With March upon us, the winter "take out the trash" season is mostly in the past and it's time to get back into the groove. I saw three new movies this weekend, all of which are worth talking about.


Rango

Our story begins with a four-bird mariachi band (!!!!) and their hilariously on-the-nose lyrics which give us a series of signposts through the story. Johnny Depp gives voice to a lizard who's spent his whole life in a dry aquarium, his only friends a plastic fish and a naked Barbie doll with no head or legs. He keeps himself amused by staging theatricals, but he seems completely unaware that his tank is in the back of a pickup truck and that said truck is moving him and the rest of his owner's belongings to presumably a new home. One severe bump in the road, however, and the tank goes flying. Soon our not-yet-Rango is taking advice from a run-over armadillo and heading out across the desert to a town called Dirt, where he is told he can find water.

What follows reminded me quite a bit of The Three Amigos, actually. Rango is a character whose entire life has revolved around making things up to keep himself amused. He's an excellent improvisor, which comes in handy in the beginning, but he hasn't had the opportunity for real life lessons, and he certainly has never been put to any kind of test as far as his bravery or moral code might be concerned.

This movie is an utter delight, with some really unique-looking and photo-real animation. It's probably not what you're expecting, and that's a very good thing. It's a western, plain and simple, and the look is very much The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (especially the creatures who are all pretty salty characters). It isn't the least bit cutesy, as you could probably tell from the ads, but what you might not know is that there's a sauciness that will sail over kids' heads and hit adults in their giggle spots. Just to give you an idea of the kind of thing the movie gets away with, in the first scene of the film, our hero makes a breast implant joke. Oh yes. This has the audacity and nudge-nudge-wink-wink that the original Shrek had, only it goes a bit farther.

Voice talent is really exceptional here, and the best part is that, except for Johnny Depp and Bill Nighy, whose voices you could not mistake if you tried, you can't really tell who's who. These aren't characters built on a particular actor's gifts, these are original characters played by actors who don't want you to know who's behind the microphone. One of the most impressive moments for me was the appearance of The Spirit of the West, which you would swear up and down is the voice of exactly who it looks like on screen but is in actuality Justified's Timothy Olyphant.

I really loved this, and I think it would appeal to most moviegoers, but especially those of you who like westerns.



The Adjustment Bureau

This was much better than I expected, mostly because of how great Matt Damon and Emily Blunt are. The concept is interesting and very sci-fi - what if our lives were designed to follow a certain plan and there were people whose job it was to make sure we stayed on that plan? Damon Lindelof (formerly of LOST fame) recently compared it to the Desmond/Penny storyline on LOST, and that's pretty accurate. I don't want to give too much away. If you've seen the trailer and the ads you know enough about the premise.

It seems weird to talk about this as if it's something revolutionary, but it was refreshing to see a movie with some actual characterization, with people in it that you care about. This is not a movie that expects us to root for people just because they're played by pretty actors and, well, we're just supposed to care. David and Elise feel like real people with real issues, and I loved that. I also loved that there was some thought behind not just *why* everyone in the "bureau" was so desperate to keep them apart, but what it was about each of them that, when put together, was bad for the other person (in the eyes of the Plan).

Some of the philosophizing was a bit ponderous at times, such as the whole speech about what happened on the two occasions that the organization stepped back and let people make their own decisions, without any adjustments. (Not to mention the fact that the premise starts to fall apart if you think about it too much.) Actor-wise, I was also disappointed by Anthony Mackie, whose heart didn't seem to be in this movie. I hope all this doesn't sound like I hated the movie, because I definitely didn't. It works very well as a romance and mostly well as a sci-fi story. Above all, it's an engaging and entertaining movie, anchored by two good performances. I was also glad to discover that there was a reason for Matt Damon to be wearing that hat in all the trailers. :P

On a more trivial note, there are loads of cameos in this from political/news figures, like Jon Stewart and Mayor Bloomberg.



I Saw the Devil

Expectations were pretty high going into this, after hearing one critic compare it to The Silence of the Lambs. Disappointment, therefore, was inevitable. This is straight up horror, and certainly not the kind most of you reading this would be into. It's even a bit too much for me, but there were elements that I did like.

