Desert Bomb: Dune

Desert Bomb: Dune

Before I get down to serious ripping and shredding, I need to get this off my chest.

As a baby boomer, I read and thrilled to Frank Herbert‘s prescient, imaginative, and mythic futuristic novel. Canadian director Denis Villeneuve, of murky self-important Arrival fame, has taken it upon himself to launch an almost-three hour cinema version of Dune. This was an error of epic proportions. The badness of this film is the only thing close to epic in this exercise of cine-waste so awful, so clueless, so dis-inspired as to defy reason.


Villeneuve’s Dune is also murky, lethargic, impenetrable, and boring.  What he has done to a seminal text should be illegal, like using the Holy Grail as a jello mold. All I could think, as I reeled out of the theater on a salt high, thanks to over-priced movie popcorn, was: how could I get back those three hours of my life?

Grab a sharp stick, aim it squarely at your left eye (or right, whatever you like) and stab! You will thus experience a more pleasurable sensation than that delivered by the clueless Canadian and his unpleasant cast.

Okay.

Now I can begin. I’ll start with the most egregious error made by this bloated production team: casting. It’s hard to recall casting this misguided, even hilarious, since that big blonde gentile Charlton Heston sauntered down the mountain with stone tablets in The Ten Commandments.

Starting with the worst: wasp-waisted Timothee Chalamet as the fierce, psychicically gifted messianic avatar Paul Atriedes. Chalamet would be fine in a bio-pic playing the young Oscar Wilde. Ideally in a film without any speaking parts. Chalamet was wretched as well as utterly unbelievable as the heir apparent to a powerful royal dynasty as well as leader of the new eco-desert utopia on Arakis. Yet, there might be five minutes of this almost 3-hour film in which the anorexic teen idol does not appear. He is so not up to the task that his mere presence inspires fantasies of the merely awful Kyle MacLachlen in David Lynch’s lackluster attempt to bring Dune to the screen 40 years earlier.

Maybe worse is the presence of Oscar Isaac. His mere presence on-screen is cause for genuine alarm, but to watch him attempt something like gravitas as Paul’s ill-fated father Duke Leto Atriedes is akin to enduring a three-hour root canal procedure. Does no one understand the importance of vocal power and nuance in filmmaking these days?

Rebecca Ferguson as Paul’s mother, the supernaturally trained Lady Jessica who teaches her son the special powers of her psychic order the Bene Gesserit, has an appropriately intelligent voice. We believe that she believes what she’s saying. Yet she, as all the others, is sabotaged again and again by a silly script.

And Josh Brolin as the adroit, amiable fight master Gurney Halleck? Not bloody likely. Brolin, with his Marine haircut and fatigues, looks like he stepped out of another film, and another timeline. He should have checked in with his acting coach before filming. So should Sharon Duncan-Brewster, who looks great as the double agent Shadout Mapes, but again, appears to have no working knowledge of the script, its language (English), or its meaning.

Another who needs slapping around is the once great  Javier Bardem, a wooden cartoon of the mighty warrior of the desert tribe, the Fremen. All I could think of was Anthony Quinn as the Bedouin leader in Lawrence of Arabia. Quinn was more believable.

Here I’ll circle back on poor matinee-idol-du-jour Chalamet, who is burning through his fifteen minutes like an addict through fentanyl. So physically wraith-like and awkward as to mock the idea that he could match knives with the Fremen soldier who calls him out, Chalamet appears not to understand or care what he is doing. Indeed, he appears embarrassed to be in front of the camera, especially given the lingering closeups he has to endure. Is he Villeneuve’s fantasy boy?

I’m too exhausted to continue.

My next installment of Dune demolition will involve asking whether ponderous camerawork, massive explosions and a behemoth score can actually substitute for a script, dramatic tension, excitement, inspiration, and/or (god help us) acting.

to be continued…..

Desert Bomb: Part II

Desert Bomb: Part II

Just thinking about continuing my assessment of Denis Villeneuve’s bloated bomb makes me reach for the gin. You’ll recall I decided to address whether ponderous camerawork, massive explosions and a behemoth score can actually substitute for a script, dramatic tension, excitement, inspiration, and/or (god help us) acting.

Courage!

Rarely has so much money been thrown at such an empty concept for remaking an earlier semi-bomb. At least the original 1984 Dune had a certified genius—David Lynch—sinking the ship.

Uniforms like these aluminum foil origami jumpsuits, [see above shot of special-needs actor Josh Brolin posing next to self-important actor Oscar Isaac] made me nostalgic for the spectacle of Kyle MacLachlan fighting uber-hunk Sting in the original cinematic Dune.

But onward! Visuals: Shall we begin by asking how many Architectural Digest decorators it took to polish the concrete fortress walls of the House of Atreides? Tunnels of grey, leading to rooms of grey, occasionally occupied by individuals in grey. I’ve seen bus station waiting rooms with more style than the royal chambers of our central figures. The camera obsesses over the acreage of grey that forms the central heart of this lumbering film.

Maybe the interiors were designed by fashion people, you know, Prada, or Chanel, or Alexander McQueen so that when the female actors glide from one grey hall to another, we could admire the way their diaphanous robes billow in the wind machine airflow. Yes. That must have been the thinking behind the cavernous, dark interiors. Catwalks of the future. [Note the post-Taliban exoskeletons in which our principals are dressed for desert life.]

And how about the decision to have big guy Jason Momoa, playing the wiley Duncan Idaho, do his acting entirely with his eyebrows! Ugh.

