in self-defense. Unaware that she is under a cloud of suspicion unknowingly proves her innocence in a manner inverted from Crossfire; she cannot find the room where the killing took place. Her ignorance as to the location of the room that the witness would have recognized clears her and enables her to walk away with Heyward in the closing shot. She is spared the humiliation of begging the lead for forgiveness or confessing to a past indiscretion. She never owes an apology and stands tall.

Having served as a Navy lieutenant commander during WWII and dedicating much of his later career both in movies (directing and narrating The Gallant Hours) and then television (Navy Log) to the chronicling of the war, it’s surprising he didn’t make the murder the result of Sam’s post-traumatic stress or make Heyward more of a haunted veteran. Indeed, for a soldier almost killed in action, Heyward seems strangely unphased. Ultimately, the resolution has little to do with Sam, Heyward, the dead man, or even the relation between them. Its premise comes down to simply finding the crucial witness.

Your Witness isn’t a profound mystery and doesn’t even touch the prospect of psychological depth. But it’s fun and played fancifully. It would be the last time Montgomery would appear on the big screen (he only narrated The Gallant Hours), turning his attention to his now forgotten series Robert Montgomery Presents and Navy Log, and work in Washington as Eisenhower’s image consultant.

               

X-MEN: FIRST CLASS

Ah, the things good casting and thoughtful writing can accomplish! Thanks primarily to such, Matthew Vaughn makes X-Men: First Class, the origin story of the Marvel team, a superior action movie with one of the best finales a superhero movie can boast of. Just the cast roll call is enticing: James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender as Charles Xavier and Erik Lensherr, the two mutants who combine forces only to become enemies as Professor X and Magneto respectively, Jennifer Lawrence as Raven before she became Mystique, Rose Byrne as Agent MacTaggert, one of the sole trustworthy humans, January Jones as the icy femme fatale Emma Frost, and Kevin Bacon as the mad villain Shaw. Most of the cast had a well established reputation before X-Men, and brought to the movie the sense of class associated with their names. Bacon was, of course, a veteran by then with a talent for playing insane criminals. McAvoy had The Last King of Scotland and Atonement under his belt while Fassbender had garnered applause for his work in Hunger, Fish Tank, and Inglourious Basterds. Lawrence had a Best Actress award to dangle at the young age of twenty from the previous year’s Winter’s Bone and January Jones was making a name for herself on AMC’s Mad Men before being demoted to extra in later seasons. Rose Byrne, who had fought for the planet in Sunshine, gets the more exciting job here of preventing nuclear war with the help of mutants.

            Even such a cast can be wasted, however, but X-Men: First Class offers a story worthy of the names it boasts. Forgetting the zigzagging quality of the earlier films, Vaughn wiped the slate clean, taking us to the creation of the super team. The time is 1962 and amidst the Cold War, paranoia of otherness run high.

            “We are children of the atom,” Shaw says of his generation but mutants, it turns out (and Wolverine explored this two years earlier, taking us back to the Civil War), formed long before then as the next evolutionary step in humanity. X-Men: First Class opens in Poland in 1944 where Erik is a young prisoner in a Nazi camp. His ability to move metal with his mind catches the attention of Shaw, who kills the boy’s mother to learn his secret.

            But it was in the atomic age that mutant births surged and became the subject of public discourse. In the outside world, tensions between the USA and the USSR are at a boiling point. Through the course of the film, the Cuban Missile Crisis will go from social background to climax, but while the Cold War rages, the mutants are fighting battles of their own.

            They can no longer hide their genetic differences (perhaps explaining why half of the X-Men are among the superheroes reluctant to relinquish their identities in the Civil War comics; they want to hold onto what little secrecy they have left) and so decide to use their special abilities for the service of mankind, hopefully winning their trust during a time of fear and global mistrust.

            At least, that’s what Charles Xavier wants. He’s a smart, confident, and has studied genetic mutation extensively while at Oxford. There is no apparent reason for humans to dislike him. Even his adoptive sister Raven (Lawrence) wants only to be accepted for who she is before becoming Mystique. For much of this film, though, she conceals her characteristic blue scales for the look of a classical young beauty. If she must hide her true form, best to conceal it with the look of the all-American beauty.

            Meanwhile, Erik (Fassbender) travels the world hunting down those responsible for the death of his family, but Shaw still eludes him. Unbeknownst to Erik, Shaw is also a mutant capable of absorbing energy. To him mutants are superior beings who can only advance to their fullest potential through the extinction of humans and engaging the USA and USSR in nuclear warfare is a good way to start.

            Ironically, of all the mutants, Erik’s ideology is the most identical to Shaw’s. His experiences in the prison camps have developed into an understandable distrust of humans. Superficially, Erik appears to be Shaw’s natural ally, except for the fact that Shaw killed his mother.

            The X-Men comic books are products of the atomic age and X-Men: First Class makes much use of the movements of the Kennedy years. The Cuban Missile Crisis, of course, becomes the white elephant of the movie as Shaw manipulates generals of different armies to move missiles into Turkey and Cuba as a catalyst to war. But there are other, more nuanced, references. Indeed, the contrasting attitudes toward humans of Xavier and Erik are an almost identical analogy to the ideological clashes between Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King. They unite temporarily as leaders of an oppressed demographic, yet disagree fundamentally on how to handle the group that has oppressed them. Xavier wants mankind to stop fearing mutants; Erik believes no human can be trusted. But Erik is a stand-in for Malcolm X in ways besides the obvious. Besides believing in justifiable violence, he pioneers the concept of ‘mutant and proud’ or ‘mutant is beautiful’. His most touching moment involves his exchange with Mystique in which he encourages her to stop trying to be human and celebrate her natural blue form.

            There are other mutants to tell of. The film’s breeziest sequence features the rounding up of an assortment of mutants, each with unique abilities. It’s a smooth, easy going montage reminiscent of the Animorphs book series for young adults popular in the late 90s which was in itself a Power Rangers knock-off. Among those discovered are Angel, a nightclub dancer with dragonfly wings played by Zoë Kravitz, a mutant dubbed Banshee (Caleb Landry Jones) for his ability to produce ultrasonic waves with his vocal chords, and Havoc (Lucas Till) who operates more or less like an energy sponge. Finally, there is the monkey-pawed scientist (Nicholas Hoult) who will become the Beast precisely for not accepting his true form.

