Brian Ferry courts Mia

Back when music videos for films were interwoven in a way that felt new and original. They don't make 'em like this anymore.

Dragonslayer



Dragonslayer was a commercial failure upon its summer release in 1981. One major contributing factor was that it opened a mere two weeks in the wake of team Lucasberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. Tough break. But there were other reasons as well concerning the plotting, style and tone of the film. The Americanized fantasy adventures of the late ‘70s into the 1980s, namely but not exclusively Star Wars and Indiana Jones, offered fast-paced escapism and easy-to-accommodate archetypical storytelling, which made Dragonslayer something of a sleepy, atonal oddball.

It was Disney distributed but in the place of cheerful conventional fairytale was a slower, dreary narrative, void of binary resolve, where characters meandered about, at a time when audiences desired pitfall heroics at every turn. Add to this the film’s overall near-unquantifiable affect: Dragonslayer is very, how shall we say, British. It plods and rambles and fusses about, with an air of bumbling Oxford geriatrics. But this is what gives the film its unique charm, and there does come moments of excitement and sheer terror when best serving the story.



The seemingly simple enough premise begins with a young apprentice named Galen Bradwarden and his sorcerer mentor named Urlich who are visited by a small expedition of desperate villagers in request to vanquish a tyrant dragon, Vermithrax Pejorative, all of which loosely set in the realm of the post Roman Brython. Early on, Urlich makes a peculiar exit that isn’t explained until the third act.

Young Galen then takes the reigns of the mission and, after reaching the kingdom of Urland, must on one hand try and destroy the dragon while on the other hand contend with lottery politics, enforced by King Casiodorus. There’s also a love story as Galen and expedition leader/tomboy Valerian romance sheepishly. Yet none of this is makes for a clear, cut-in-dry story of Good vs. Evil, of white hats vs. black hats, but a story about the last vestige of a druid and Celtic mysticism before its eradication by an orderly, monotheistic faith, one that has homogenized the bulk of modern textbook history, all but eradicating the secrets of magic.

Vermithrax is monstrous but not necessarily evil incarnate. He’s just a beast. Galen, too, is less a traditional hero who successfully champions any one morally right perspective than he is a mere good-hearted (even slightly embarrassing) witness to the changing of the times. The king is flakey and corrupt but also very human and pragmatic regarding the long term betterment of his people. No one outcome of the film is ultimately happy or sad: Vermithrax dies, but so does Urlich and the rest of magic; the villagers are saved, only to succumb to the blindness of Christianity.

Even as Galen and Valerian ride off together happily they likewise express a ponderous, inconclusive “What-was-the-point?” reflection of the events. Peter MacNicol plays Galen with all the stature of that clarinet kid from your high school band class, which perfectly fits his role in the grand scheme of the story. The rest of the cast is British, including John Hellam, Peter Eyre, Sydney Bromley, Ian McDiarmid, a strangely attractive Catlin Clark as Valerian and, the highlight performance of the film, Ralph Richardson as Urlich – the same classically trained theater actor who, also in 1981, graced my personal favorite Time Bandits as The Supreme Being. 

 

Despite the aforementioned British flavor of the film, it was American director and co-writer Matthew Robins and co-writer Hal Barwood who helmed it from start to finish. Robins and Barwood both stem from a group of USC film students known in their time as The Dirty Dozen, which, to name a few, consisted of George Lucas, John Milius, Walter Murch, Howard Kazanjian, Bob Gale and Willard Huyck. None-the-less, Robins and Barwood totally saturated Dragonslayer with the look and feel of primeval Briton, filming on location in the castle-ridden countryside of Northern Wales and Scotland, while depicting an array of song, customs and superstitions that one could liken to nowhere else and at no other period in history.

