JOHN CARTER - Disney's ginger stepchild

JOHN CARTER is a movie so unloved by its studio that before it was released it was almost possible to recast it in its own Hollywood "underdog story".  Over the past six months, articles in the trade press have bemoaned Disney's lack of marketing strategy - the pre-commitment to the 60 second Superbowl ad (which was underwhelming at best) - dropping the "OF MARS" from the title.  The studio chief seems to have been backing his way out of the door, pushing blame for this fiasco on his predecessor - and, make no mistake, this movie IS a fiasco. A tent-pole movie whose budget is a reported £250m plus marketing, with no A-list stars and no brand-name recognisable source text.  Even a superbly made movie would struggle to earn this kind of money back, and JOHN CARTER isn't superbly made.  For that, I guess we have to blame writer-director and Pixar golden-boy Andrew Stanton (UP, WALL-E, TOY STORY, FINDING NEMO).  A director who has come across as so defensive on his UK press tour as to alienate his potential audiences.  His basic stance seems to be "we make the movies we wanna make: so screw the audience and the studio.  Steve Jobs told me we were hired for our taste."  Sub-text: if we, the humble ticket-paying audience don't like the movie, it's on us - we just aren't tasteful enough. It's also completely disingenuous to suggest that Stanton makes movies without studio pressure. If so, why the extensive re-cutting, the expensive re-shoots, the change in title, the retro-fitted 3D?  All of which are the studio's desperate attempt to get back more cents on the dollar than investors in Greek sovereign debt.  (Prognosis - probably about the same i.e. 30 cents on the dollar.)

All the negative press had made me perversely desperate to like JOHN CARTER - to become its champion. But sadly, the movie didn't give me anything.  It was just dull over-produced nonsense - a sort of trashy sci-fi B-movie that, despite its egregious budget, still managed to look pretty cheesy - a movie that hinted at action-adventure serials in the FLASH GORDON or INDIANA JONES or STAR WARS style, but failed to live up to any of them.  (Not that there's anything wrong with B-movies - we all love FLASH GORDON - but there's no need to spend more than, say, £70m, on a B-movie).  Apparently, the movie is based on an early twentieth century serial by Edgar Rice Borroughs (he of TARZAN fame) that ran to some 13 instalments. I have no interest in seeing any more.

So what's it all about, Alfie?  John Carter (Taylor Kitsch) is a Confederate cavalryman, mysteriously transported to Mars where he uses his new super-strength (thanks to low gravity) to intervene in the war between Helios (good guys) and Zodanga (bad guys). He does this by enlisting the help of the hitherto neutral Tharks (the Ewok/Na'avi of this flick).  In the process, Carter falls for the Helios' Princess Dejah (Lynn Collins) saves her from a forced marriage to the Zodanga Prince Sab Than, foils the manipulations of the mysterious Thern (Mark Strong) and brokers a reconciliation between a Thark father and daughter (Willem Dafoe and Samantha Morton). Not bad, huh?!

This is your basic sci-fi, space-romance story in the B-movie style.  All good fun.  So what went so horribly wrong? Well, for a start, it just isn't fun to watch! The dialogue and delivery is remarkably po-faced and earnest.  The only actor who looks like he's having any fun at all is James Purefoy as a Helios General in the HBO Rome Mark Anthony mould.  Purefoy is a scene-stealer, and left me wondering what this movie had been like if he had been cast as John Carter instead of pretty boy and ex-Friday Night Lights star, Taylor Kitsch. Purefoy would've been more age-appropriate for a start, and has so much more charisma than Kitsch, who comes across as a whimpering pasty bouncing ball.  


Which brings me to the next problem: the look of the actors.  The movie is set on Mars, so of course, the Martians have to have red skin. Problem is, they just look like they've have had Essex-style bad fake tans (orange-heavy) and their costumes are so plastic-fantastic they look like cheap action figures.  Which brings me to the next problem.  Poor Lynn Collins - the female love-interest - is made to where a series of revealing costumes that are clearly catering to the same teen-boy fantasy as Princess Leia's bikini.  This sits ill with the fact that Collins is not a conventional beauty. I applaud that casting - it makes the fact that the Princess is a science geek more credible than, say, casting Megan Fox - but it seems hypocritical to make so much of her brains and fighting smarts, while dressing her like Martian Barbie. 

And this uneasy juxtaposition brings me to my final, and biggest problem with the film: its need to bely its B-movie status my pumping up the emotional gravity. Do we really need the father-daughter angst in the Thark storyline, for instance? Cutting that could've got the movie down to a 90 minute run-time for a start. And worst of all, the most crass scene is one where John Carter in battle is inter-cut with a flash-back to him digging his wife's grave on Earth.  No-one needs that kind of crass emotional manipulation in the midst of a good old-fashioned punch-up.  The inter-cutting was utterly unearned and utterly unsuccessful. Much like the rest of this unloved ginger stepchild of a movie.

JOHN CARTER is on global release in all bar Portugal, where it opens next weekend, and Japan, where it opens on April 13th.

