Trailers of the Week — Our Patron Saint of Surviving Double Standards

by Gabriel Valdez

Some of you know this blog treats Kristen Stewart as something of a champion. You can read why here, but the brief reason is that she’s been effectively blackballed from studio filmmaking for having an affair, while the man she slept with, Rupert Sanders – her director, twice her age, with a wife and children – never received similar treatment from the industry and has been offered his choice of big-budget studio projects.

Another director, Frank Darabont, won the directing job for Snow White and the Huntsman 2 by pitching the plot that most effectively cut Stewart out of the franchise she launched. So we champion Kristen Stewart here (or at least Vanessa and I do; we’re not a hivemind) because an attitude that holds young women accountable for affairs yet rewards old men with families for them deserves every ounce of vitriol we can muster.

CAMP X-RAY
Oct. 17

All of that is immaterial when it comes to Camp X-Ray. This just looks like a good film. Stewart gets a bad rap as an actress for her part in a Twilight franchise in which everybody – even Michael Sheen and Dakota Fanning – indisputably sucked. People neglect her roles in The Messengers, Into the Wild, Welcome to the Rileys, and The Runaways. That’s certainly a better resume than most of the actors involved in Twilight boasted.

Kristen Stewart with a chip on her shoulder and something to prove, in a film with a chip on its shoulder and something to prove? That’s something I want to see.

Camp X-Ray. It’s about the soldiers assigned to a particular section of Guantanamo Bay, a military prison that holds its prisoners free of international law, trial, and in violation of the Geneva Convention. (Barack Obama campaigned on closing it in 2008. It is still open today.)

The film follows a friendship that develops between Stewart’s Private Amy Cole and a prisoner named Ali Amir. As a guard, her job is not to keep him imprisoned; it’s to keep him from killing himself.

RED ARMY
Jan. 22

A sports movie for people who hate sports movies? What if I like sports movies? The closest I’ve ever gotten to understanding the sports camps of Soviet Russia is catching the rerun of Rocky IV on a lazy Sunday afternoon. You see, the key to boxing is glistening as hard as you can.

Children would dream of growing up to play hockey or wrestle for the USSR in the Olympics, and when they achieved that, they would dream of escaping the nearly year-round sports camps (read: prisons) that were dedicated to perfecting athletes whether they liked it or not.

An investigation of Soviet Russian policies and their mutual obsession with the United States through the lens of sports? That’s what documentary is made for.

AMERICAN SNIPER
Dec. 25

Never count Clint Eastwood out. Regardless of conversations with empty chairs, the man is still a consummate director obsessed with plumbing the depths of the American experience. His politics rarely make it into his films, at least not in the way you’d expect.

American Sniper, starring Bradley Cooper, looks powerful. Its trailer comes across not like a tease but as a statement in and of itself. It’s the kind of film – centered around a lone figure, juxtaposing family life against dangerous work, tension inherent to the job – that plays to all of Eastwood’s strengths as a director. Cooper himself is a burgeoning talent, only now getting the recognition and roles he deserves after films like Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle.

THE WATER DIVINER
No date set

As I pointed out in last week’s special feature, it’s looking like a banner year for Australian film. Add Russell Crowe’s directorial debut, the tale of a father who travels to post-World War I Turkey in order to find his three dead sons.

You can see the edges of the movie’s budget in the trailer, but there are a number of factors recommending this film anyway. The most obvious is wondering what Crowe can bring as a director. Some of the visuals here look compelling. I already know what he can bring as an actor. That’s another reason.

Then there’s the story dealing with the aftermath of the Gallipoli campaign. Gallipoli is a bitter moment in Australian history – young Australian soldiers fighting halfway around the world for the British Empire were slaughtered. Gallipoli, a 1981 film directed by Peter Weir and starring Mel Gibson, remains one of the more salient – and often overlooked – war movies ever made.

Finally, there’s Olga Kurylenko. Once dismissed as a model who only appeared in B-films as eye candy, she’s built a career of very solid performances in films including Quantum of Solace, To the Wonder, and Oblivion. She hints of an actor about to break out.

BLACK SEA
Jan. 23

Jude Law gets laid off and decides to take his skills – salvaging underwater wrecks – on one last freelance job. He assembles a rag-tag crew to exhume a Nazi U-boat full of gold from the bottom of the – you guessed it – Black Sea.

I’m honestly more interested in the trailer when it’s about conflicting personalities taking on an improbable job (and Jude Law’s crack at brogue). If it were all underwater rigging this and running out of air that, I’d be happy. To make it an everyone-turns-on-the-next man thriller is predictable. I’m not saying it can’t be done well – the trailer’s solid enough – but I’m more interested in Jude Law as a man against nature than I am in his pointing guns at people. Still, the talent involved and premise are enough to get me interested.