However, verisimilitude is etched with matt painted backdrops and elaborate set-designed caves and canyons (not to mention the actual content of magic and dragons), as if the Briton we’re seeing is still tied to the lands of ancient myth and legend. It feels credible but evokes the fanciful. The film has stunning cinematography by Derek Vanlint who also lensed Ridley Scott’s Alien. Never relying on false or forced light, Vanlint allowed for the gleaming white ambiance of overcast skies and the under-glow of burning torches–fire in general–to fill every frame, giving deep greens to the surrounding forest, pouring in through windows and warming dark keeps and cobbled corridors with soft amber. The short lens focusing is sharp and direct, while deep focused shots are nicely composed, complete with full vistas and well staged actors and extras. Dragonslayer is not particularly complex or daring in its visual language, but it does have the reassuring shot-flow of a carefully storyboarded optical effects film, the kind of disciplined editing were every frame must economize the hardships of location shooting and heavy post-production.

Speaking of which, the special effects are a marvel even to this day. What’s important is that Vermithrax isn’t a thing, he’s a genuine fully realized character rendered by ILM wizards Phil Tippet, Denis Muren, Ken Ralston and Brain Johnson using a pioneering animation technique called go-motion. This differed from traditional stop-motion in that a model of the dragon would articulate during each exposure instead of in between. The results speak for themselves. In addition, Disney studios provided full scale animatronic head, limbs and wings that would go unrivaled until Stan Winston’s T-Rex.

The climactic battle between dragon and sorcerer is steeped in lurid imagery with impossible craggy mountains (scale modeled) and an otherworldly solar eclipse. Detail is top notch – when Vermithrax soars through the clouds and swoops down upon Urlich, you can hear the wind blowing through his torn leathery wings; his and Urlich’s shared demise achieves the blast, furry and lyrical movement equal to the self-destructed, trailblazing Enterprise from The Search for Spock.

The musical by Alex North was nominated for an academy award but has since become targeted unfairly as an ugly, ungainly fantasy score. North emphasizes the unconventional aspects of the film. He put aside homophonic writing where musical themes are clearly distinct through a progression of repeating structures, instead relying on polyphonic writing where individual phrases and motifs are conceived separately but racked together in composition – replacing traditional harmony with counterpoint harmony, thus rendering an ambiguous, asymmetrical score that is largely inaccessible for the audience, which was the point. Perhaps most important of all is that the score wonderfully captures the atmosphere of this world without choosing sides. It’s wild, chaotic, subversively comical, intentionally aimless, and extremely tense …without delineating the story or setting to any one end. One reviewer said: [It's what shadowy sorcery and fantastical, fire-breathing creatures should sound like in the language of a "modern" orchestra.]

By all means, sit down with Dragonslayer and let it wash you over with its subtle weirdness and fully immersive folklore. It looks great, has great action and rich ideas. It’s an awesome movie.  



Coolist. Picture. Ever.



Supernova

Movies are strange. Even when they don’t pass the bar on all things adequate storytelling they can still make an impression. So many movies drift through the deep space of late night viewings on cable or as bargain-bin DVDs that one might watch on impulse after work, after the lights go out, or maybe on a lazy Sunday afternoon. They’re free from baggage, zero expectations – you find yourself not really caring whether or not they rise to the level of greatness. From this indifference comes a calmness, a kind of cine-zen state of mind where often within said forgettable films hidden potentials reveal themselves.

Supernova is a clunky, stitched together sci-fi that centers around a six-member crew medical ship, the Nightingale 229, who receives a distress call from a far off galaxy–amidst a rogue moon and dying star–then sets out to rescue only to find a sole survivor and his smuggled treasure, a mysterious alien artifact. The director is Walter Hill, who is credited with the pseudonym Thomas Lee (an Alan Smithee variant) in an effort to distance himself from the project. Clearly, there were problems behind the scenes, most likely due to the usual creative differences between filmmaker and studio execs. Or maybe Hill could just never get the long-since recycled script to work proper. The film was subject to re-edits and, allegedly, Frances Ford Coppola was the guy left with salvaging what he could.

One can only guess what and/or how much additional material never made it into the final cut. There’s a strong enough setup and a story to be told, but the proceeding narrative is so malnourished that all we’re left with are an assortment of repetitive scenes that merely service worn thin clichés from psychopath thrillers and the outer space isolation horror subgenre. The additional surrounding cast has little to do other than exposit techno-babble and react accordingly to their impending doom. Actually, that’s not true. Robin Tunney and Lou Diamond Philips copulate like bunnies whilst Wilson Cruz plays chess with the ship’s female computer named Sweetie, with a hint of romance. A potentially great Robert Forrester, with a potentially intriguing subplot, all but cameos his part as the ship’s captain before exiting stage left and Peter Facinelli acts as the villain with all the menace of a CW vampire. 

