47 Ronin

The short version is – it was bad, but not nearly as bad as I had expected it to be.

The poster and trailer are misleading. It’s kind of ridiculous to promote the film on the basis of an image that centres on none of the characters from the main storyline – no Ouishi, no Kira, no Asano – but instead shows Keanu Reeves, the behind-the-scenes baddy, and then a mute warrior and Zombie Boy, who features for all of 4 seconds of screen-time. And then an image of burning ships in Dejima, none of which is an accurate representation of what happens in this film – including the dominance of Reeves. The trailer also led me to expect a very silly fantasy with almost nothing to do with the original pseudo-factual story, very possibly not even set in the Japan of our world.

Well, this was Japan-through-fanciful-Western-eyes. Daibutsu grow organically out of mountainsides and Tengu that look rather too much like they’re from Star Trek hide in misty temples testing outsiders to either kill or bless them. But that’s alright, because this is intentionally supposed to be fantastical and puts magical powers front and centre, both for a big special effects-laden climax and for a way to make Asano more sympathetic than in the original tale – rather than just driven to rage by insults, he is manipulated by a spell.

The main thing that doesn’t work here is Keanu Reeves. Not the performance, necessarily – he does as much as I think there was to do in the flimsy part, and obviously put a lot of work into the combat sequences – but his part in the story. There’s some interesting things to be said here about the place of the ‘other’ and how being foreign, especially half-and-half, is a shorthand for both not belonging and being able to somehow be possessed of advanced abilities, but mostly what comes over, constantly and unceasingly, is how the character does not deserve to be foregrounded and has been shoehorned into this story so that Americans will actually go and see it, because the wider public still cannot identify well enough with a non-White character. Much protestation may be made about this, but the fact is that to avoid being pushed into a world cinema-y subgenre, this sort of awkward addition is necessary – it’s crass, but it simply translates into ticket sales. Shame, but true.

But it just doesn’t work. There’s no real place in the story for this weird half-Japanese, half-British person who has a mysterious past, should definitely have been killed after pretending to be a samurai, and whose main function in the story is to (a) get weapons, (b) have a stone-cold romance and (c) be able to deal with the made-up magic witch with made-up magic of his own. Awkward and jarring throughout – and that’s before dialogue like ‘I’m not afraid of you.’ ‘You should be!’

Take him and the witch out, though, and you get a fairly solid retelling of the classic story with big names. A large chunk of the Japanese acting community who have previously appeared in Hollywood films are represented – cast members of Thor, Pacific Rim, Battle Royale (okay, not actually a Hollywood film, but big Stateside), The Last Samurai and, yes indeed, Mortal Kombat are in the film, as well as an obligatory pretty-boy – this one from Kat-Tun. There are changes to the original in order to affect motivations, some of which make sense, like having Asano be innocent of resorting to violence, and some of which don’t, like Ouishi not throwing off spies by pretending to be a drunkard and womaniser but being thrown into a pit and inexplicably released just in time to be able to ruin Lord Kira’s plans. The one pardoned Ronin is one we actually care about rather than the random messenger boy – though I think it’s more devastating when Ouishi Junior, age 16, has to join his comrades. The climactic action is changed from storming a house to storming a castle using a theatrical show, but otherwise it’s a fairly loyal retelling with some big-name actors and some nice moments of cheesy pathos. Actually flesh out some more of the Ronin using the time otherwise spent on Reeves and you could’ve had an interesting take. But then – probably not one that added much to the old classic in any case.

So there we have it. A fairly decent film masked by a tacked-on extra plot to broaden the appeal. I must say, I find myself wondering what the Japanese thought of this. Is it, as I suspect, rather like English audiences going to see a film version of Robin Hood in which there’s a magical half-Japanese Merry Man inexplicably always being centre-stage?

Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Well, this is the point that the adulation stops, I feel. The need to string the franchise out so far that The Hobbit, of all books, is stretched into three overlong films has ended in Original Character fan-fiction, daft elf fighting scenes that have gone from small but amazing vignettes in the first films to rather tedious video game-esque events with rather too much surfing on the bodies of foes, and a makeup department that is unable to make Orlando Bloom look less than twenty years older than in The Fellowship of the Ring. 

This film could certainly have been an hour shorter and just as good. There were a lot of extraneous sequences, and while Smaug is undoubtedly the highlight of the film and quite brilliant to watch, there was far too much of him being incapable of catching his prey before the cliffhanger that close-ups of a missing scale and a reveal of a hidden black arrow in Bard's house has totally robbed of any real tension. 

To me, the film felt like a series of highlights - escaping from the elves, battling orcs, Sylvester McCoy constantly stealing the show (despite that scene on the Hobbit set in the Doctor Who special) and of course, Benedict Cumberbatch's superbly smug Smaug. I'm also a fan of those lovely sweeping shots of the environments. But between those just came far too much of very little, and the little love triangle between two elves and the one non-daft-looking Dwarf who isn't going to be the king definitely isn't up to the best parts of this most impressive of series. I also wasn't too sure about giving Stephen Fry another role, for much as I love seeing him on screen, it was jarring and very much a moment to take the audience out of their involvement with the story. 