            Agent MacTaggert is the principal good human besides Oliver Platt’s ill-fated CIA operative. Rose Byrne, despite confessing to having no familiarity with the comics when taking the part, turns out to be the ideal modern action heroine. She strikes an endearing combination of classic action girl ingenuity and bewilderment with contemporary feminist fire. She’s in awe of her unusual friends, but needs no rescuing.

            The best thing about X-Men: First Class, and why it’s one of the best movies based on a comic book, is because it takes its material seriously while never forgetting that superhero movies should be fun above all else. This fun was wearing off of the old franchise, so Vaughn disregarded everything that came after the second movie, with the Wolverine movie existing in its own sphere for now, and started fresh righting everything that was going wrong.

Vaughn had been involved with the first films, but when taking the director helm for First Class he said, “This is going to be very different. What I’m doing no one has done in superhero films. It’s James Bond, it’s a political thriller and it’s an X-Men movie. It’s not like the other X-Men movies which I think is important. I think they need to sort of take on a new…you know, what Batman Begins did for all those Batman movies? We bloody well need it.”

            And different it is. His climax, featuring the American and Russian military ships at a standoff in the shores of Cuba, exemplifies everything Vaughn got right. The thrills are real and exciting in that cohesive way so often lacking in popcorn entertainment, but Vaughn never treats his alternate take on history seriously. Human lives are saved and the injuries sustained by the mutants force them into becoming the characters we know so well. If that was the worse to come out of the real Cold War then the creation of Magneto was a small price to pay. But there it is, two mutant allies that became arch enemies due to their regard of humans. Are they Jekyll and Hyde? No, not quite. They are more like two famous leaders of recent history a little closer to home. 

WRECK-IT RALPH

If not a return to top form, Wreck-It Ralph should give Disney hope for going solo into CGI. Its colors are vibrant and the story has heart, two Disney pillars. It’s also a lot of fun, with more creativity than Disney has recently attempted, even when it retreats to familiar ground.

            Yes, its draw is a gimmick which comes with a built-in fanbase (and there are few loyalists more vocal than gamers) but it knows how to use its turf intelligently. Ostensibly the movie is traditional, a misunderstood outcast finds a niche for himself through the help of an even lonelier child, but the movie’s purpose is a tribute to the classic arcade games so fondly remembered by Generation X-ers and early Y-ers, who flocked to this movie in droves with a nostalgic reverence seldom paid to cartoons.

            Disney, of course, has tried this before. In 1988 Disney (through the Touchstone label) reached outside of its copyright domain and saluted not only its own golden age but that of all animation for Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Disney’s stable (Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy) appeared alongside Warner’s gang (Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Tweety) and even Tex Avery’s Droopy made an appearance as the M-G-M cast was transitioning ownership into Warner’s hands, though Tom and Jerry remained off limits. This all the more amazing considering that Disney’s rivalry with Warner Bros. was much sharper then (even though some of the Warner cartoon compilations played on the Disney Channel around this time) and subsided only when Disney found a fiercer competitor with DreamWorks (though, again, that didn’t prevent songs from the Shrek soundtrack from playing on Radio Disney).

            Who Framed Roger Rabbit was a triumph artistically, creatively, and in its revival of interest in the great cartoons of the past. Wreck-It Ralph is a far more modest success done on a smaller scale, but the concept is the same.  A hodge-podge of vintage video game characters serve as backdrops to the story of Ralph (John C. Reilly), a big lonely lug fed up with life as a video game villain. Who could blame him? For thirty years he’s played foil to Fix-It Felix, Jr. (Jack McBrayer), the hero of an arcade game bearing his own name which is about 80% Donkey Kong (right down to Ralph’s resemblance to the big ape with his oversized hands, bare feet, and bulging biceps) and 20% Wrecking Crew, the early Mario game.

            What Ralph wrecks, Felix fixes, but why should the hero get all the praise? Where would Felix be, after all, if Ralph never gave him something to fix? Without a livelihood and without a game says Ralph and he has a point as was proven in the Disneyland episode “Our Unsung Villains” where the Magic Mirror explained how dull a hero’s life would be without a villain giving them their claim to fame.

            Ralph’s colleagues feel his pain. They meet in the Pac-Man console where they discuss the virtues of being bad. There are a lot of familiar faces here including Bowser from the Mario games, Dr. Robotnik from Sonic the Hedgehog, and Zangief from Street Fighter. Not one of them, however, wishes to be anything other than bad and are shocked when Ralph reveals his intention to be good guy for a day.

            The ingenuity of Wreck-It Ralph is in how it establishes airtight laws for the video game universe, which all play into the story. For starters, characters programmed to be bad guys like Ralph cannot win medals and in his world. However, since medals are a token of heroism Ralph vows to win one, but to do so he must sneak into another game. But game hopping or going “turbo”, as it is called by characters, is frowned upon here. Nonetheless, Ralph is determined to prove himself and sneaks into a dark and foreboding combat game called Hero’s Duty (a stand-in for the Call of Duty franchise) where he battles an army of Cy-Bugs, ugly winged boogers that devour everything in sight and could ravage the whole arcade if let out of their own game. The stakes are high for Ralph because, you see, we are told (by Sonic the Hedgehog himself in PSA) that if a character dies outside of their own game they can never be regenerated. But, against the odds, Ralph does find his medal only to wind up in an escape pod and is shuttled to a garishly colorful game called Sugar Rush, a tacky kart racing game set in a candy land.

            New rules are put in place here when the movie finds its heart in Ralph’s friendship with Vanellope von Shweetz (Sarah Silverman), a tiny racer shunned in her own world. Her dreams are simply to race with the other sugar-coated children of the kingdom but is disallowed to so by King Candy (Alan Tudyk), the land’s doofus despot. Vanellope is a glitch (meaning she pixelates) and was never intended to be a part of the game, or so the king says. If she races and wins, she will be added to the game’s regular roster of racers. Gamers will take her pixelating as a sign that the game is broken, the game will be unplugged, and the cast of Sugar Rush will be left homeless. Vanellope will suffer the most as glitches cannot escape their game, and so she will perish along with Sugar Rush.

