jhobson1 Reviews

The Phantom of the Opera (2004)

A great opera could be made from the novel, but this isn't it

[3/10 · 8 June 2005]

The film looks gorgeous. The costumes, the sets, the colors are all magnificent. The acting isn't bad, Simon Callow and Minnie Driver are both great in supporting roles, and everyone can sing.

However: Andrew Lloyd Weber has a reputation for giving his works a few catchy melodies and reusing these. Over and over. And then repeating them. This reputation is, unfortunately, fully lived up to here. I kept thinking of Lloyd Weber's Requiem, with its magnificent "Pie Jesu" and its revolting "Dies Irae" -- the second of which is used far too often.

Moreover, there are two glaring anachronisms in the film. First, dancers in 1871 did not "vogue", as is shown in the Masquerade sequence. Second, the Phantom's opera Don Juan would have been hounded off the stage in 1871. Lloyd Webber should have tried to imitate 19th century operatic style when writing the music for it -- after all, some have accused him of plagiarizing Puccini in Evita. Too bad he didn't do that here.

Oh, and in 1870 and 1871, there were these minor affairs known as the Siege of Paris and the Paris Commune. Not mentioning them is akin to setting a play in Washington, DC in 1864/1865 and not mentioning the Civil War.

Braveheart (1995)

More unhistorical than many

[2/10 · 30 May 2005]

Braveheart really messes up the history. For example, it has Robert the Bruce starting the Battle of Bannockburn within minutes of hearing of Wallace' death. I know that news traveled more slowly in those days, but Wallace was killed on August 23, 1305 and Bannockburn was fought on June 23 and 24, 1314. The report of Wallace's death did not take nine years to get from London to Edinburgh. There was a battle fought between the Scots and the English a year after Wallace's execution, but the Battle of Methven on June 19, 1306 was a decisive victory for the English.

King Edward I, AKA Longshanks, did not die simultaneously with Wallace. He died on July 7, 1307.

The movie suggests that Wallace had an affair with Isabella of France, and that she was pregnant with his child at the time of his execution. As the real Isabella had been in France all her life until she married Edward II in 1308 -- and Wallace was never in France -- that would have been impossible. There is also the minor matter of Isabella being a child of ten when Wallace died

That whole bit about English lords having the right to sleep on the "first night" with any newly married woman before her husband is crap. There was never such a "right". For one thing, can you imagine anything which would be more likely to incite revolts? For another thing, marriage law was determined by the Church. The Church has always supported marital fidelity. Any king or lord who tried to push this "right" would find himself excommunicated.

The Scots did have legitimate complaints against the English. But this pretended Prima Nocte was not one of them

Rock Island Trail (1950)

Something not in this movie which should have been

[4/10 · 29 May 2005]

I saw this movie, and wanted to see just how accurate it was, so I looked at a history of the Rock Island Railroad. I discovered that Iowa City posted a $50,000 bonus to the builders if the railway reached the station in the town and a train came into the station on or before midnight December 31, 1855.

On December 31st, in a temperature of 30 degrees below zero, the rails were just 1,000 feet short of their goal. Crews worked feverishly to finish the job. Ties were dropped on the staked earth and rails spiked hurriedly in place. Finally, with only minutes to go, a signal was given for the engine to approach. It couldn't move, because it was frozen to the track. With the help of every available man, they pushed the engine into the station with only seconds to spare.

This would have made an exciting sequence for the film, and it would have been historically accurate. But they didn't even try to put it in.

Alexander (2004)

This movie is a mess

[1/10 · 26 November 2004]

Rarely have I ever seen such a disjointed film. It alternates between florid and turgid, like Cecil B DeMille on a bad day. Its scale is vast, but lacks real grandeur. The two major battle scenes are confusing. In the first, the Battle of Gaugamela, there is a great shot showing the opening of the battle from an eagle's point of view, but this is the only shot which gives us any real sense of what is going on. Otherwise it's Macedonian hoplites and cavalry against Persians with the Persian king Darius deserting the field for no apparent reason (he has plenty of unused reserves and has clearly outflanked Alexander).

The second battle, against elephants in India, is merely confusing. And strange colors in part of the sequence -- red leaves on the trees -- doesn't help matters. Stone should sit down and watch some Kurosawa to see how to film a battle.

Anthony Hopkins, as Ptolomy, tries to let us know what is going on with narration. This is not entirely successful. For example, Alexander's conquest of Egypt is reduced to a couple sentences. There is also a flashback late in the film to the assassination of Alexander's father, Philip (Val Kilmer) It would have made more sense to have shown this in its proper place.

Colin Farrell, sporting the worst hair dye since Milla Jovovich in The Fifth Element, stumbles through his role as the sexually ambiguous, driven conqueror. His relationship with Hephaistion (Jared Leto with too much eye-liner) is curiously understated. The two men hug but never kiss and whether or not they go to bed together is only hinted at. There is a body servant of Alexander who seems spend much of his time just standing around, looking sloe-eyed.

Alexander marries, for no apparent reason, and against the advice of his generals, a woman named Roxana, with whom he has one night of passion and then promptly loses interest.

Alexander's relationship with his mother, played by Angelina Jolie, borders on the incestuous. She comes across as a combination of snake charmer, Lady Macbeth and stereotypical Jewish mother (she sends Alexander a letter that can be summed up as "you never call, you never write, why don't you come home and marry a nice Greek girl"). Jolie is far too young to be playing the adult Alexander's mother and speaks with an accent that sounds like Natasha Fatale. Most of the other Greeks speak with Irish accents, except for Anthony Hopkins, Christopher Plummer and Brian Blessed who sound English.

Alexander keeps driving his troops onward for no apparent reason. Towards the end, some of them mutiny because they haven't seen their homes and families for over eight years. They are bogged down in an endless campaign in India. Alexander, in one of the worst speeches to the troops ever, can't give them a reason for not going home. So he just has the leaders of the mutiny killed and then gets into another battle in which he is nearly killed. Then he goes home, crossing a desert. A sequence which should have been reminiscent of Napoleon retreating from Moscow is reduced to one shot and a couple of lines of narration.

My basic problem with the film is that we never get any sense of why Alexander acted as he did. Farrell stumbles through his role, not giving us any real clues about the man himself. In any biography, we need to understand the main character. Apparently, neither Farrell nor Stone understand Alexander, so of course the audience doesn't understand him either.

One last comment: Alexander's death was such an homage (a kindlier word than "rip-off") to Citizen Kane that I expected him to say "Rosebud".

JAG: A New Life: Part 1 (1995) Season 1, Episode 1

Go navy!

[6 July 2004]

My wife is a real fan of this show, so I've seen quite a few episodes. Just once, I would like to see an episode where the US Navy itself was made to look less than perfect.

To judge from this program, when you get promoted in the navy, you gain wisdom with each stripe. On the other hand, if you don't think well of the navy, you are a cad and a scoundrel, acting from the basest motives.

My father was a regular navy officer and my brother put 20 years in the navy (mostly on submarines) and they had plenty of examples of institutional stupidity in the navy.

Don Juan DeMarco (1994)

Magical realism

[8/10 · 6 July 2004]

One of my favourite literary genres is Magical Realism -- I have seriously considered learning Spanish so I could read Gabriel García Márquez in the original. For those of you who are not familiar with it, it is characterized by elements of the fantastic woven into the story with a deadpan sense of presentation. One of the best examples of this is the opening sentence of One Hundred Years of Solitude: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

Don Juan DeMarco struck me as being magical realism.