Basic story. A young woman is waiting for a tow truck when she is beaten nearly to death, kidnapped, then brutally murdered by a maniac who proceeds to chop her into pieces, despite her pleas for her life and the life of her unborn child. And that's just the first ten minutes. Bad luck for our murderer that his latest victim was the daughter of a retired and venerated police chief and the fiancee of a secret agent (though not that secret, since several people in the film seem to know what he does). Secret Agent Man vows revenge, but can't bring himself to strike a fatal blow. So he catches up to the killer repeatedly, inflicts painful wounds, and repeatedly lets the killer go, swearing that he's going to keep coming and that the attacks are going to get worse.

Over the course of the story, we're supposed to be getting the impression that Secret Agent Man is becoming a monster just like the man he's hunting. But I'm afraid I just could not get behind that idea. The killer is so disgusting and abominable that I was cheering for Secret Agent Man throughout. There are some interesting notions, I suppose, about how useful revenge is and who really comes out the winner in this scenario. There's also something to be said here about the illogical nature of engaging oneself in a battle of wills with a soulless maniac who can hurt you far more effectively than you can hurt him. But the movie doesn't lean on either of those ideas as much as it does the "who's the real monster" thing. And the movie's biggest problem for me is that this question is not nearly as ambiguous as the movie would like it to be. Spoiler Alert - the serial killer is the monster. There is no doubt in my mind about that.

This movie sort of piggybacks on Chan-Wook Park's vengeance trilogy (the killer is even played by the star of Park's Oldboy), but doesn't explore the idea of revenge quite as thoughtfully, in my opinion. And while the camera work, music, and acting are all top notch, there are some things I found incredibly difficult to watch, and not in a good way. There's a "dinner" scene in particular that exploits the horror of cannibalism beyond the bounds of decency, even for shock cinema. I never thought I'd find myself longing for the delicate sensibilities of Serbian cinema.

Next week brings us another good cinematic haul - notably Jane Eyre (!), Battle: Los Angeles, and Red Riding Hood.

Scenes Made of Awesome - Out of Sight

In honor of this movie's Blu-Ray release today, I thought I'd give a shout-out to one of my favorite love scenes of all time. George Clooney was still best known for being Dr. Ross on E.R. Jennifer Lopez was still an actress, and her "J.Lo" days were a few years away. And director Steven Soderbergh was still an indie guy, a few years away from the critical success of Traffic and the commercial successes of his Ocean's movies.

In the 1998 film Out of Sight, Clooney plays Jack Foley, a bank robber, and Lopez plays Karen Sisco, a U.S. Marshal. They have a connection while sharing the trunk of a car after one of Foley's escape attempts, and Sisco pursues Foley as a U.S. Marshal pursuing a criminal, but she may have other motives as well. Foley tracks her down in a Detroit hotel, and what follows is this scene, where they try and figure out how to explore their attraction to one another.

The editing in this scene is where the magic is, taking the scene in the bar and the scene in the bedroom and weaving them together. I compared it once to the love scene in Don't Look Now, and apparently Soderbergh did style his scene after that one. The sense I get from Foley and Sisco in this scene is that, despite the difficulties their prospective careers pose to any kind of relationship, there's an inevitability about their being together, however briefly. They're sitting there talking, but it's as if they're already in bed together.

"Well, there it is."

The target of perfection at which posing, period "Oscar bait" pictures shoot in vain.


Amadeus

I was 9 years old when this movie came out in 1984, and my parents went to see it without me (I would discover it on television soon after). I remember that they dressed up as if they were going to the theater and were appalled that people had shown up to the cinema in jeans and shorts. To see a movie about MOZART, forsooth! They talked rapturously about it with my piano teacher, and I listened jealously. This was a point in my life when I was completely unaware of the Oscars and the honors lavished on this film the next spring. But this has been a very important movie to me for most of my life, and it's a case of a great movie that has only gotten better with age (both the movie's age and my own).

My first vivid memory of the film was always the horror of the Salieri's suicide attempt, which for the longest time I could not watch - a fact that seems hilarious to me now. There are many moments in the film, though, that have lived in my memory for a long, long time. At the center of this fantastic movie are two phenomenal performances. F. Murray Abraham (Salieri) and Tom Hulce (Mozart) would each go on to be nominated for Academy Awards, and when Abraham won, he paid tribute to his co-star and on-screen rival by saying that the only thing missing from the experience was having Hulce standing at his side.