INTERSTELLAR
Nov. 7

Trailer #3 is better than this place on the list, but we’ve had quite a few Interstellar trailers (it’s more like #5 now), and this is the only one so far not to put a lump in my throat. It looks phenomenal, but it’s looked more phenomenal in other trailers. This could be the only major film left this year with a real chance to unseat the ridiculous twosome of Under the Skin and Gone Girl.

Worst Trailer of the Week
MISS MEADOWS
Nov. 14

I don’t want to put this one here, I really don’t. I’ve always liked Katie Holmes – she seems like a nice human being I want to see do well. As a prim schoolteacher by day, vigilante killer by night, she looks like she’s having a lot of fun in this.

Unfortunately, everything not having to do with Katie Holmes here seems off. Deeply off. Miss Meadows has been in a holding pattern for a while now, and I can see why.

I really expected to be putting Taken 3 here, but you know what? That looks like all the dumb car crashes and needless explosions I’ve ever wanted to see Liam Neeson create. Next time, give Katie Holmes an assault rifle, a Mustang, and some C4. Then we’ll talk.

All release dates given are U.S.

Best Movies Never Made — “Gladiator 2”

Everyone writes Throwback Thursdays, and there are some great ones out there. They’re all kind of exclusive, though. They only review films that actually exist. What about all those Thursdays that never happened?

From Alfred Hitchcock’s nudie flick Kaleidoscope to David Fincher’s Rendezvous with Rama, we’ll cover everything from the biggest movies never made (Steven Soderbergh’s Cleopatra, anyone?) to long-forgotten treasures (Clair Noto’s sci-fi masterpiece The Tourist). The stories behind them are as interesting as the films themselves. Some were killed for their budgets, some for their politics. Many sank when their auteurs foundered, others were sabotaged by affairs, and still more fell victim to studios unwilling to take risks.

We’ll start with one of the biggest sequels never made: Gladiator 2.

BACKGROUND

The release of Gladiator on May 5, 2000 was considered risky. Back then, the summer movie season didn’t start until June, when schools let out (now it starts in March). The story of Roman general Maximus – who is enslaved as a gladiator and challenges a corrupt emperor – harkened back to sword-and-sandal classics like Spartacus.

The $103 million Ridley Scott film, aside from giving us the confusing gift of Joaquin Phoenix, made $457 million worldwide. Before the advent of streaming sites like Netflix and Hulu, it also did terrific business on DVD.

It also won Best Picture, rare for a film released so early in the year, especially in such a contentious field: its competition included Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the Steven Soderbergh twin threat of Traffic and Erin Brockovich. Though many felt Wonder Boys or Almost Famous (really, people?) deserved its spot, count me as one of the lonely voices that favored Lasse Hallstrom’s dark horse Chocolat over the whole bunch.

Gladiator nabbed Russell Crowe an Oscar in the second year of three straight he was nominated, upsetting early favorite Tom Hanks (Cast Away). The film also picked up Best Costume Design, Best Visual Effects, and Best Sound.

THE PITCH

Gladiator was in the unique position of being both a Best Picture winner and a financially successful summer action movie. It’s not as if you could make American Beauty 2 (although it was discussed) or An Even More Beautiful Mind. There was only one problem, and this is where the spoilers start: Crowe’s heroic General Maximus dies in the end.

A prequel was the most obvious way to bring back Crowe and Maximus. His history of Roman conquests could provide the action while building his loving family (which the audience knew was doomed) could provide the poignancy. It didn’t stick, though – all these things had been established in the first movie. So far, it sounded like a direct-to-DVD affair.

Original writer John Logan shifted gears to a sequel that could take place years later and feature the nephew of corrupt Emperor Commodus – the innocent young Lucius, who becomes emperor at the end of the first film.

One version got rid of Crowe entirely, while another crammed together both the past and future – half prequel covering Maximus’ rise through the ranks, half sequel regarding Lucius’ own fight against corrupt politicians. (The approach has been compared to that of The Godfather Part II.) Both versions revealed that Lucius was the secret lovechild of Maximus and Connie Nielsen’s Lucilla, a needless contrivance that could have seriously undermined too many emotional beats in the first Gladiator.

These approaches all sound pretty ho-hum, don’t they? They’re all too safe. Since when did Russell Crowe, in the middle of Oscar nominations and his Fightin’ Around the World tour, do safe? So Crowe asked a mate of his, Australian goth rocker Nick Cave, to take a stab at Gladiator 2. Between leading bands The Birthday Party, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, and Grinderman, Cave is arguably goth music’s single most influential artist. Crowe asked Cave to research the Roman afterlife and look into ways Maximus could be brought back to life via the gods. What did Cave do?