But for all I know it had major flaws, I did enjoy the vast majority of it. I certainly wouldn't want to have missed it, and apart from going a bit too far with the combat sequences - yes, even the one with the barrel - this is some of the most spectacular film-making it's possible to see. It's true that really, Peter Jackson could spew out any rubbish with this production team and cast and I'd lap it up, but...I must say, I have to wish that it had been better. And shorter. 

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

Thoughts on the original: link

So after this film, I was making jokes that book series that become huge hits because of female-dominated fandoms are all terrible. Yes, including Harry Potter. They were jokes, but…I must say I find it hard to provide much evidence to the contrary.

It may be no surprise, but I disliked Catching Fire. I actually had hoped that things would be more interesting in this film based on the possibilities of a wider story in the first, but…well, all that was promised there is still yet to come.

What I can’t fault are the blockbuster production values. The futuristic sets are superb, the direction, framing and editing work, the camerawork is no longer extremely annoying like in the first film and the performances are actually great, including the newly-introduced cast members. But again, it’s the writing I really have problems with.

I have huge problems with the fact that the film doesn’t work as a standalone story or as part of the overarching narrative. Alone, it’s deeply unsatisfying because it’s another total cop-out – Katniss and Peeta think they’re out of danger, but Katniss’s growing status as a symbol of defiance and revolution in a totalitarian society that, let’s face it, ought to be having a whole lot more uprisings than it does means that rather than simply being tortured into absolute subservience like a proper dictatorship would do, she’s put in for another Hunger Games against previous winners. Though this is built up to over an incredibly long time, it is for one thing completely stupid, as in reality everyone would have just died within a day with no survivors (much like the last games when they unleashed the CG dogs), but for another just like the first film raises lots of interesting moral questions about what will happen when the competition is whittled right down and Katniss has to start contemplating executing her allies, but then completely cops out and none of the promised tension ever reaches fruition, making the whole thing seem pointless. From the mastermind’s point of view, the whole exercise was stupid because Katniss was very likely to die many times over, and god knows what their original evacuation plan was because Katniss made hers up alone.

And worse, overall the film was just completely pointless. As I said, it basically ended at the point I thought it was start. The Capital really just let Katniss and Peeta go home unsupervised for months? And when they did, they didn’t slip away? The reasons Katniss has for not going, generally to do with her family and wanting to struggle from within rather than running, are reasonable, but only from a writing point of view to postpone action. And what is her action postponed for? This half-baked rehash of the first book that doesn’t even get anywhere. It would have been extremely easy for Collins to write a single scene that goes from Katniss and Gale contemplating leaving District 12 to the scene at the very end of this film, with none of what came in between. Thus, the film’s contents were superfluous and must be worthwhile alone – which they clearly weren’t.

It’s true that there are worst books out there. But after the first film, I said I was sad that this was being made rather than more His Dark Materials. Well, add Narnia to that. And colour me very disappointed that we get films of tripe like Eragon, Percy Jackson and Stormbreaker while superb YA books like Mortal Engines, The Wind Singer, Larklight and The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray never seem to get past preproduction. 

The Butler

A very worthy, pompous and sentimental film, The Butler nevertheless manages to hit the right emotional notes at the right time to frame neatly the guilt, the drama and the occasional incredibly brave spirits of the civil rights struggles in the latter half of the Twentieth Century in the United States – while making Hollywood studios a nice buck, in the time-honoured way.

Superb performances, a string of very pleasant surprises in the casting of successive actors as recognisable US presidents – some of them completely unexpected but actually inspired – and almost all of the heavy-hitting moments of the last sixty years of US history, from the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King to Vietnam, got checked off in the story of one Butler’s long tenure at the White House. Though it sounds like it could have been a fanciful bit of Hollywood invention and many critics have rightly likened it to Forrest Gump, it was based on the life of Eugene Allen, who genuinely did serve in the White House for 34 years, reaching prominence after a Washington Post article and living to see the first black president, though sadly not to see the film based on his life. He may have been uncomfortable with the interpretation in any case – while he was the inspiration for this film, his family life was entirely fictitious, from the traumas of his early childhood on a plantation to his sons highly symbolically going in very different directions, one to serve in Vietnam while the other became a black panther and ultimately a left-wing minor politician

Through the presence of a black man in the White House and the tensions between a father who has come from so little that he thinks his position is incredibly honourable and a son who thinks the black man serving the white is an abhorrent Uncle Tom, but layers of complexity are added with the butler – here named Cecil – gaining enough leverage to begin to fight for equal wages for black and white staff, and a fictitious but excellent quote from the film’s briefly-glimpsed Martin Luther King on the way a ‘black domestic’ can be subversive without knowing it.

There is much to recommend The Butler – the fantastic performances, especially from Forest Whitaker, Cuba Gooding Jr and Lenny Kravitz, and Oprah did her bit nicely too, though I think the filmmakers knew the audience was never going to be suckered into too sentimental a moment with her. I also loved how shellsuits are so perfect a shorthand for a certain era. But if you don’t want to go to the cinema to feel slightly manipulated and preached to, there may be more enjoyable choices.