London Film Fest 2010 Day 8 - MIRAL

Julian Schnabel's latest feature, MIRAL, is a deeply frustrating movie. There's a brilliantly tense ticking bomb scene intercut with Roman Polanski's REPULSION; Schnabel's trademark fluid handling of the camera; and somewhere underneath the soap-opera-bad romance there's a genuinely fascinating drama. But man, does it get swallowed up by the hammy dialogue and piss-poor acting that surrounds it.

The movie is set in post-WW2 Jerusalem. Hiam Abbas plays Hind Husseini - the real life educator who sacrificed her personal life and wealth to run an orphanage/school for Palestinian refugees. Her struggle to keep her orphanage is lightly sketched in with a few comments and a rather redundant cameo from Willem Dafoe. Her story is the movie I would have wanted to see. What in her childhood gave her the fortitude and integrity to sacrifice her life? How did she navigate the slippery local politics and raise the money necessary? How did she really feel about never marrying?

The problem is that her story is down-played in favour of the story of Miral - one of her pupils. Miral is the daughter of a deeply emotional disturbed mother (Yasmine Al Massri in a very strong cameo performance) and a sympathetic but floundering father (Alexander Siddig). He places Miral in the school, trying to protect her from radical politics and danger. But as Miral becomes a teenager, she gets radicalised by seeing a village bull-dozed. This could have set us up for a fascinating drama playing off emotions against intelligence - and the very real and important choice between overt action and the longer game. But Rula Jebreal's script (she is the real-life Miral) keeps giving us glimpses of something interesting - say Miral's friendship with a Jewish girl - but refuses to explore it, reverting back to soap opera dialogue and emotional.

So, what do we have in the end? A movie that is a joy to behold, thanks to Schnabel's fluid camera and talent for capturing light - a movie that is earnest in its intentions - but ultimately one that is marred by the fact that it has cast an Indian girl who can't act in the central role, and its incredibly poor script.

MIRAL played Venice and Toronto 2010. It opens in Germany on November 18th and in the UK on December 3rd. It opens in the USA on March 25th.

MY SON, MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE?

You go in to a movie directed by Werner Herzog and produced by David Lynch with a certain expectation of Weird. You come out thinking, “What just happened here?” You struggle with your own feelings – did you enjoy the film? Is that even a possible outcome here? Maybe it’s just about levels of being unnerved? We’re not in Kansas anymore.

The story is simple enough. Brad McCullum (Michael Shannon – in serious danger of being typecast) is an actor who has become so obsessed with Elektra that he has murdered his over-protective mother. His girlfriend knew he was becoming increasingly unhinged, but the fact that she was with him at all, given his weird emotional tics, shows that she’s no judge of character. But then again, a Herzog film is often peopled with characters who are weird without being sinister – without there being a narrative purpose to it. Udo Kier’s theatre director is certainly strange and bizarre and unnerving, but he’s not actually menacing. The same applies to Willem Defoe’s detective, who appears to be immune to the weirdness that engulfs him, and this immunity makes him as strange as the man he’s staking out. At let’s not even discuss the craziest character of all – Brad’s insane ostrich-farming Uncle Ted (Brad Dourif). It’s as though Herzog is making a point about the inherent oddity of suburban life. Yes, he’s saying, this shit may seem unutterably weird to you viewers, but if you look beyond those white picket fences, this is really the level of oddity on which we’re operating. And that brings us firmly into the realm of David Lynch.

And so you end up with a film that combines both Herzogian and Lynchian strangeness. An obsession with mutated chickens; aggressive ostriches; a random interlude in Peru; and endless tableaux vivants; put us firmly in Herzog territory. The casting of the default-crazy Grace Zabriskie; the inclusion of a milk-sop girlfriend; and the fetishisation of a food; put us firmly in Lynch territory.

How can you respond to a movie in which the plot is propelled by a murder and an abduction, but basically nothing happens? In which every crazy character is trumped by another? This movie isn’t so much an empathetic experience as a spectacle. I still can’t tell you if I enjoyed it. But I know I won’t forget it in a hurry.

Additional tags: Ernst Reijseger, Loretta Devine, Brad Dourif

MY SON, MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE? played Venice and Toronto 2009 and was released in Portugal earlier this year. It is currently on release in the UK and Italy and was released on DVD in the US last week.

Wes Anderson's THE FANTASTIC MR FOX to open London 2009

After the genius of BOTTLE ROCKET and THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS and the self-indulgent fiascos of THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU and THE DARJEELING LIMITED, all eyes are on Wes Anderson's next project, an animated adaptation of the Roald Dahl classic, THE FANTASTIC MR FOX. Set for release in the UK on October 23rd and in the US on November 13th, the movie will open the London Film Festival this year. Let's hope it can break the hoo-doo of recent open films which have all been picked on commercial rather than critical grounds - mediocre, solid but that's all. I give you films such as THE CONSTANT GARDENER, FROST/NIXON and oh, that awful biopic, SYLVIA. So far, things look good. We have a voice cast stuffed with Anderson regulars - Owen Wilson, Angelica Huston - but we also have top notch British characters - Michael Gambon, Helen McCrory - not to mention genuine Hollywood A-list in Meryl Streep (stepping in for Cate Blanchett as Mrs Fox). I also love that Anderson has gone back to old school stop motion animation. Sounds, if not fantastic, given his recent record, at least intriguing....