The Basket Case Transformation – Justified

25 years plus and fans and non-fans alike are still bemoaning Allison’s final act metamorphosis from disheveled recluse to buddying pretty princes. “False!” they cry; an arc in character that completely undermines her alleged winning individualism. For someone who dresses and behaves on her own Gothy, ransacked terms to be all the sudden subjected to Claire’s Barbie make-over has been taken to heart as the highest insult to all who idolize unconformity. This point of contention is understandable, but not accurate. I think it’s time to set the record straight. When we first meet her, Allison is not some free spirited bohemian. Allison is not anything. She’s a void, a black hole. And like all black holes she sucks in everything – the klepto (a hallway combo lock, Brian’s wallet) with a bag full of trinkets.
 
“Okay, fine…but I didn’t dump my purse out on the couch and invite people into my problems, did I?!”


Andrew makes a further valid point: when not hiding, Allison is an attention whore. Every external aspect of her character is a grab, a means to entice the gossipy side of others with her appearance, random outbursts ( “Ha!!” ) and lurid comments about her sexuality. She lies. She is a lie. Conformity lacks integrity only when one’s principles are sacrificed for social acceptance. But Allison doesn’t sacrifice any principles; she merely supplants a hindering identity crisis with a single honest attempt to be identified for the first time in her young adult life. “They ignore me,” she says regarding her parents. And everything she does–or doesn’t do–from beginning to end is an attempt to compensate. The only difference here, with her blossoming make-over, is that she’s now expressing herself with a positive intent instead of a negative one. She’s connecting instead of repelling.

Best and most underrated line in the movie


Allison: "Have you ever done it?"
Claire:... ! ..."I don't even have a psychiartrist."    

Season of the Witch

I make no claim that Season of the Witch is a great film; it plainly isn’t. But it knows its business and carries it out dutifully. I personally enjoyed it, as I often do with Nicolas Cage titles: Con Air, Wicker Man, Next, Knowing and, recently, Drive Angry 3D. Many criticize that Cage has long since succumbed to sleepwalking through second-hand movies. I say he’s using his A-list star status far more liberally, without pretense, giving us matinee discount junkies an open buffet of B-entertainment. Find me an Oscar winner more pro bono than Nicolas Cage and I’ll find you an actor with a greater film legacy of awesomely bad hair. His latest here is a dumb movie that takes itself seriously, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. You can’t enjoy these kinds of films when they’re self aware with parody. Well, you can, but not to the same effect; because with a lack of sincerity comes a lack of guilty indulgence.

Like a return to the pages of dime store horror comics and the films of Hammer and Roger Corman, Season of the Witch is laden with grim faced heroes who venture through wooded darkness and torch lit dungeon layer, racking steel against evil in all its ghoulish forms… with a touch of Tales from the Crypt and Howard’s Solomon Kane. This is no doubt a Saturday night (or afternoon at the local marquee) movie for boys, or men with boyish enthusiasms. I can almost picture it as an early ‘80 VHS incarnation (Paragon, Media, Vidmark – take your pick), with the smell of old, through-many-hands plastic and a smudged graphic illustration on the cover box.

The 14th century: After many years of bloody service in the name of God that eventually dwindles to the slaughtering of innocents, two knights of the Crusades, Behmen (Cage) and Felson (Ron Pearlman), rid themselves of the puritanical bullshit and head north for home, or wherever, as deserters. Somewhere amidst the vast of Eastern Europe they happen upon a kingdom-post ravaged by the Black Plague. In attempt to pass through unnoticed, the two men are identified by Behmen’s crested sword and imprisoned--to be executed. But the sickly Cardinal D'Ambroise (Christopher Lee, rounding said Hammer experience), with his plague rotting mug, summons the errant knights and tasks them with a pardoning quest to escort an accused black haired witch (Claire Foy), referred to simply as The Girl, to a remote monastery. There, she is to be tried by an elite order of monks and, if found guilty, executed by sacred ritual that will remedy the curse of the Plague. Accompanying them is a priest named Debelzaq (Stephen Campbell Moor), a local knight Eckhardt (Ulrich Thomsen), a swindler Hagamar (Stephen Graham), who knows the road and a young squire named Kay (Robert Sheehan).