The first thing to note about this film, which was written by Peter Shaffer (who also wrote Equus), adapted from his own 1979 play, is that it is not a biography. It is a highly fictionalized story about real people. Mozart's (and Salieri's) music is heavily featured throughout and is an essential piece of the storytelling. Perhaps more than anything else, though, what it is "about" is the nature of genius and the appreciation of it. It may be a cliche to say that a true genius is never appreciated in his/her own time, but I have to say that seeing this film again in the context of an Oscar season puts a fascinating new spin on it. With all the arguments over what the "best" film of the year is and many people feeling (as if this is anything new) that the frontrunner is merely a sentimental favorite rather than a genuinely great work, I can't help thinking of Mozart and Salieri. One was perhaps the greatest composer who has ever lived but, at least as the film portrays him, he was not the most popular composer of his day because he was ahead of his time in so many ways and because he was not a toady of the Emperor's Court. The other man had musical talent - was quite good in fact - and received many honors and accolades while he lived but was all but forgotten by history (until Shaffer's play and the film brought him back to people's attention). Salieri receives medals and commendations by the Emperor who calls one of his works "the greatest opera yet written." Mozart, on the other hand, sees his own opera, La Nozze di Figaro (arguably his greatest work), pilloried and parodied on the vaudeville stage as if it were part of one of those awful pop culture pastiche movies like Not Another Teen Movie. Mozart obviously got the better deal in the long run, but we can only see that conclusion through the long lens of history.



I won't go through a play-by-play of the film, because there is far too much to say. I will just leave you with my two favorite moments from the film, both of which are key musical moments as well. In the first, we're watching the premiere of La Nozze di Figaro. Salieri, despite his resentment, cannot but marvel at the beauty of the piece. Abraham's narration is absolutely perfect here, putting each word in precisely the right place in the music so that he only adds and never takes away from it. This part of the opera, by the way, is probably my favorite piece of music ever, I'm sure in no small part due to the meaning Abraham gives to it in this scene.



Of course, before we can get too carried away, there is that yawn which changes the tone utterly and irrevocably, followed by another scene that spookily mirrors the film criticism world (to me, anyway). Salieri suggests that Mozart's opera was too long, and that he should have given the audience a big bang at the end of songs to let them know when to clap. I've seen loads of film critics say comparable things about films, to say nothing of snap judging a film because it doesn't have "X" or "Y" in it. Or, you know, snap judging at all (Incidentally, I think Twitter has been the worst thing to happen to film criticism in a great many years - how can you possibly judge something adequately before you've had a chance to think about it?).

And then there is this moment. I don't know how much you may know about sound mixing. I'm pretty ignorant about it myself, but it's really hard not to see how massively important it is to this scene (and the one embedded above, for that matter). Mozart, on his sickbed, is dictating part of his Requiem, specifically the "Confutatis," to Salieri. You hear each piece of the whole by itself, as Mozart dictates, and when he finally looks at the whole thing you hear it all together and can see what each little piece brings to the whole. I've heard this piece of music many, many times since first seeing this film, and I never fail to marvel at all those amazing little pieces.



There is a director's cut of this, which adds a great deal of character development, but which doesn't flow quite as well as the theatrical cut, in my opinion. This is a perfect film in every way. If you have not yet seen it, by all means do so. It is definitely not one of those "eat your spinach, it's good for you" period movies. It is bold and hilarious and moving and is a movie I could watch again and again and again. Even if you have resisted because you don't like classical music, this film could very well make you a newborn fan.

Final Girl Film Club - Frozen

February's Final Girl Film Club is the ski lift chiller (*rimshot*) Frozen.


BRRRRRRRRR!

I'm tweaking a previous review here, but giving it a bit more context. I was fortunate enough to see this at Butt-Numb-A-Thon (BNAT) in Austin (held at the Alamo Drafthouse) in December 2009, about a month before it made a more official bow at Sundance. This film played roughly 2/3 of the way through our 24-hour cinematic journey (roughly 2am) - the 8th film out of a total 12 - and was sandwiched between Jean-Pierre Jeunet's then-new film Micmacs and the banned Shaw Brothers flick Centipede Horror. (NOTE: Centipede Horror is not to be confused with Tom Six's The Human Centipede; Centipede Horror has REAL centipedes, not to mention flaming zombie chickens.) We'd had a couple of mild forays into semi-horror already that evening, with Shutter Island and The Lovely Bones, and everyone expected great things from Adam Green, the guy who made Hatchet and who showed up and braved a probably very ripe-smelling and farty room to personally introduce the film to us.