            There is precedent for this which explains the meaning of “going turbo”. In the early years of the arcade there was a popular racing game featuring a megalomaniac driver named Turbo who could not take being eclipsed by a newer game and so hopped into the new games world causing it to glitch, resulting in the retirement of both games.

            By the end of Wreck-It Ralph we see why these rules were set in place and how they serve the story. They are bound to be of interest to thoughtful gamers who have often philosophized about the laws of the worlds they master by remote. To some degree, Wreck-It Ralph answers their questions. Game characters, as theorized in the movie, live a repetitive life coasting between free will and controlled movement. Their memories depend on the programmer’s imagination and can always pop back to life so long as they die within their own game. What happens to characters that manage to escape unplugged games? Most end up homeless and hungry begging at Game Central, a video game hub modeled on Grand Central where assorted game creations cross paths on a daily commute. Among the abandoned are Q*Bert and friends who replaced Dig Dug as homeless beggars at the station when Namco refused to allow Dug to be depicted as a has-been. Also seen are Frogger, Paperboy, and Charley Chuck. Nintendo’s Mario was also set for a cameo but was cut from the final film when a spot worthy of his stature in the gaming world could not be found.

            “The hard thing was, we were trying to work out the right way to use a character like Mario,” said Disney producer Clark Spencer. “It had to be organic to the film. We didn’t want to just paste him in there. For Bowser, it made perfect sense for him to be a member of the Bad Anon group. For Mario himself we couldn’t think of the right way to incorporate him into the film, and so we didn’t do it.” 

            The Italian plumber was, then, only mentioned as an expected guest at Felix’s thirtieth anniversary bash (and a super mushroom pops up later on) while Sega icon Sonic makes scattered appearances throughout the film. As in Roger Rabbit, these cameos aren’t really functional to the story but as distractions for a demographic they are on target. Wreck-It Ralph can get away with gimmickry because there is substance behind the style. 

            At its heart is the friendship between Ralph and Vanellope, tow outcasts who meet and find a use for each other. Ralph’s story alone is worth mentioning if only because it is a classical underdog story. When Ralph leaves the game to prove himself, Felix and the other Nicelanders (as they are called) soon realize the importance of a bad guy.

            The message is vintage Disney. Outcasts discover how important they are simply by being themselves, though one could argue that it’s possible to take it from another angle and think of the message is an advertisement for complacency; accept and don’t challenge the label bestowed upon you by society. But Ralph can’t change what he was programmed to be any more than a human can change their appearance. But we can all do good and Ralph does so by his new friend.

            Working in the world of video games gave the Disney animators a diverse range of backdrops and an army of characters creations to work with (there was a record-breaking tally of 188 character designs). Many of these came pre-designed, of course, but those in the forefront, while certainly inspired from alternative sources, are ingenious creations. Ralph is a loveable big lug, brutish in appearance but with a heart as big as his height. Felix is a subtle attack on the infallible hero. He never cusses or becomes more than cross and his physical incapability of doing wrong comes as something of a curse at times. Even the Nicelanders are a curious combination between classic 8-bit game models and the Fisher Price Little People toys from the 60s (which, incidentally, have licensed Disney characters for a playsets). Their legs too short to walk, they hop up and down building stairs and around the town. In the conceptual stages the animators considered animating the whole movie in the style of an 8-bit game, but found this too complicated and softened the look of the characters while keeping their movements grounded to the style of classic arcades.

            Not surprisingly, the best creations are the villains. Sugar Rush is policed by two badge-wearing donuts and their pack of devil dogs. King candy’s subjects are talking candies with dotted eyes and small mouths, true to their design’s probable Japanese origin. The king’s lackey is a glum green ball known as Sour Bill with disconnected hands and feet, but candy himself is the film’s most surprising pleasure. A flamboyant but bullying elf king, Candy was designed by animator Zach Parrish as a darker, more sinister, twin of the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland, complete with a pink bulbous nose and receding gray hair. But the real stunner is voice actor Alan Tudyk who brings the character to life as if he were simultaneously channeling Ed Wynn.

            Wreck-It Ralph is a slight film and it seems deliberate. It’s as if Disney doesn’t yet trust itself handling CGI without Pixar’s help and so works on a smaller scale. But it is a lot of fun and has moments as poignant as any Disney has done lately, mostly involving Ralph and Vanellope. Disney has always had an affinity for bratty misunderstood children and Vanellope von Shweetz is part of the tradition. As is often the case in Disney it takes a child-like adult to reach out to such a child and Ralph fills the bill.

            If there is one area in which Wreck-It Ralph provides Disney with a unique opportunity it’s in its broad assortment of settings. From the starry city where Ralph and Felix play to the apocalyptic wasteland of Hero’s Duty to the bright and colorful confections of Sugar Rush, the animators have three eye-popping canvases to for their talents. 

THE WOMAN IN BLACK

In America we have the Gray Man, a lonely figure haunting the shores of Pawleys Island in South Carolina. He is said to be the ghost of a local landowner who long ago drowned in the marshes on his way to visit his sweetheart. Today residents take his appearances as a warning of pending disasters, usually hurricanes. Locals who claim to have seen him believe in the legend enough to evacuate the beach after the sighting and their homes are said to have been left undamaged after the coastal flooding.

            In 1983, Susan Hill created a sinister counterpart for England with her novella The Woman in Black about a malevolent feign whose appearances mark the death of a local child in some terrible way as vindication for the death of her own son. Hill’s novel, set in the late 19^th century, took place roughly over the span of a year. James Watkins’s film adaptation retains the late Edwardian setting but puts its hero, a lawyer named Arthur Kipps, on a crash course toward a somber finale. His movie takes place over the course of a week and in that time Kipps will uncover the dark secret of a small town in north east England, a deserted mansion at the end of the causeway (aptly called Eel Marsh House), and encounter the force of evil that dwells within.

            Kipps, the youthful widowed accountant from London, is played by Daniel Radcliffe in his first role since the end of the Harry Potter series. Though it exceeded expectations, the movie was not a big enough financial success to shake off his association with the boy wizard but it is proof of his talent elsewhere. He’s good enough to make us forget he was once a bespectacled student of Hogwarts, at least for the duration of this film.