He went certifiably batshit.

If you can imagine What Dreams May Come smashed together with The Crow and an ultraviolent Forrest Gump, you might begin to grasp at what Cave delivered. In his version, Maximus is offered a deal by the dying Roman gods to hunt down the traitor Hephaestus. Maximus, of course, finds him – Hephaestus is on his last legs, and resurrects Maximus to serve penance as an immortal who walks the earth.

The bulk of the story follows Maximus defending early Christians and his resurrected son Marius from the bloodthirsty Romans under the command of a Lucius so malevolent, they could have stuck Phoenix back in the role and no one would’ve blinked. He’s aided by his occasional spirit guide Mordecai.

Maximus survives to see Christianity take hold, later fighting in the Crusades, leading a tank charge in World War 2, and unleashing a flamethrower on the Vietcong. Wait, what? Yes, Maximus essentially turns into Highlander for the Tea Party. In the end, we see Maximus in the Pentagon. Mordecai’s last words – depending on your interpretation – imply that either the world is about to end, or that Maximus is doomed to continue fighting into eternity.

And the whole movie is spliced together with footage of a dying deer and visions of Maximus’ wife, doomed to Purgatory.

WHAT WENT WRONG

The studio balked. There was no way they’d spend $150 million to make an esoteric art film that would’ve risked the loyalty of the fans. Gladiator possessed no supernatural or divine elements, and to make a sequel based solely around these additions felt too mad.

The strange thing is, according to all accounts, the screenplay was a work of genius. Crowe stood by it tooth-and-nail, and it was eventually the ONLY sequel to Gladiator that Scott might have returned to direct (although this may have been Scott’s polite way of saying he wouldn’t return for a sequel.)

Cave’s script was leaked years ago – reviews were unanimously favorable. You might find that hard to believe, but try watching the next film Cave scripted, The Proposition, and then tell me the man can’t write.

THE FALLOUT

Russell Crowe continued delivering Oscar-worthy performances, but in this humble critic’s opinion, his best performance stands as his most overlooked – he wasn’t nominated for his role as Captain Aubrey in Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World. Despite widespread reports that he’d fought with Scott incessantly during the making of Gladiator, the two reunited for four more films (A Good Year, American Gangster, Body of Lies, and Robin Hood).

Ridley Scott himself enjoyed a sort of golden era. He pumped out eight major films in the next eight years, and the production company he’d started with his brother, director Tony Scott (since deceased), took off. In its 20 years of existence before Gladiator, it had produced 10 films. In the 14 years since Gladiator, it’s produced more than 40.

Scott himself returned to the sword-and-sandals genre in 2005’s Kingdom of Heaven, Robin Hood, and the upcoming Exodus: Gods and Kings. On a critical note, the theatrical release of Kingdom of Heaven was a mess; the director’s cut is Scott’s best film. Combined with Blade Runner, Scott now boasts the two films most heavily screwed over in the history of Fox Studios.

And Nick Cave? In a broad sense, facets of Cave’s screenplay were adapted – or at least echoed – in The Proposition. The 2005 Australian period piece is both brutally nasty and philosophically haunting. Its monologues stay with me even all these years later. Guy Pearce and Emily Watson delivered two of the best performances of their careers, and it helped introduce director John Hillcoat (who later directed The Road and Cave-scripted Lawless).

As a musician, Cave’s made some of the best albums of recent years – Push the Sky Away was one of my top 5 albums of 2013, and you can’t go wrong with Grinderman 2.

Gladiator 2 will never be realized. It remains a film that I’d very much like to have seen not just for its novelty, but for how bravely it might’ve turned the original film’s formula on its head.

ADDED BONUS

An Historian Goes to the Movies recently wrote two articles regarding the historical accuracy of Gladiator. You might be surprised how well many of its details hold up:

Gladiator: Why Did Commodus Become Emperor?

Gladiator: Just How Bad an Emperor was Commodus?

Half-Year Awards — Best Screenplays, Director, and Film

You know the preamble. Let’s just dive right in:

Best Adapted Screenplay: Darren Aronofsky & Ari Handel, Noah

A lot of people hate the story in Noah. It’s too bastardized, they say. Damn straight, I say. The story of Noah doesn’t belong to the Bible. It was around long before, transmuted into a plethora of different stories across different cultures that highlight contrasting details. Noah never adopts an orphan in the Bible. This is a reference to Korean flood mythology. There are no giants in the Bible’s Noah. This is a Midrashic conceit that belongs to certain sects of Judaism. Noah doesn’t contemplate exterminating his grandchildren in the Bible. This sequence combines reflections of other Biblical books – the jettisoned baby in Exodus, the crisis of faith in Job, and most importantly the tale of Abraham in Genesis.