As with most of the films over the 24 hours, this one was preceded by some appropriate vintage trailers.


The Ski Bum

and


Hot Dog: The Movie

I love the Alamo Drafthouse.

So anyway ... FROZEN.



This movie is about three young people - a guy, his girlfriend, and his best friend - who go for a short ski trip. They spend most of the day on the bunny slopes, because the girlfriend is not an experienced skier, and the guys decide to go up again that evening by themselves to do some real skiing. After some arguments and hurt feelings, however, the girlfriend ends up going with them, and they get stuck on the chair lift while the place shuts down for the week.



Okay, so let's get the implausibilities out of the way, because they are many and pretty egregious. These kids must have driven a car to this place (though it's possible they took a shuttle). If they drove, someone would have noticed an extra car and asked whose it was, realizing that someone could still be on the mountains, possibly even trying to get a free night's stay or extra skiing they didn't pay for. Second, no skiing establishment is that lackadaisical about people being on the chair lift or on the mountain. You wouldn't be able to bamboozle someone into letting you on the chair lift without paying in the first place, and you certainly wouldn't have one solitary chair lift operator be the final word in whether everyone was down from the lift and the mountain. There are way too many precautions in place at ski resorts for what happens in this movie to happen. Third, wolves don't hang out where there are loads of people skiing.

HOWEVER. Forget about all that for a minute. What if you DID get stuck on a chair lift and there was no way down and no one would find you for several days? If you take it from there, this is a pretty fantastic scary movie about the series of bad decisions you might make in the huge effort to get out alive. Decisions that are bound to be further hampered by the extreme cold weather and its effect on your brain.



The first huge mistake is made when the boyfriend decides to try and jump down, however much it might injure him. Well, it injures him a hell of a lot. Both his legs snap (there were some excellent sound effects in this film, by the way), and when he tries to move himself, he just injures himself exponentially more and more. A wolf finds him and eventually leaves after a stare-down, but this is not a victory for our poor broken-legged hero. Oh no. The wolf went and got a few friends and they proceed to eat him alive while his girlfriend and best friend can only listen to his screams and do their best not to watch from above. This was fairly affecting to me, actually, as the guy screams to his best friend not to dare let the girlfriend look. Story issues aside, there was still some pretty great acting in this, I have to say.

The rest of the movie alternates between the girlfriend and best friend blaming each other, consoling each other, and making fresh attempts to get out of this situation. Strangely, they make little attempt to huddle together and actually keep each other warm, which might have been helpful. And I can't figure out why the girl, after losing one of her gloves, didn't pull her coat sleeve over her bare hand. That would have saved a lot of pain, especially when she wakes up with her bare hand frozen to the safety bar.


OWWWWWWWW!

The movie manages to be very effective, though, despite it's implausibility issues, and was one of the better examples of audience reaction of the evening. A woman in our audience actually FAINTED during this movie (she was alright, by the way, just overcome by the movie, it seems). This was probably the most talked about film at the post-BNAT dinner and party. Several in our crowd were from Minnesota and had HUGE issues with its plausibility. But there was no doubt that it made an impact.

Regardless, though, if you can let go of the need for accuracy and credibility, it's a pretty dang good scary movie.

The Oscar Time Capsule

Kristopher Tapley, of InContention.com, is a critic who frequently infuriates me, but who just as frequently allows the clouds of whiny punditry to part and lets the logic shine through. Case in point, this article about the inevitability of The King's Speech's frontrunner status, how that status was decided not just in the last week but at the end of the summer (when it received a five-minute standing ovation at its Telluride Film Festival premiere), and how that status (coupled with disappointment over The Social Network's fading star) is starting an inevitable backlash.

One thing to remember is the difference between these supposed early indicators - the critics groups and the Hollywood Foreign Press who put on the Golden Globes (all of which are pretty small groups of people) - and the real meat of the season - the guild awards and the Academy (each of whose membership runs at the several-thousand mark). The Social Network is an exquisite film that does exactly what it sets out to do, but the buzz around it became built up to the point of hyperbole in the early weeks of campaigning, mostly due to Rolling Stone's Peter Travers and his comment about "defining a generation" (which, by the way, I don't think is true, but that's a whole 'nother post). Meanwhile, if you stepped back from the stats and actually talked to Academy members (obviously, I didn't do this personally, but I've read a great deal of commentary from those who have), upon mentioning The King's Speech, you'd see many, many of them get that far away look in their eyes and gush like a teenager with a life-defining crush. People really love this movie. So do I. The "Camptown Races" bit brings me to tears every --- damn, there I go again.