            Oh, there are plenty of homages to the Harry Potter movies, notably the train ride from London (the real world) to the spooky village (where supernatural forces lurk), though the magic here is far more sinister than even Lord Voldemort. But the real roots of the film intertwine with the great tradition of Gothic horror and its heart is often with The Innocents, itself based on Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw.

            A devotion to the old stock robs the film of surprises or innovations, but its very familiarity with the classics gives it an allure of its own. In its own way, The Woman in Black is a genuinely frightening and lurid film making effective use of human drama.

            Kipps’s story is not unheard of. His wife died giving birth to their son and he holds a mournful heart while raising his son. He can’t keep his mind on his job but is given one last chance to do well by the company. An old woman has died way out in the mist-covered Eel Marsh House and he is to put her affairs in order. For some reason, the local residents aren’t being very cooperative.

            Such is the first layer of The Woman in Black and it’s an old trick. A train ride away from the world of terror is the world of law, attorneys, and real estate. It’s the real world we know so well, perhaps a little too well, with all of its cold hard technicalities that get in the way of an easy life. And yet, its very predictability makes it something of a comfort in comparison to the horror we know lurks just on the other side of the train tracks. For all its legal headaches, the world Arthur Kipps works in is a world we are familiar with, can grasp, and some of us can eve master.

            In between the world of papers and the occult is the bridge world which Kipps encounters upon his arrival in the hushed town. It’s a classical town with a secret. The locals want Kipps out and try to expedite the completion of his business there. They fear him and with good reason. Children of the village have died in horrible ways, seemingly by their own intention. As the movie opens we see three little girls playing and then spotting an unseen (to us) terror in the nursery. They calmly walk to the window and jump out in perfect unison. Many of the folks attribute this to a local legend and some have gone so far as to lock their children up to protect them from this force of evil. They live in a fragile state of fear, wondering what child will be next. Understandably they don’t want Kipps messing around at Eel Marsh House, the cradle of the town’s horror. Hostility grows among the villagers when the arrival of Kipps coincides with the death of more children in the most dreadful of ways. Despite the ice cold demeanor of the town toward the stranger this is still the real world and there is some comfort in knowing that the locals are acting on relatable human emotion or, even more understandably, concern for their young ones. But this world is linked to the supernatural because the behavior of the town is a direct result of a ghostly spell. It is the middle world; real enough though under the influence of spirits.

            The deal is sealed, however, for the third level when Kipps enters the crumbling mansion. It still is the real world, but not as we know it. The Woman in Black is in complete control, the doors of the manor a threshold to her domain of terror and evil. So strong is her fury, in fact, that her thirst for revenge knows no boundaries, and the very wickedness of her doings, rather than their supernatural nature, become the focus of the story.

            The website tvtropes.org categorizes movie ghostly goals into two types, A and B. As the website describes, “Type A will never actually be proactive in getting things done to end their undeath; it’s always about scaring the people inhabiting their house into exhuming their hidden-after-the-murder corpse, or investigating the strange disappearance of their family, or whatever it is their ectoplasmic tuchus is unable to do.” However, “Type B will be forces of pure, motiveless evil whose thirst for bloody death will be forestalled only by their sadistic desire to cause as much psychological anguish beforehand as possible.”

            The Woman in Black exhibits definite signs of Type B. She wants blood for her son’s death and will stop at nothing to feed her anger, vowing never to forgive the town. But her case is unique in that she also has elements of Type A. Her rage is not unfounded. In life she was robbed of her child when courts deemed her unfit to be a mother and put her boy under the care of her neglectful sister where he came to his death. There is no justification for her method of revenge, but her anger is easy to understand. From her point of view, her story is a tragedy and her afterlife a nightmare.

            This emotional crossroad gives The Woman in Black a special, if not quite unique, place in the annals of horror. Essentially, the film consists of two stories working together. On the outset we have a traditional ghost story. The macabre is suggested but never flung. Most of the unadulterated horror is clumped into the central part of the movie in which Kipps spends the night at the haunted manor (how a house so recently inhabited could have so quickly fallen into such a deplorable state is never explained) where he is visited by ominous apparitions, is spooked by loud thumps coming from dark hallways, and encounters a perpetually swaying rocking chair with a story of its own.

            But the scares are encompassed by three love stories. The principal one highlights a dangerous similarity between Arthur Kipps and the Woman in Black. The loss of a loved one (Kipps his wife and the woman her son) has led them both down paths highly destructive to themselves and to others. Kipps may not realize it, but his inability to control his grief has put his career on the line and has hurt his son, if only because it has made him a detached father. Indeed, Kipps is haunted as much by his dead wife as the Woman in Black because both are posing a threat to his and his son’s well-being from beyond the grave. Of course, the Woman in Black carries malicious intentions toward Kipps and son, but the mother’s memory brings pragmatic problems of its own.

            The similarities between Kipps and the ghost are such that they ultimately become a sort of rivalry. This is hardly surprising given that they are both motivated by a love for their sons. But Arthur’s advantage is that his son still lives and he has a chance to make things right. On the other hand, the Woman in Black, at least by the time of her son’s death, was never given a chance to form a bond with her son.

            The ending has been called many things, notably bittersweet or depressing, but if there is one thing it shouldn’t be it’s surprising that the ghost refuses to pardon Arthur Kipps. He is, after all, her living counterpart, a man haunted by death, and yet he has a chance that was denied to her. Her jealousy results in evil, but it’s no mystery where it comes from.

            And yet, while it’s clear that this was not the result of the ghost doing them any favors as some have suggested, it is Kipps’s love for his son and the benevolent force of his dead wife that grant the Kipps family a better end than the woman’s other victims. For virtually everyone else we meet, little has been resolved, but the Kipps family does find peace. This is a deeper note than the one the book closes on and still the movie manages to end on a more optimistic tone.

            The Woman in Black is a well written ghost story; scary enough but, more so, it’s haunting, a word horror films have long since forgotten as meaning the lingering pain of past events. But what better way to explain the presence of a ghost?