How about long, self-indulgent camera shots? The Valium-scented overhead shots, the countless drone shots, the shots designed to substitute for the missing: A) script, B) insight, C), narrative arc, or D) dramatic tension. No worries. Just keep the camera rolling, tack on an extra half hour, and gamble that the Cannes crowd will eat it up.

Another secret of Villeneuve’s concept: no editing. Just take after take after take. Again for reasons noted above: keep viewers off-balance so they won’t notice the vacuity of the cinematic text.

And throw in many explosions. Explosions requiring loud booms. Here the visual barrage meets the sonic barrage.

Score: And that brings me to the once-notable Hans Zimmer, composer for Gladiator, The Lion King, Inception, and a few others. In this film, Zimmer’s mega-decible score does most of the heavy lifting, drama-wise. During the final, interminable, 45 minutes of Dune (the one with teen throb Timothee Chalamet ((don’t get me started on the pretentious spelling of his name!))), Zimmer’s score IS the film. This device of making the sound do the work is cheap and obvious. Villeneuve ran out of ideas very early on, even though Frank Herbert (the book’s author) provided plenty of them. So he just cranked up Zimmer’s score, threw in explosions and Bob’s your uncle.

Loud. Very loud. And when the film still fails to revive movie-goers who have by now fallen into comas unalleviated by either popcorn or diet Cokes, Zimmer & company simply make everything louder.

And slow. Slow sand. Slow explosions. Slow loud music.

Let’s review: Dune is a book of eco prophecy, laced with compelling mythology, labyrinthean power conflicts, inventive sorcery and mysticism set in the heart of a desert scented by spice. And not just any spice. Spice that allows the consumer to intuit thoughts, feelings, and events both intimate and far into the future. At the center of this story is a young man who, thanks to his mother’s power and clairvoyance has been bred to exist in many temporal states at once. Yes my friends, long before Keanu Reeves, Paul Atriedes was The One. And no my friends, Timothée (pretentious spelling) Chalamet, is NOT The One.

Spend a more pleasant two and a half hours filling out tax forms, or calling AT&T Customer Service and waiting on hold to a continuous loop of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

Caveat Emptor! and if there is a god, Villeneuve will find himself without the funding to continue his cruel dismantling of Dune.

Oscar Post Mortem

Oscar Post Mortem

th.jpgThe collaborative selfie (thanks to über hunk Bradley Cooper) was a delightful moment amongst rather predictable turns on the stage.

Harrison Ford will probably not be asked back. Nor will poor Kim Novak.

Alfonso Cuaron was an elegant recipient of the Best Director award – but his outstanding film Gravity, which won seven awards, was robbed of its rightful Best Picture Oscar.

Everybody knows that. But still, it was the huge and obvious snub.

Ditto Leonardo DiCaprio‘s non-Oscar for Best Actor.

Cate Blanchett’s crass and ungraceful acceptance speech should pretty much confine her to Australia for the rest of her acting career. But it was made up for by the stirring remarks from Jared Leto who managed to be both political and sincere.
Meryl Streep proved once again that she’s not only a great screen presence, but she’s also a real player.

And why on earth so much time was spent on “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” instead of a photo-montage tribute to both Shirley Temple and Philip Seymour Hoffman I’ll never know!!

Loved Ellen. The pizza. Fab.

The critics and I do not agree…

The critics and I do not agree…

wolf.jpgIt’s lewd, it’s crude, and it alternately glamorizes and villifies one of the dirtiest demimondes of capitalism. It’s also outrageously entertaining, vibrantly directed, and loaded with memorable performanes.

The Wolf of Wall Street will literally split the viewing public in half: those repulsed, and those fascinated. It also — finally — brought me around to what a huge talent is Leonardo diCaprio. (If Jonah Hill doesn’t take the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor then the Academy is truly deaf, dumb, and blind.)
Did I mention that it was lewd and crude? No, really. Very.

Oscar Mash-up @ KZSC on Tuesday Feb. 12

Tune in to Bruce Bratton’s juicy Universal Grapevine program, next Tuesday—February 12, at 7:30 and you’ll get to hear me and film critic Lisa Jensen go boca a boca with Bruce about our Oscar picks, and favorite films of 2012.

That’s KZSC 88.1 FM.
The gloves are off!

Zero Dark Thirty

Zero Dark Thirty

Set aside the debate about whether or not this film endorses the use of torture as an zerodark2.jpgenhanced interrogation tool.  There are other issues plaguing this film by director Kathryn Bigelow, and they primarily involve the curiously empty—or at least vaguely characterized—center of the action, a fledgling CIA operative named Maya (Jessica Chastain).

I loved and admired Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, a taut, bravura war film that packed an authentic emotional punch. And while I was mostly caught up in Zero Dark Thirty (the echo of many Vietnam vets’ favorite slang for “early,” as in “we had to get up at O dark thirty”), and riveted by its expert visual and verbal architecture—I didn’t love it.  And I have puzzled since then over why I didn’t love it. Then it came to me: Jessica Chastain! Wrong. Utterly wrong!  Too pretty, too fragile, too unbelievable—especially the voice, a voice lacking in anything like authority. A high-pitched voice in a masculine power context is clearly a cry for condescension.

My concern with this bracing story of the roughly ten-year “hunt” for Osama bin Laden has to do with the choice of lead actress — a choice, however, that might ruin the film’s believability in order to make a more subtle political point.

As Bigelow’s film dramatizes (more…)