Thankfully, the main casting appeal rest on the shoulders of the film’s two leads who show natural chemistry for one another. James Spader is the ship’s co-pilot Nick Vanzant and Angela Basset as the head medical officer Dr. Kaela Evers. In recent years Spader's (small)screen persona has been defined almost exclusively by his Boston Legal stint as the pudgy, smug, liberal ranting lawyer. Before then, going back to his early career, he mostly saddled himself with similar characters from yuppie to geeky to narcissistic, and even a little homosexual. Here, smack-dab in the middle of his then still ongoing attempt to achieve A-list stardom, Spader took his one and only shot at the bulked up leading man action hero tough guy, but with a Spader twist. His Vanzant character is a limbo recovering drug addict with the driest of irreverence, and Spader lubricates every line of dialogue with understated charm and acerbic wit. His transfixed gaze denotes a complex and intelligent inner being that well adorns the spacey setting.

Basset continues her hardened black woman exterior, a no-nonsense doctor who keeps her proximity with others professional; that is, until Vanzant smoothly courts her over a couple of intimate exchanges and a bottle of brandy (with a grown pear inside, making for easy small talk). In fact, intimacy is something of a central theme throughout the film. And this is where Supernova gels. There's groovy sensual vibe that casually opens and closes the movie; aforementioned generic suspense is better left secondary as mere filler. The alien artifact that drives the conflict is a shell encased 9th dimensional property that glows erotic and seduces all who come near it. Long term exposure yields rejuvenation and super strength, but its real purpose seems to be a reboot bomb with a blast radius that spreads throughout the universe, replacing old life with new – at once both total destruction and total creation, not unlike the Genesis Devise from Wrath of Khan.

Following the theme of sexual interplay amidst the varying characters, the artifact's supernova explosion, near the film's end, can be taken as the ultimate orgasm and conception. This “climax” is even juxtaposed with a last ditched-effort to escape via hyper-jump where Spader and Basset must share nude the one remaining pod, at the risk molecular transfusion--which does in fact happen in a manner contrived but thematically resonate none-the-less.

Those familiar with Hill's work will note that the directorial style for this film is oddly opaque. Steadicam and handheld close-ups dominate the shot-flow along with many a loosed Dutch angles, as a means to stay personal to the characters while keeping the tone precarious. It's all rather cluttered and amateurish, really, best serving the quiet scenes between Spader and Basset, but ultimately seems the product of a first time director from today's TV generation; not Hill, with his penchant for sturdy Peckinpah framing and editing (nor will you find any of his signature black’n’white flashbacks). The sets and environments feel like fragmented background blurs and there's virtually no attempt to impress with graphic compositions.

However, this kinda works for the better, given the casual floaty atmosphere these characters inhabit. Production-wise the Nightingale's interior is ornate with curvy corridors and a color scheme of vibrant blues, pinks and purples that resembles a neon-techno tanning salon – perhaps as a final salute to 1990s aesthetic. The first 15 minutes acts as a prologue to the opening title credit, which isn't a credit at all but a rapid montage of the events yet to come that flashes by precognitive during the ship's first hyper-jump, while the actual title sequence comes at film's end as a sort of denouement in-and-of-itself. I suspect this one saving grace edit was that of Coppola's contribution as opposed to his infamous zero-gravity sex scene tinkering, but who knows?

Overall, Supernova has lousy piecemeal and nonsensical plotting, aimless subplots, a silly antagonist and some uninspired futuristic settings and technologies (sporting the lamest robot in movie history!) It’s nothing short of a mitigated disaster. Yet it does have a surprisingly effective ambiance and sound emotional logic thanks largely to its two leads and the way the surrounding story thematically accentuates their relationship. This is actually a fine movie to watch with your girlfriend, when watching a movie for movie’s sake is not the objective.