THE THREE STOOGES

Spending over a decade in development hell can generate curiosity about almost any movie, but the Farrelly brothers’ Three Stooges tribute excited generations of fans. Buzz came early: this wouldn’t be a biopic like Mel Gibson’s TV movie from 2000, but new adventures for the knuckleheads set in the present day (apparently period pieces are off limits to the Farrellys. How else to explain setting the movie today when many of the gags and incidents could easily have taken place seventy years ago?)

            In truth, the idea was neither novel nor promising given past experience. Not many people remember The Little Rascals update from the 90s and for good reason. Of course, the Stooges have a stronger and wider fan base and even the most ardent Stooge fan seemed willing to give the Farrellys the benefit of the doubt when they announced their intention to tip their hats at the granddaddies of physical comedy. Indeed, where would Peter and Bob be without them?

            Lucrative cast names began to emerge and either made of broke the trust of fans depending on their level of affection for pure original Stooge spirit. Benicio del Toro and Russell Crowe were both considered for Moe at different points and Sean Penn got as far as accepting the part of Larry, and would have made a fine Larry (no pun intended) at that. Jim Carrey was also attached once and began gaining weight for the role of Curly, but dropped out when he thought the movie was dead in its tracks and he couldn’t gain the pounds. As Carrey explained, “For me, I don’t really want to do anything halfway, and I don’t feel like a fat suit does it.”

            As the big names gradually dropped out, a path was formed for a smaller roster that was cast for the most important reason of all; they are near perfect embodiments of the iconic morons. Will Sasso took on the role of Curly and there could not have been a better choice, while Chris Diamantopoulos became the bowler haired Moe and Sean Hayes jumped in as Larry.

            Despite the setbacks The Three Stooges came to be and the result is a movie that is surprisingly pretty good thanks largely to its leads and the Farrellys’ devotion to the original clowns. Nearly everything that can be leveled against it is true to its source. That it’s hair-brained goes without saying and the overacting is no blunter than in the classic shorts populated with cartoon tough guys, shrill dames, and bullying authorities. For what it’s worth, The Three Stooges amounts to the same innocuous brain vacation offered by the Columbia films.

            It’s even set up in the same way, the story divided into episodes, not a bad choice of terminology for a movie offered to a younger generation of fans who remember the Stooges as a television package rather than cinematic shorts. This fate was unique to The Three Stooges and, to a lesser degree, the Our Gang kids instead of, say, Laurel & Hardy. This was all about timing and both the Stooges and the new wave of Little Rascals were still active well into the era of television despite continuing to work primarily in movie theaters. The Stooges’ attempt to break into television in 1949 with a pilot film called Jerks of all Trades was a failure. Laurel & Hardy, by contrast, made their last film in 1950 and a proposed colored series for television, Laurel & Hardy’s Fabulous Fables, never came to be. Moe, Larry, and the shifting third stooge coexisted with television even as caricatures in an abysmal animated series and then as androids in the dismissed The Robonic Stooges. Larry Harmon made a short-lived cartoon series based on the antics of Stan and Ollie, even allowing his caricatures to guest star in The New Scooby Doo Movies (the Stooges also appeared in an episode) but this has all but been forgotten as have most of Harmon’s properties including his cheapened Popeye cartoons and his pet franchise Bozo the Clown.

            The movie episodes are marked by title cards inspired by the originals (wacky illustrations beneath zany block letters) spruced up here by animation. The three episodes are, however, tied to a common story, based on a 1980s video game starring the boys. When the orphanage where they have spent their entire lives faces foreclosure, Moe, Larry, and Curly set out into the real world hoping to raise the funds to save the place that raised them. They try a variety of jobs, failing spectacularly at each.

            While still under Ted Healy and then again when they were past their prime, the original Stooges made a few feature films (though they had a few cameos in a number of musicals from the 30s, each totaling less than a reel of footage). These were ponderous tired works, stretching old gags far longer than they were worth. Despite working with a feature running time, the Farrellys were smart enough to compartmentalize the movie while focusing on Stooge antics, capturing the fast-pacing of the Jules White classics. Their primary plot turn, a seductress bent on murdering her husband for cash, works with the boys rather than by their side.

            Tributes to the Stooge heyday abound. The orphanage where the film begins is shown to have been founded in 1934, the year the boys signed their fateful contract with Columbia and received their only Academy Award nomination for Men in Black. Their pal at the orphanage, who is later adopted by a vile businessman (Stephen Collins), is named Teddy (Kirby Heyborne) as a nod to Ted Healy, their manager from their vaudeville days who left them dry. After the backlash from Healy’s son over the less than flattering depiction of his father in the AMC biopic, this Teddy was turned into a good natured dope who, nonetheless, proves to be a good buddy.

            There are other, more generalized, salutes to the classic shorts (notably the editing in the grand finale as the boys take off on horseback). But the most overt homage is to the epic pie fight of In the Sweet Pie and Pie, this time done with urinating babies. Of all of the Farrelly homages this one works the least It’s true that they try some clever angles like spoofing Western stand-offs but it’s so fangled from the iconic sequence that to a modern audience it will be just another excuse for the Farrellys’ stock in gross humor.

            Indeed, this sort of confusion is widespread in The Three Stooges. The movie is undoubtedly set in the present, but are these Stooges reincarnations of the originals or the originals having discovered time-travel? Either explanation works, even when considering their ignorance of modern appliances (Curly tries talking through his eye on an iPhone!) In the orphanage the boys were sheltered from the real world, after all. That doesn’t account for the arcaic attire but we can accept that the boys are back if only in spirit.

            For this we can thank Diamantopoulos, Sasso, and Hayes for their near perfect emulations of the originals and the young actors who play the Stooges as children (Skyler Gisondo, Lance Chantiles-Wertz, and Robert Capron) should not be overlooked. In a sense, they had a harder job than their adult counterparts, playing modifications of modifications of the originals. And yet, they capture the essence of the Stooges beautifully.