There are countless other details from a variety of other religions folded into Aronofsky’s retelling of Noah. It creates a Frankenstein’s monster of a myth, housing itself inside Abrahamic and non-Abrahamic religions alike and vibrantly socially aware of the moment in time it arrives in our world.

Feel free to hate it for not being accurate to your interpretation of Noah, but Noah was never yours to begin with. Neither is it Aronofsky’s or Handel’s, and their patchwork retelling reminds us that it’s not so much the detail in the story that’s important – those details are completely different for everybody – but it’s the common meaning those various interpretations seek to teach us that is crucial.

The narrative details aren’t sacred. They’re just as bastardized in the Bible as they are out of it. The meanings are sacred. The world’s done a horrible job of getting this through its head. We argue about the length of Noah’s ark and its width and what wood it was made from and how he fed the animals while we ignore that in all those stories, God sends down the flood because we were annihilating each other and so lost in petty bickering we ignored the needs of the helpless among us. Understand that before you come at Noah complaining it’s not accurate enough.

Devoutness of detail can often be a useless habit. Give me a new interpretation that reminds me of the old meaning any day of the week.

Best Original Screenplay: Joel Edgerton & David Michod, The Rover

We so rarely get short stories on film anymore. Our movies today sprawl, like labyrinths meant to make the biggest and most widely talked-about mark on our social calendars. Every character gets his or her own realization mid-plot, so we can check the character development box off the list and justify a dozen different character-specific posters. Even in our blockbusters, two sides aren’t enough anymore. I like my seven-sided, choatic end-battles, believe me, but there are only so many writers and filmmakers who can truly hack that.

What about the short story? What about visiting a time and place for just a moment, getting just a glimpse? What about leaving us wanting to know more? Many of our works of art have forgotten how to shield their characters from us. Characters are thrown at us with gadgets and costume changes and sidekicks for spinoffs. That’s fine…so long as we don’t forget those other movies, the ones that contain characters we should never want to see again, or that we should wish to save, or that we should pity, or that we should hate. Sometimes all at once. The Rover visits a time and place we should never want to see and delivers characters we should never want to meet. It stays long enough so that we begin to care what happens anyway, that we begin to understand why someone might be a way we never could be ourselves, and then it exits gracefully.

Like The Proposition a decade before, which also starred Guy Pearce, it crafts a haunting story from an elegant blend of poetic dialogue, stark visual, and simple structure. In a short story, every word matters. So, too, in The Rover. Every word, every shot, every cut matters, and builds to a whole at just the right moment – the second before the credits roll. It forces you to take a piece of that time and place you’d never visit back with you into the real world, to contrast the two, to be terrified at their similarities and joyous at their differences. It’s a staggering work that demands tears and silence and reverence. The Rover is a fire-and-brimstone sermon in the church of film.

Best Director: Jonathan Glazer, Under the Skin

My choice for this at the end of last year was Alfonso Cuaron for his pioneering work in Gravity. At least until I saw Wong Kar-Wai’s The Grandmaster. But that’s another essay. This year, it’s the polar opposite of those two directors. Instead of Cuaron’s painstaking cinematic techniques, so groundbreaking they demanded new inventions, and instead of Wong Kar-Wai’s precise, artistic framing (nearly every shot is so painterly it’s worthy of its own essay), Glazer is much more hands-off. He gathered a wild array of fringe talent and let them go wild.

In various Guardian articles, and in my own interview with author Michel Faber, who wrote the novel on which the film Under the Skin is based, Glazer’s loose, guerrilla approach to filmmaking began to take shape: Conversations with passersby recorded on hidden camera. Covert microphones hidden in umbrellas picking up stray conversation on the streets of Edinburgh. An FX studio let loose to envision an alien’s digestive tract in visual metaphor. Documentarian shots of both nature and civilization. An experimental rock musician asked to score it all.

What Glazer does is invite chaos into his movie, trusting himself enough to shape it. The result is a mash of experimental techniques fused into a powerful whole. These diverse technical experiments shine through so much that you can even see how contributors’ interpretations agree and disagree. It’s rare that so loose and experimental an approach results in a film so tight and complete. The most difficult part of directing is knowing when to control chaos and knowing when to unleash it. For mastering the balance, at least for this film, Glazer does something just as impressive as inventing new technologies or framing everything with painterly perfection.

