{"id":275,"date":"2006-03-12T02:32:12","date_gmt":"2006-03-12T07:32:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=275"},"modified":"2006-03-20T10:03:26","modified_gmt":"2006-03-20T15:03:26","slug":"when-hollywood-gets-it-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=275","title":{"rendered":"When Hollywood Gets It Right"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My last two posts<br \/>\n(<a href='http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=273'>If Hollywood Were Really Brave<\/a><br \/>\nand <a href='http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=274'>Out of the Frame<\/a>)<br \/>\nhave slammed Hollywood pretty hard for cranking out preachy, boring crap<br \/>\nwhile congratulating itself on its bravery.  I&#8217;ll make it a triptych by<br \/>\nexamining some recent movies that I found truly excellent.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<h3>Lord Of The Rings (2001-2004)<\/h3>\n<p>Tolkien fans went into these movies dreading a disappointment and<br \/>\ncame out stunned by the power and fidelity with which director Peter<br \/>\nJackson (himself a lifelong fan) brought Middle-Earth to life.  It was<br \/>\na revelation that a fantasy film this good and this true to its<br \/>\nmaterials could get made inside the Hollywood system at all.  Most of<br \/>\nthe credit seems to go to Jackson, who insisted on doing it<br \/>\n<em>right<\/em>; but kudos to everyone in the cast (except the<br \/>\ninexplicably unconvincing Cate Blanchett) who clearly gave these movies<br \/>\neverything they had and then some.<\/p>\n<h3>The Incredibles (2004)<\/h3>\n<p>If there&#8217;s anyone out there who still thinks animated film has to<br \/>\nbe trivial entertainment or just for children, this is the movie to<br \/>\nnuke that misconception into vapor.  What an amazing and wonderful<br \/>\nwork of art this was &mdash; entertaining, intelligent, emotionally<br \/>\nrich, morally serious without being preachy, deeply humane. And with<br \/>\na tasty libertarian-verging-on-Objectivist subtext, too!<\/p>\n<h3>Serenity (2005)<\/h3>\n<p>And speaking of libertarian subtexts &mdash; this movie&#8217;s punchline<br \/>\nis the hardest slam against coercive social engineering I&#8217;ve ever<br \/>\nseen on film.  Along the way to it we get plenty of action, the<br \/>\nsuperb ensemble acting we&#8217;d come to expect from the TV series, humor,<br \/>\nhorrror and a lot of plain old visual gorgeousness. Extra points for<br \/>\nthe hot-chick-with-mad-kung-fu-skillz fight scene&#8230;<\/p>\n<h3>Open Range (2003)<\/h3>\n<p>I thought this was an underappreciated gem, a superb Western in the<br \/>\ntraditional style that even managed to extract a fine performance from<br \/>\nwithin Kevin Costner&#8217;s excessive self-regard.  Robert Duvall was even<br \/>\nbetter as the tough old trail-boss Costner&#8217;s ex-gunfighter rides with.<br \/>\nAnnette Bening barely holds up her end as the female lead, but that&#8217;s<br \/>\nOK; this is a film about men, and manhood, in the best sense of both<br \/>\nterms.  There&#8217;s one scene where she serves Costner&#8217;s and Duvall&#8217;s<br \/>\ncharacters tea; the wordless moment when the two are trying to fit<br \/>\ntheir work-gnarled fingers through delicate bone-china handles is one<br \/>\nof the most complex and poignant bits I&#8217;ve ever seen in a movie.<\/p>\n<h3>The Last Samurai (2003)<\/h3>\n<p>I&#8217;ve reviewed this movie in a previous blog entry; go <a href='http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=137'>there<\/a>.  Alas, the trend<br \/>\ntowards better historicals I was so happy about in 2003 didn&#8217;t<br \/>\ncontinue; instead, we got disappointments like <cite>Troy<\/cite> and<br \/>\nthe mega-craptacular <cite>Alexander<\/cite>.<\/p>\n<h3>Looney Toons: Back In Action (2003)<\/h3>\n<p>Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and the whole Warner Brothers posse rock<br \/>\nthe house old-school style. But this was no mere gag-fest; the chase<br \/>\nscenes running through famous paintings in the Louvre were art and<br \/>\nsatire and satire about art of a very high order (the chase through<br \/>\nDali&#8217;s <cite>The Persistence of Memory<\/cite> was particularly<br \/>\nbrilliant).  Marvin the Martian gets more screen time than his entire<br \/>\nprevious career put together, especially during the slam-bang finish<br \/>\nset in (animated) Earth orbit that wonderfully sends up the Star Wars<br \/>\nmovies and finally (finally!) lets Daffy be the hero.<\/p>\n<h3>Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)<\/h3>\n<p>This movie absolutely should not have worked.  The plot was thin,<br \/>\nthe maguffin was a ridiculous lift from a Disney amusement-park ride,<br \/>\nOrlando Bloom uttered a lifeless Errol Flynn imitation in lieu of a<br \/>\nperformance, and Keira Knightley forgot anything she might have known<br \/>\nabout acting (or possibly she was just stunned by the wooden quality of<br \/>\nthe script).  It was all redeemed by Johnny Depp&#8217;s incandescently<br \/>\nbrilliant turn as Captain Jack Sparrow, proving that a good enough<br \/>\nactor can bring life to even the most formulaic crap.  Depp didn&#8217;t<br \/>\njust carry this movie on his back, he spun it on one finger with an<br \/>\ninsouciant grin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My last two posts (If Hollywood Were Really Brave and Out of the Frame) have slammed Hollywood pretty hard for cranking out preachy, boring crap while congratulating itself on its bravery. I&#8217;ll make it a triptych by examining some recent movies that I found truly excellent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=275"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}