            Given the uncanny appeal of the leads, the supporting cast could easily be dismissed, but the Farrellys give us plenty of reason not to. Sofia Vergara is modeled after the sexy seductresses that have always duped the boys into wild goose chases, her evil seeping seductively out of her beauty. Craig Bierko makes a fun bumbling thug who suffers more physical abuse than Wile E. Coyote in all his years (getting hit by a bus, ran over, blown up with dynamite, mauled by a lion, and shot with an arrow) and still coming out as unscathed as any cartoon. Stephen Collins is the more or less straight villain who is humiliated by the oblivious knuckleheads. Best of all is Larry David as the long-suffering Sister Mary-Mengele who endures more eye pokes and head bangs from the boys than even the saintliest of nuns would tolerate.

            But the Farrellys have a deeper understanding of Stooge methodology than a good eye for casting. They understand the soul of the first films even at their most nuanced. The Stooges were always downtrodden and growing up in foster homes was always part of their backstory. Many a short concerned them setting off into the world in search of riches with soft spots for their humble origins. In their own incompetent way, they always sought to repay their benefactors. It’s for this reason that their disastrous attempts to fix the orphanage bell rings so true to their nature as does their later decision to become farmers. When the boys triumphantly exclaim, “To the farm!” they are recognizing the farm as the ideal it was recognized as in a lot of Depression-era comedy; the cornerstone of simplicity and earnesty in the American way of life that Irvin Berlin had romanticized in his 1914 ballad "I Want to Go Back to Michigan". 

            On this page it is possible to apprecaite their later wreckage of a swank party, modeled after many similar scenes in their early films. This was a common Marx Brothers set-up as well, but for the Stooges such party crashing was a subconscious (for they were too dumb to realize, much less plan, the destruction in their wake) revenge against the high society that shunned them.

            The Farrellys are so in tune with vintage Stooge spirit that their wrong turns are all the more surprising. Less surprising is where they go wrong, and that is deliberately deviating from the Jules White modus operandi for a fish-out-of-water gag such as Larry’s run-in with urban hoods and Moe’s appearance on Jersey Shore. This misguided alchemy that only creates more ambiguity about what exactly the Farrellys are hoping to accomplish.

            But the biggest misstep involves the boys themselves. In an obvious attempt to appease modern sensibilities, The Three Stooges sentimentalizes the relationship between the trio. Moe, Larry, and Curly were never obvious about their camaraderie; it was always felt and never stated. The real boys were classic Depression-era hard-knocks, never caring to apologize for their hostile knockabout. One eye poke led to another up until a cataclysmic finale, but to the end they remained crabby misanthropes. Perhaps in an attempt to appease modern sensibilities, the movie digs deeper into the dynamics of their companionship when a proposed adoption threatens to separate them as kids, as if we ever needed to be told that they were inseperable. Even harder to take is a later scene where Larry and Curly finally stand-up to the bullying Moe causing the bowelr-cut stooge to part ways in a heart-poking sequence. The real Moe Howard would have bashed their skulls together and the three would immediately jump back to the problem at hand. No time for humanity.

            For true loyalists, nothing will ever replace the Stooge glory days between 1934 to the mid-50s. But, imperfect as it is, The Three Stooges is as soulful a revival as we are likely to get. If it was to be attempted at all, then the Farrelly brothers did it mostly right.

SHREK 2

Shrek 2 is a bright and fun cartoon, but the magic of the first film had begun to wear off. It has some good laughs and clever new characters but with little of the excitement or heart of the original. Still, as far as animated sequels go, this is one of the better ones even though Toy Story 2 (and 3 for that matter) set that bar exceedingly high. Shrek 2 takes many plot turns and also involves a zany journey like the first Shrek, but there are too many characters and not enough attention to the returning stars.

            Shrek and Fiona are married but have still been blessed by her parents, who are still unaware that Fiona has married an ogre and remained one herself once the spell was broken. The green lovebirds are summoned to the Kingdom of Far Far Away where the royal parents live, Shrek is dragged along begrudgingly. The best gags in the film give us the mean green ogre from the first film in disgruntled resignation to domestic life. The big curmudgeon has been subdued by a lady ogre and when Fiona says they are going, he goes.

            There are many popculture references along the way, more so than in the first film. In the Far Far Away kingdom, itself modeled after Beverly Hills, there is a Farbucks coffee shop (and proving that satire as an intent doesn’t guarantee a free legal pass, DreamWorks was granted special permission by Starbucks to spoof their logo), a Baskin Robinhood , and the lettering of Far Far Away is modeled after the Hollywood sign.  These gags are mildly amusing at first, but the saturation comes quick.

            As expected, the King and Queen are a bit shocked to, but King Harold (John Cleese) is downright hostile to his daughter and son-in-law. The best thing to come from this bad start is funny dinner scene with ogre and monarch going at each other, the insults growing more and more passionate, culminating in the spoiling of the table’s suckling pig.

            From here on the narrative of Shrek 2 branches out. The king strikes a deal with the conniving Fairy Godmother (Jennifer Saunders) to have Shrek eliminated so that Fiona can marry the fairy’s son, Prince Charming (Rupert Everett), Fiona’s intended suitor, can marry her. Shrek, meanwhile, steals a beauty potion from the Fairy Godmother and after swallowing it becomes a cartoon stud complete with round features and toonish eyes, not unlike that of Disney’s buffoonish beefcakes like Casey the ballplayer and the love-struck mountain man from Make Mine Music. But the potion also has an effect on those the user has close to heart and so, back in the kingdom, Fiona reverts back to human form, more or less how she looked when she first met Shrek. If his plan works right, Shrek hopes to now be good enough for Fiona’s parents and live happily ever after with his princess bride. But, as he later asks, at what cost? He is an ogre at heart and we want him to be one. We do miss the swamp for much of this picture. As Shrek looks back at his beloved swamp as he rides away on the onion cart to the distant land, his sadness is ours.

            Anyway, the Fairy Godmother takes matters into her own hands and lets her son pass as the humanized Shrek. It’s convoluted to be sure, but the movie does tie into a neat endpoint.