Best Film: Under the Skin

Any other year, this wouldn’t be a contest. It would be The Rover with nothing else close. But Under the Skin is the best film we’ve had in many years, the most challenging, the one that does something film is very often incapable of doing. Many films put you in someone else’s shoes. Almost none trick you into filling out the shoes of a sociopath and rapist. The film has such command of allegory, it truly makes you stop and contemplate a perspective that’s (hopefully) completely alien to you, and it transports you very uncomfortably outside of your own realm of sensation and experience.

Also take a look at our Half-Year Technical Awards and our Half-Year Acting Awards.

“Noah” Folds the Entire Old Testament into One Film

How do you adapt the story of Noah’s Ark into a movie? Whose version do you use? The Jewish version came before the Christian one, which came before the Muslim one, but in each broader religion there are dozens of sects who dispute everything from the size of Noah’s ark to the type of wood used to build it. There are even Middle Eastern religions that predate the other three and regard Noah, not Jesus or Muhammad, as their prophet.

Most agree that Noah is warned by his creator that a great flood is coming to wipe humanity from the face of the Earth. This is due to mankind’s wickedness. Noah and his family are to build a great ark, a ship that shall endure the flood and carry two of every animal so that these innocent species will survive the cataclysm.

Director Darren Aronofsky’s Noah is not one religion’s Noah story or even all of them put together. This film is the entirety of the Old Testament, its challenging and lasting philosophical ideas using the narrative structure of Noah much as the animals use the ark – as a housing in which to survive.

Aronofsky creates a striking environmental parable, includes heroic giants from the Dead Sea Scrolls, and tells the entire story through the lens of a post-apocalyptic action fantasy. It is a self-assured, visionary, feverish, and schizophrenic achievement. Aronofsky always has you exactly where he wants you, and that’s not knowing where you’ll be next.

Don’t go into this thinking you’ll see anything resembling a straightforward Noah’s Ark narrative. If you know the Old Testament, be prepared to see a dozen stories told at once. If you don’t know the Old Testament, that’s OK – enjoy one of the maddest, most intriguing movies you’ll see in a long time.

Aronofsky is known for the low-budget Pi, a gritty sort of Book of Job-retold as horror movie, and the stately magical realism of The Fountain. In Noah, he dashes from straightforward narrative to metaphysical interlude to family drama at the drop of a hat, occasionally taking the scenic route through Lord of the Rings to borrow a battle sequence.

Noah’s visions from God are chilling. Aronofsky may only show about 30 seconds of the wickedness for which mankind is being punished, but he’s better than any other director at putting images in your mind that simply don’t leave. Similarly, when Noah (Russell Crowe) tells his family the story of Creation itself, it is beautiful and touching and inspiring. When he moves on to the history of mankind, it is intense, points the finger directly at the audience, and makes you squirm. Perhaps the most memorable moment comes when God collects the animals of the world two-by-two. His word spreads as a river in a unique and artistically overpowering montage.

Noah crosses paths with grandfather Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins) and the warring King Tubal-Cain (Ray Winstone). Emma Watson is also very good as Noah’s daughter Ila. When the actors who played Maximus, Hannibal Lecter, Beowulf, and Hermione Granger are stomping around, it can be very easy to forget the true powerhouse of the cast. Don’t worry, Jennifer Connelly – as Noah’s wife Naameh – will remind you. No giants or battle scene or CGI flood can compare to the moment when she lets loose.

Noah is ludicrous and accomplished. What’s on-screen will seem insane one minute, and gut punch you the next. Nothing can be taken literally, even if it’s told that way, and even less can be taken personally, even though we’re all possessive of our religions.

By the end of the film, Noah simultaneously acts out the Book of Job and the Binding of Isaac to the point where Ila begins playing out Exodus. All this while son Ham re-enacts Cain’s murder of Abel because he earlier repeated the temptation of Eve. This is conceptually thick stuff made easy to swallow only through effects, fantasy and sheer, audacious artistry.

Noah conflates these many narratives to show the cyclical nature of mankind’s tendency toward corruption. In this Noah, humanity’s rebirth is precluded by the same old sins that got us into trouble in the first place. It’s a stark look in an unforgiving mirror. Like many things that make us uncomfortable, some will laud it and others will dismiss it. Some will say it isn’t their Noah, but this film’s challenge to its audience is in accepting Noah wasn’t yours or mine or Aronofsky’s to begin with. This is every Noah, every Job, every Abraham, every Old Testament lesson bound into one story and asking you, point blank: “Now what do you do with it?” It’s up to us how to answer.

Noah is rated PG-13 for violence and disturbing images.