Rio Rancho Film Reviews: Geoffrey Rush

The King's Speech

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

Wednesday, August 08, 2007

It's a sad indictment of modern mainstream cinema when Pirates of the Caribbean becomes a smash hit. Now that's not to say it's a terrible film – it's entirely watchable. No, it's just that it's so mediocre.

What hurts the film most is the casting of its hero and heroine. Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley are just incredibly bland. They're two actors who although not entirely incompetent (thus denying us the opportunity to laugh our arses off as we point and jeer at the screen) have no serious acting chops. But worse than that they have no charisma. There's no charm, no allure and no sex appeal. I mean, sure Knighley is easy on the eye and I'm sure girls cream themselves silly at Bloom's squinty little eyes and paedophile moustache, but they're almost entirely lifeless – there's nothing going on behind the eyes. And Knightley's presence is made even more unwelcome by the fact that she plays a prissy, self-righteous, wholesome bore who squeals all her dialogue at a decibel level so great it explodes eardrums. Seriously, Will Turner deserves her. He can look forward to a lifetime of high-pitched nagging and refusal of sex.

But Knightley's worst moment (and the film's worst moment) is when she hits a pirate while uttering the following line, "You like pain? Try wearing a corset." You know, because men don't know pain. And because wearing a corset is far worse than having your arm lopped off with a sword; or having a leg blown to kingdom come from canon fire; or having a sweaty, leering, corpulent, well-endowed seadog make you his rear admiral with all the supplies of lubricant run dry. And that cheesy line is made even worse because it's spoken by a woman so weedy, so skinny, so under-nourished that it's debatable that she could pick up the plank she hits the pirate with without regurgitating in exhaustion the kiddie-sized bowl of muesli she gorged on for dinner. Yeah, she's an empowered woman. She's pretty, she can kick ass and she's got a waist thinner than a tube of Pringles. (The politically correct 'empowering' of women also extends to one of the ships being captained by a black woman. I know it's just a kid's film and the mores of today are shoehorned into an earlier time, but couldn't the 'empowered' women actually resemble real women and not be bland model types who either squeal like anorexic harridans or screech a 'talk to the hand' brand of sass that's more suited to Jerry Springer?)

But I shouldn't be too tough on Knightley. Bloom's equally culpable. Just take the way he scrunches his forehead and squints his eyes when he has to communicate thought; or when he makes a passionate speech that's about as rousing as a punch in the groin; or when he wetly communicates his love for Miss Swan. If Luke Skywalker is a limp piece of lettuce, Will Turner is a flaccid one-inch penis.

And exacerbating the blandness is the casting of Jack Davenport. He's meant to be the pencil-necked Poindexter that does everything by the rules, but he plays his role too well. It's like watching an invisible man. His character is totally devoid of…anything.

But if Bloom, Knightley and Davenport are the schmoly trinity, then Johnny Depp, Geoffrey Rush, Jonathan Pryce, Mackenzie Crook and Lee Arenberg are the quintet that makes the film worth watching (I also like the two dumb soldiers). Enough people have expounded the joys of Depp's Keith Richards-inspired performance, but Rush actually makes me laugh more anyway. There's a fantastic bit during a swordfight where he walks along shouting "Aaaaarrrr!" And he also does the same thing while chasing Knightley. It's a clichéd pirate played with absolute glee. And Pryce is great, too. Admittedly he doesn't get to do much, but he makes up for everything in a moment near the end. After the British defeat the pirates he emerges from the room he's locked himself in and he proceeds to finger wag and shadow box the marauders. It just shows what a good actor is capable of; how an actor with wit and personality can make a small moment memorable.

But contrary to popular opinion, the film actually belongs to the duo of Mackenzie Crook and Lee Arenberg as a pair of knuckleheaded pirates. Every time they're on the screen the film is suddenly about a million times more fun. And I like the way the two are portrayed as something of a married couple. They finish each other's sentences and get on each other's nerves. And I also like the way the film wryly questions their sexuality. Take the scene where they have to dress up as women as they act as a decoy in a rowing boat. Crook tells his pal that he looks nice and a scuffle ensues. Funny stuff.

Unfortunately, though, while some of the interplay between the supporting characters is fun to watch, the action is rather uninspired. And it's not helped by the fact that all the pirates (and Johnny Depp) are immortal. Therefore you have to endure swordfights that have zero tension because there's absolutely nothing at stake. And action seems to take up the entire final third of the film. As a consequence it becomes something of a snoozer. But fortunately the photography and production design is first rate. So at least you get something nice to look at while swords clatter ad nauseam.