            The appeal of Shrek 2, not to mention its success (it outdid Pixar’s hit Finding Nemo from the previous summer at the box-office) relies on our memories of the beloved characters from the first film. Without that background for context, Shrek 2 would hardly standout among DreamWorks’ variable oeuvre. The good news is that the familiar faces are still here and in top form, especially Eddie Murphy as Donkey. Shrek, too, has been developed to new levels and realizing that the green giant is susceptible to becoming hen-pecked is fun. Fiona has not only turned into an ogre permanently, she has even begun to enjoy some of the less hygienic habits of the creatures. Early in the movie she joins her hubby for a gassy dip in the muddy swamp. And when a conspicuously familiar looking mermaid makes a move on her husband, the extent of her jealousy makes for delightfully dark humor. This is, incidentally, another jab at Disney with a far nastier bite than anything in the first film. In 2003, Disney had punched DreamWorks back in Finding Nemo with Dory the fish lampooning Donkey’s “Pick me!” DreamWorks was true playing nice and came back with a vengeance with a rather unflattering joke on The Little Mermaid.

            Paradoxically, the best thing Shrek 2 brings to the table is a new cast of characters, many of which are wonderful creations. Above them all is Puss in Boots, a suave assassin hired by King Harold in his original attempt to have Shrek bumped off, but the feline ends up becoming an ally of the ogre. Puss is designed and developed with classic cartoon integrity and brought to life by the cooing voice of Antonio Banderas after plans to make him an English swordsman were dropped. The cat’s appeal proved to be so strong that he not only became a regular in the next two Shrek movies but spun off a film of his own that was surprisingly pretty good.

            Fairy Godmother and her rotten son are just as well vanquished here as few would care to see them again. Both Julie Andrews and John Cleese are under used and misused as Fiona’s parents, but the biggest (literally as well as figuratively) surprise in the film goes almost unmentioned. Mongo, the oversized version of the Gingerbread Man, is a fantastic surprise. This lumbering cookie, created by Shrek and friends to defeat the bad guys is a scream throughout and a nod to both the Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters and E.T.

            Shrek 2 is a pale shadow of its predecessor but the best of its sequels and as good as many sequels get. Good enough, anyway, to convince the DreamWorks team to keep the Shrek franchise going. The third film is the weakest link and may have contributed to the decision to trim the planned five films down to four. The fourth film was largely ignored, but then Puss in Boots came out and brought a smile once more. 

SHREK

To see Shrek is to be transported into a world of storybook beauty of green meadows and starry skies as beautiful as a clear summer night. But there is also something odd, wonderfully odd. There are plenty of familiar faces here from the best known fairytales, but they are up to modern jokes and sensibilities. References to the real world abound, from Tic Tacs to talks of the need for therapy after a long adventure.

            Shrek, DreamWorks’ crowning jewel, presents us with the best of both worlds. It loves folktales and classic fables, but it lives in contemporary times, revisioning with old storytellers like the Brothers Grimm imagined through modern interpretation. One of the most memorable examples” Snow White becomes an eligible bachelorette who “lives with seven men, but is not easy”.

            At its core, however, Shrek is a pure, delightful, comical adventure in the classic fairytale sense. Its origins, in fact, come from a children’s book by New Yorker cartoonist William Steig about a curmudgeonly green ogre living in an isolated swamp. Shrek takes this misanthropic brute and develops him into a misunderstood creature impossible not to love. Yes, he still wants to be left alone in the swamp where he dwells inside a hollow tree stump warning villagers to keep out by reposting their own “Beware Ogre” posters, but his misanthropy a forced lifestyle. His world, even though it is itself inhabited by weird characters, has shunned him and the townspeople would rather see him dead.

            But times are tough for all fairytale creatures in the kingdom these days. Lord Farquaad (John Lithgow), the megalomaniac ruler of the Kingdom of Duloc, has ordered them out of the kingdom so that he can expand his empire. Having no other place to go, the sprites become squatters in Shrek’s swamp. They’re all here from the Three Little Pigs to the Three Blind Mice. The ogre won’t have it, though, and sets off to confront Farquaad. Farquaad has a dilemma of his own. In order be king he must marry a princess and the one he desires, Fiona, is being held captive in a castle by a dragon. The conniving ruler sees an opportunity and strikes a deal with Shrek. If the ogre can bring Princess Fiona back safely he will order the unwelcomed guests off the swamp and return the property to Shrek.

            And so begins the journey to rescue the princess. In many ways, Shrek will take the shape of a traditional epic journey full of danger and adventure along the way. But Shrek is as much a satire of the conventional fable as Don Quixote is of ancient tales of daring knights. If Rocinante was less than a noble steed, at least he kept quiet. But against his will Shrek finds himself accompanied on his quest by an unrelentingly chatty Donkey with Eddie Murphy’s giddy motor-mouth. “Sure it talks,” Shrek says. “It’s getting him to shut up that’s the problem.”

            The humor lies in the very premise. A spoiled nobleman like Farquaad is too fickle to go and rescue the princess himself and so his traditional role is assumed by an ogre and his donkey, two of the least likely figures to set off on a path to heroism if you ask Hans Christian Andersen. Shrek 2 would heckle expectations further with Fiona’s intended champion arriving too late and looking for her in vain beyond yonder castle walls. For now, though, Shrek and Donkey move forth shattering clichés while still engaging in all the thrills of epic journeys much like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza strode off on their merry way bursting the bubble of stoic knighthood while (often unintentionally) creating a literary adventure like no other. A difference in Shrek, though, is that Don Quixote was, as many (though not all) would say, delusional and genuinely believed he was still a gallant knight-errant on a mission to save the world. Shrek, on the other hand, is well aware that he is going against the norm and cares very little for the laws of chivalry. Neither does he care to break them. He just wants to get the job done and get back to his home.

            Princess Fiona (Cameron Diaz), meanwhile, has remained in the castle tower harboring dream of an old fashioned fairytale rescue. A brave knight, she believes, will come sweep her off her feet, carry her beyond the castle walls, and they will live happily ever after. As Shrek said after reading such an ending as the film opens, “Yeah, like that’s ever going to happen.”

            But the beauty of Shrek rests on two levels. The stunning visuals continue to enchant more than a decade later. In 2001 they created a new standard early on for computer animation, creating vibrant landscapes evoking aspects of central Europe, Great Britain, and the enchanted forests of our collective imaginations.