But of course, once a film starts to become the more obvious frontrunner, people will try to knock it down. It already happened with The Social Network, back in those heady days of its reign atop the prediction lists. If it's not historians or the real people involved complaining because it isn't a documentary and leaves things out (e.g., Bertie's support of Neville Chamberlain's appeasement and whether or not Mark Zuckerberg had an "Erica Albright" in his life when he started Facemash), then it's the screeching commenters claiming that if the movie wins (just talking about King's Speech now) it will be a blight on the Academy's history, which ... really, now. Rotten Tomatoes is probably not a completely objective measuring stick, but it's probably as good as we've got, and while The King's Speech doesn't have quite as high a rating as three of its Best Picture competitors - The Social Network, Toy Story 3, and Winter's Bone - at 88% fresh it is still "better" (whatever that means) than 2008's Best Picture Slumdog Millionaire, 2002's winner Chicago, and 2004's winner Million Dollar Baby. I mean, it's not like we're talking about the embarrassment of 1956 known (sadly) as "Best Picture winner Around the World in 80 Days," for crying out loud!

As exciting as the race is to watch, it doesn't ultimately mean anything, other than that whichever film wins will possibly make a bit more money - or, in the case of The Hurt Locker, maybe not. (Side note, loosely related: Harvey Weinstein, sensing victory in the air for The King's Speech and hence more money for the studio, is trying to edit the film to get a PG-13 so that more people will see it. Director Tom Hooper, for his part, has no intention of cutting anything, and his DGA plaque could give him some pull there. But they may add ... bleeps. *facepalm*)

The Oscars are a time capsule. They are, to paraphrase Amy Poehler's genius deadpanning at the SAGs, the opinion of a certain group of people at a certain time. The Academy is not five guys in a room somewhere, nor are they some all-ruling Taste Police. Was Rocky really the best film of 1976? I don't think so, but it caught the collective cultural consciousness that year in a big way even if history would grow more respect and affection for its stellar competitors Taxi Driver, Network, and All the President's Men. Was Titanic really a better film than L.A. Confidential and Good Will Hunting in 2007? I say no to L.A. Confidential, actually, unless you cut out that bullshit ending, but who cares, really? Loads of people (not just Leo fangirls but people in the industry) LOVED that movie. Personally, I really love that the Academy so often votes with its 6000 or so hearts rather than with its heads.

I do think there's something to Matt Damon's old suggestion that you really can't properly appraise a film's merits until it's at least 10 years old (though I disagree that we should wait that long to give awards). But hey, let's try it. Let's take a look at what was up for Best Picture 10 years ago...

Chocolat
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Erin Brockovich
Gladiator
Traffic

Dudes, I love Chocolat as much as the next red-blooded gal, but it had no place on that list. Nor did Erin Brockovich, if you ask me. Of course, if we were really doing this proper, those same five films would probably not be the final five in contention now. So let's look at some of the notable films that might or might not make that list if we were to make it today.

Almost Famous
American Psycho
Amores Perros
Battle Royale
Before Night Falls
Best in Show
Billy Elliot
Chicken Run
Croupier
Dancer in the Dark
In the Mood for Love
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Memento
Nurse Betty
O Brother, Where Art Thou
Quills
Requiem for a Dream
Sexy Beast
Unbreakable
Wonder Boys
You Can Count on Me
Sunshine

At a glance, I see at least a few among those titles that might get in due to their directors having done excellent work over the last decade and bringing new appreciation to their 2000 films. Specifically, I see the films of two current Best Director nominees, Requiem for a Dream (Darren Aronofsky) and O Brother, Where Art Thou (Ethan Coen and Joel Coen). Plus a third film by a director many feel should have been in that mix this year - Memento (Christopher Nolan). Two of those three could respectably replace Chocolat and Erin Brockovich in a list of 5, and if we're going for 10, let's throw in all three. Billy Elliot should probably be in there too (its director, on the other hand, probably wouldn't be in the Directing slate if we were doing this now). I'd round the 10 out with Almost Famous, Quills, and Wonder Boys. But that's just me. Those movies have, I think, stood the test of time and people enjoy and respect them as much as, if not more than, they did during the films' original releases.