Eric Bana

Munich

Sunday, July 08, 2007

The final frame of Munich – the image of the Twin Towers – rather than being pat or overly simplistic, as some people would suggest, is a wonderfully economic way of summarising the film's message – for every action there's a reaction; none of us are as innocent as we'd like to think and all of us are responsible for the unholy mess we're in.

Munich's main strength is its refusal to glorify or condemn the actions of its protagonists. Nothing they do is heroic, but at the same time, their brutal response to the central atrocity is understandable – if your people are murdered, it's only natural to want to kill the people responsible. The only problem is that revenge begets more revenge, and eventually it's impossible to tell who's good and who's bad.

Of course, it's a bit of a cliché these days to have the tortured assassin – the man who's haunted by his actions – but in Munich it never feels like it's done purely for effect. Instead it's a natural by-product of (fairly) ordinary men doing things that most people in 'civilised' society never do – take the lives of other people. And so, therefore, unlike quite a lot of the film-going public, I think the final sex scene between Avner and his wife works tremendously well. It shows how everything has been ruined for him. He's not even capable of enjoying the physical act of love. And remember, this is what he was supposed to be protecting – the men, women and children of his homeland, and their way of life; he was supposed to be making their lives safer. Instead he's just helped things get worse.

And Avner's demand for evidence in the final scene is directly related to where we are at the present. All too often our desire for wrongs to be righted is exploited by governments and regimes. Just take Iraq – we've committed massive wrongs to try and right a barbaric act. And then you have the Israeli's justifying their actions in the name of the Holocaust and other more recent acts of brutalism they've suffered. Same goes for the Palestinians – they try and justify bombs and mayhem by saying that the other guys have killed their people. What they say is true, but no one can claim to be righteous – we're all as bad as each other.

The film realises this and, even though the protagonists are Israeli, it does a pretty good job of presenting both sides of the argument. Just take the scene in the safe house in Athens. Beneath all the political mumbo jumbo what both sides want is a home. Both want somewhere they can call their own. But by using violence to claim this home both are corrupting their dream – if, by some miracle, one side wins, what's going to be left?

And the idea of home is probably the film's main theme – the lengths we go to in order to protect it. It's certainly the reason why these men embark on this mission. But when Avner's mother tells him that he did what he did for their people, and that finally they have a place on Earth, you can only wonder whether it was worth it.

For me, one of the best scenes in the film is the bombing at the hotel. Without being heavy handed, it shows how difficult it is to kill somebody. And I don't mean difficult in the same way as the first killing, which is more about the physical difficulty, but instead the moral dilemma. How can you kill somebody in cold blood when you've had a perfectly pleasant conversation with them? And you can see Avner debating it in his mind as he stares at the light. For the first time doubt is creeping into his mind. He's realising that everything isn't clear cut. But still he condemns the man to death – for whatever reason, even when alarm bells are ringing in our head, we're still more than willing to close our eyes and ignore good sense.

But even though there's a lot of meat to sink your teeth into, Munich also works as a thriller. The first murder, for instance, is very Hitchcockian. You've got the music, the shadowy figures, the shots of the lift, the terrified killers and the macabre detail of the man falling on the milk bottle. It's very cinematic. And then you have the Munich siege itself. The killings are grim and bloody (and the stabbing in the head is shocking in the way that it comes out of nowhere) but it also gets the blood pumping. It helps you understand the outrage the Israeli's must have felt and how easy it is to let emotions get the better of you.

Another excellent scene is the killing of the female assassin. Again the film shows murder as messy and clumsy – the blood squirting out of the woman's throat is a great detail. And then you have the telephone bombing. It's quite conventional in the way it frames it with the little girl – will or won't she get killed? – but Spielberg builds the tension expertly and you're never entirely sure what's going to happen.

But to view the film entirely as a thriller would be to miss the point. The film, quite rightly, is more concerned with the way violence corrupts. It's certainly at the root of all our problems today. But as the film points out, for every person that's killed there's another person willing to step into their shoes – the group even has to kill the replacement of a person they assassinate. So what does the group really achieve? The answer is that they achieve nothing. Some people die and things carry on as they did before. They've only fanned the flames.

The King's Speech

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

Munich

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