            The other level is strength in characterization and each of the central players are more than what they seem to be. Princess Fiona has a few surprises of her own and by the end we are left to conclude that her dream of a classical rescue was purely an attachment to tradition. Tough girls appeared in animated movies before Shrek, but none held their own like Fiona. Donkey proves wiser than the typical comic sidekick, much like Mushu the diminutive dragon Murphy voiced in Disney’s Mulan. Donkey is really more of a reincarnation of Mushu than a parody as some have analyzed. Both are less majestic than their common counterpart (a giant dragon and a stallion), but both prove helpful beyond the comic relief. Ultimately, Shrek is willing to let his walls come down. He has a heart and wants his inner layers to be seen. He even has a sense of humor, usually at the expense of Lord Farquaad.

            If there is any hypocrisy in mocking Lord Farquaad for his short stature in a film so devoted to tolerance consider that Farquaad nastiness was not caused by his shortness but, rather, motivated by it. Take it this way, he looks down on his subjects as freaks and yet cannot come to terms with his own perceived imperfection. He compensates through decadence and tyranny. The joke is more on his hypocrisy than his height.

            Even the colorful cast of characters the travelers meet on the way have tricks up their sleeves. The dragon that so fiercely guarded the castle where Fiona was trapped herself has a problem not unlike Shrek’s. The movie also challenges the noble image of Robin Hood, who in this movie is inexplicably French and voiced by Vincent Cassel, then collecting a few English-speaking roles under his belt while dabbling in computer animation in his own country voicing Diego the saber-toothed tiger for the French version of Ice Age. 

            Feature cartoons from animation’s dark age (60s to early 80s) for their reliance on the established personas of character actors behind the voices for a lazy form of characterization. But times have changed and this is what is best loved about Hanna-Barbera’s animated TV stars. Yogi Bear is today loved by old fans of The Honeymooners for his Art Carney pattern and the similarities between Ralph Cramden and Fred Flintstone are so similar (at the time, Jackie Gleeson even considered a lawsuit against Hanna-Barbera that could have pulled the plug on the series before he was advised against this PR wrecking move) that their fan base often overlaps.

            Before animation moved to TV, cartoon voice actors were largely unknown. The few exceptions to this rule (Mae Questel as Betty Boop, William Costello and Jack Mercer as Popeye the Sailor Man, Clarence “Ducky” Nash as many of the Disney ducks, and Pinto Colvig got his start as Goofy before going to Bozo the Clown) become as known as they were because of the characters they voiced and not the other way around. In this era, only Mel Blanc became something of a celebrity in his own right for his pan-studio contributions. Bringing celebrities voices to animated features was seen as an easy instant character creation. It was tolerated for TV, were the quality of animation was limited anyway, but it was treated as shameful in theatrical films such as Disney’s The Aristocats and Robin Hood.

            Today, and 1992’s Aladdin (thanks to Robin Williams as the Genie) and 1994’s The Lion King may have been turning points, voicing cartoons has become a lucrative role for stars. The reluctance of older animators to this tactic has never been officially settled, but no one could have stolen the show better than Eddie Murphy as the voice of Donkey. The late Chris Farley had recorded most of Shrek’s voice when DreamWorks bought the rights to the book soon after opening in 1994. After his death in 1997, Mike Myers took over and it is doubtful anyone could have been more creative, combining his memories of his upbringing amongst Scottish-Canadians and his Fat Bastard from the Austin Powers films.

            Yes, voices are a major driving force to the popularity of Shrek. But many of the supporting characters, voiced by lesser known actors, are also granted one or two plum lines, mostly to throw jabs at Disney. DreamWorks was born out of a feud at Disney, when Jeffrey Katzenberg left the studio after a falling out with Michael Eisner. What better target for Shrek than Disney’s conformity? Disney was in the business of reimagining fairytales from early on, but never breaking the conventions. Many of the fabled characters that appear here are a mockery of their Disney makeover. Pinocchio lies about being a real boy and an awestruck Peter Pan marvels that Donkey “can fly” when pixie dust is spilled. For Donkey’s response, DreamWorks even hits Disney in their non-folklore department and takes a jab at the crows from Dumbo, “You ain’t never seen a donkey-fly!”

            Shrek was DreamWorks’s first biting punch at Disney, though the rivalry was clearly visible when DreamWorks released Antz to coincide with the release of Pixar’s A Bug’s Life in 1998. Shrek demonstrates the full extent of the hostility, with Eisner himself thinly disguised as the despot Lord Farquaad.

            The playful pranks directed at Disney and folklore in general are often funny, but they are balanced out by moments of genuine tenderness and poignancy. This is, at its core, a story about a longing for acceptance. Even the soundtrack is balanced in mood, from the joyful defiance of Smash Mouth’s “All Star” to the somberness of Rufus Wainwright’s rendition of “Hallelujah”, to reflect the duality of the film’s nature.

            Overall, however, Shrek is a fun glorious delight of the kind seldom brought to family movies. It’s an animated tour de force that is perhaps a reflection of its time. In the months before 9/11, America was still free from the wariness that the age of terrorism would bring and free to embrace both the prosperous boom in computer animation and the loving reworking of traditional fables. Shrek is a capsule in the best sense, reflecting the carefree optimism of the dawn of the 21^st century. By comparison, the three sequels it spawned grew increasingly dark in tone. But this first gem started a trend that changed animation. Even Disney has grown fond of tweaking antiquated rules with such films as Enchanted (which has some subtle retaliation at the Shrek franchise), Tangled, and The Princess and the Frog, a hand-drawn retelling of the old story set in Jazz Age New Orleans with African-American protagonists. It’s not just an update in location, but the heroine is put in charge of creating a happy ending.

            But Shrek did more for DreamWorks than establishing computer animation as its chief asset. In their first years, the studio tried to prove themselves against Disney’s might with traditionally animated films like The Prince of Egypt and The Road to El Dorado, but Disney had cornered that market and decent reviews did little to convince audiences otherwise. Shrek was a turning point with which DreamWorks discovered its strongest weapon. Rightfully, the studio has embraced the film as its first triumph and it remains their greatest accomplishment, good enough to stand head to head against Pixar.

            More than ten years later, however, it’s hard to watch Shrek without a slight sense of sadness. Sadness because we have seen just how seldom Western animation this good comes along. Shrek is one of its best moments and it remains something of a measuring stick, especially for DreamWorks.