I'd better not go further than that, because man, can you imagine how different the movie business would be if we waited that long to give out awards for a particular year? Not just to movies but to actors and craftspeople as well? I mean, you could stage a comeback off an "Oscar bump." That is, if the Oscars still had as much prestige and pressure around them if they were ten years behind the times.

But then again, I kind of like the way it is now, being able to look back over Oscar history and see, with pleasure or regret, the films that were loved and revered at the time. It's certainly nice to have your affection for a film validated by an award show like the Oscars. I mean, who among us LOTR wonks could forget the anxiety and excitement that accompanied the 2003 Middle Earth Oscar ceremony (and the subsequent laying down of crowbars after Return of the King's clean sweep)? But the films we love should be the films we love, regardless of what some voting body declares is awards-worthy.

One of my favorite things to read between last year's Oscar season and this one has been a column called "Life Without Oscar," also on InContention.com. Chad Hartigan went through each Oscar year and picked one film that didn't receive a single nomination and highlighted it as an example that the Oscars are not the be-all and end-all of what a great movie is. There's a good deal of snooty arthouse fare among his posts, but there's also "Kindergarten Cop" and "What's Up, Doc" - just to give you a feel of the range of titles. :P

Not that it matters, since I don't get to vote on the Oscars, but my Best Picture pick of the ten nominees THIS year would be Black Swan, with Aronofsky as Best Director. Obviously, I always knew there'd be no way in hell my FAVORITE movie of the year would be in the race, even with ten nominees. :P But hey, you love what you love. Don't let any stupid critics or award shows (or me, of course) tell you what's worth admiring.

Unless what you love and admire is Twilight, in which case ... I don't even.

Scenes Made of Awesome - Kill Bill, Vol. 2

With all this hysteria over Red State, I was thinking about its star, Michael Parks. Parks is an actor, like Dick Miller, who should be way more famous than he is. He is best known lately from his work with Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, namely his role as Sheriff Earl McGraw, which he has played in From Dusk Till Dawn, Planet Terror, Death Proof, and Kill Bill, Vol. 1. But it's his role in Kill Bill, Vol. 2 that I want to talk about, because I think it's my absolute favorite moment of that film.

Parks was not supposed to be in Vol. 2 at all. The Mexican pimp, Esteban Vihaio, was originally given to Ricardo Montalban. However, when Montalban missed a script reading, Parks happened to be on hand and Tarantino asked him to fill in and read the part. He was so good that QT decided then and there that he should play the part in the film, prompting David Carridine to later remark that he would never, ever miss one of Quentin's readings.

Here is Michael Parks as Esteban Vihaio, the last stop for The Bride on her way to the titular killing of Bill. I also really dig the music here, as it perfectly sets up this great moment.

Topsy-Turvy (1999)

I was in the middle of writing a post on Mike Leigh's new film, Another Year, when I suddenly came over all nostalgic for my all-time favorite movie of his.



I can't even tell you how much I adore this movie. It is practically perfect in every way, chock full of details of the Victorian era (love the description of eleven-year-old Winston Churchill as "covered in freckles, and has a total disdain for authority"), overflowing with witty period dialogue ("And now, sir, I am going in search of some Italian hokey-pokey, and I care not who knows it."), and positively teeming with the wonderful music of Arthur Sullivan (often accompanied by the clever words of W.S. Gilbert).

One of the things I love the most about this movie is the level of painstaking research, which a film about people and stories familiar to so many could hardly have done without. Almost all of the characters are (or were, rather) real people and many elements of the story are based on historical events. No doubt some artistic license was taken (for instance, I believe "The Lost Chord" was written several years before it is presented as debuting in the film), but I get the impression that it was not a large amount for this movie. Mostly just filling in a few blanks, I should think.



There are lots of familiar faces here, three of them from Harry Potter films - Jim Broadbent as W.S. Gilbert, Timothy Spall as Richard Temple, and Shirley Henderson as Leonora Braham. Kevin McKidd, of Grey's Anatomy fame (and Rome and the short-lived Journeyman) plays lead performer Durward Lely, who cannot sing without his corset. Martin Savage (perhaps known better to you Brits) is beyond wonderful as the famous George Grossmith. LOTR fans may or may not recognize Andy Serkis as choreographer John D'Auban. Ron Cook plays D'Oyly Carte, owner of the Savoy Theater. Jim Broadbent's Another Year co-star Lesley Manville here plays his wife, "Kitty" Gilbert. And those of you who revere, as I do, the classic BBC production of Pride and Prejudice will recognize Mrs. Bennett (a/k/a Alison Steadman) as Madame Leon, the costumer. Another interesting Potter connection is that Alan Corduner, pictured below as Arthur Sullivan, has provided voice work for almost all of the Harry Potter video games, doing voices for Filch, Snape, and Flitwick.



The plot is your average backstage drama. We meet both Gilbert and Sullivan at the height of their popularity, after the successes of most of their well-known productions - The Pirates of Penzance, The Sorcerer, HMS Pinafore, Patience, Iolanthe ... you know, all those ones about duty (they're all about duty). Due to Sullivan's ill health and subsequent trip abroad, combined with a an impasse with Gilbert over the "topsy-turvydom" that defined most of their past work together (including Gilbert's latest libretto, which employs the use of a magic lozenge, thought by Sullivan to be too similar to the magical device in The Sorcerer), the Savoy Theatre which puts on their operas faces a dilemma. Their latest Gilbert and Sullivan opera, Princess Ida, is not as successful as previous efforts, owing both to the repetitive nature of the story and an especially hot London summer which has kept many patrons away. And for the first time since the theater opened, they will have no new opera to replace Ida when it closes (again, this is all based on the actual events and circumstances). Producer Richard D'Oyly Carte revives The Sorcerer to buy some time, but says in no uncertain terms that his theater is not in the business of revivals and that some compromise must be reached soon.



About this time, the Japanese Village in Knightsbridge opens, taking advantage of English fascination with Japan following the opening of trade between the countries. Gilbert reluctantly accompanies his wife to the exhibit in Humphreys' Hall, and after a katana sword he purchased there falls off its hanging place in his study, he is struck with inspiration. I love this scene in the movie, by the way. Broadbent takes the sword and play-acts the part of a samurai for a bit before setting it on the desk to be rehung later. The camera closes in on his face as he looks at the sword, and we hear the faint opening strains of "Behold the Lord, High Executioner" as the light of inspiration fills his eyes, followed by a peek at a song he is about to write from what will be his most successful collaboration with Arthur Sullivan, The Mikado.



Over the course of the rest of the film, we're introduced to various performers in the D'Oyly Carte company, as well as people working backstage, and see various rehearsals and costume fittings, peppered with musical numbers from the opera itself. And these, combined with the struggles in the first part of the film, serve to really invest the viewer in the success of the performance. That's a difficult thing to pull off, but it works remarkably well here. I love how the musical numbers of woven throughout, instead of just a concert dump in the third act. For example, the scene pictured above is a performance of "Three Little Maids," which we see in rehearsal. Gilbert brings in three Japanese women to watch the original choreography, which is cute but not remotely Japanese. He then has the three women replace the actresses and move down the stage, which they do very timidly and gigglingly, and which inspires the eventual staging of the scene, which we see immediately after that rehearsal.



There are many standout scenes, but two in particular that I'm even more fond of than the rest. First is the scene where the ladies and gentlemen of the chorus persuade Gilbert to reinstate a previously cut solo, the only solo that had been written for the eponymous Mikado (who is played by Temple, a/k/a Timothy Spall). The second, and undoubtedly my favorite scene in the film, is very near the end, where Kitty Gilbert talks with her husband about the Mikado opening night and attempts to reach out and, well, woo her husband. The entire history of their marriage is written in this scene and on Lesley Manville's sad but hopeful face. Theirs is not a loveless marriage, but it is a childless and apparently a sexless one. They sleep in separate rooms, and presumably always have. Victorian propriety and probably personal awkwardness have kept them from any kind of intimacy, and what's strange is that you get the impression that each of them would like to have that kind of relationship, but they seem to have lived in polite frigidity so long that neither of them knows how to go about it. A beautiful scene, and a heartbreaking one.



This is getting a Criterion release this March with lots of tantalizing special features (*bounces*), but you can also see it for free on Hulu, if you don't mind the occasional commercial interruption. If you have ever been involved in any way with the theater or enjoy backstage tales like Shakespeare in Love or A Chorus Line, I would highly, highly recommend it. It is rated R, for "a scene of risque nudity" which isn't terribly essential to the story, but I think is a significant moment of character sketching.

I leave you with one of many brilliantly written and performed scenes from this delightful movie - and another example of how the songs are juxtaposed with the backstage moments. Watch how Kevin McKidd gets even Scottish-er at the peak of his anger. :P