The lean narrative follows our heroes over treacherous wilds, from one thrill to the next, as the crux of the story centers on whether or not The Girl can be trusted and whether or not Behmen will abide his oath to protect her and see to her a fair trial – an oath that grows more precarious as The Girl plays on the men’s fears and loyalties, saving the life of one while manipulating others to their end, sympathetic upfront but smirking slyly behind glances. This yields a surprisingly decent amount of dramatic tension on her end, aided largely by the actor involved. In her big screen debut, Clair Foy, seen mostly from behind bars, gets down patent her assorted looks of coy, deception and vulnerability, playing each card accordingly.

From Cage there is no speed we haven’t seen countless times over, but he trudges on like the soldier of cinema that he is, wearing the mournful brow and heavy conscious of Behmen’s faith-jaded character. In sidekick mode, Pearlman dishes out his usual gruff charm and dogged screen presence; where some actors have feathers in their cap, he has notches on his belt. Together, the two leads make of it a day’s work, delivering droll dialogue with comically flat accents and sharing an occasional nod, chuckle or relating gesture with genuine buddy chemistry. The rest of the supporting cast are broadly outlined in their characters but none-the-less earnest in their performances – the acting overall is about as good as a movie like this will allow. 

The last time director Dominic Sena teamed with Cage was for the Gone in 60 Seconds remake, which, along with Swordfish was some pretty obnoxious Hollywood hyperbole. Season of the Witch is a notably more subdued (and cheaper, with a mere $40 million price tag) bells and whistleless exercise in genre. Yet whatever failings attributed to the screenplay, the film does succeed with immersive settings and a moody medieval atmosphere. Between the locations used in Hungary, Austria and Croatia and the gritty production design, Sena and cinematographer Amir Mokri render a pallet of grayish overcast and cold ember turquoise clashed with glowing firelight. Fog is used effectively during a night attack by demon wolves and a sequence involving a rope bridge over an impossible chasm is realized with wonderful matte painted dimension. There’s even a certain D&D feel to the way our heroes progress through rounds of peril, investigating mysterious places and deciding collectively on the next course of action. The film’s rather admirably methodical build-up is somewhat undone in the final act, beginning with a slightly nonsensical revelation about The Girl’s true nature. From thereon it settles into part zombie feature and part goofy FX battle, though balanced by one very cool death scene and an honest moment where young Kay is recognized for his bravery.

My town has two movie theaters. One is a 14 auditorium complex newly furnished with XD digital super-screens and Real-D 3D projectors. The other is the older, smaller, bargain bin dive with sticky floors, tacky purple & green trimmings and film reels that snap, pop and crackle. It plays two-to-three month old new releases for a dollar…a dollar! That’s where I saw Season of the Witch, by myself, in a half-sized auditorium peppered with maybe four or five other lowly patrons sitting near the back. Cage hacked away at demon wolves and zombie monks. I ate Goobers. It was fun. 

       

Impossible Movie: The Flash

The biggest problem one faces when making a live action film about a superhero …is that they’re making a live action film about a superhero. It’s a preposterous concept – people who can fly and throw cars and shoot laser beams out of their eyes, often clad in bright spandex. Batman, who is less superhero and more self-made crime fighter, is arguably the easiest to adapt because he has no super powers at all but, instead, must rely on training and specialized gear. He’s entirely human. Iron Man, too, is reliant upon technology; without it he’s just a smartass playboy. The X-Men have mutant powers that are each limited in function, less effective against certain obstacles or enemy mutants and are often conceived more as extensions of personality than solve-all solutions.

By rule of thumb the more powerful and outlandish the superhero the more difficult it is to challenge them and make them semi-credible and sensible--all within and 2 hour average running time. Superman: The Movie managed to slide by with a certain novelty in seeing a man fly and catch helicopters and whatnot. It was a cheery piece that followed in the wake Star Wars, so audiences were still riding high and happy enough just to see such whimsical things up on the big screen for the first time, or at least for the first time with big studio money.

However, looking back, the film no doubts commits one of the lamest deus ex machinas in cinema history when its title hero brings Lois Lane back from the dead by rewinding time via reversing the rotation of the Earth. This is a prime example of superheroes translating to the big screen with silly results. Don’t get me wrong, Superman: The Movie succeeds on charm, but it wasn’t until the sequel that audiences were treated to something a bit more compelling when fellow Kryptonians, General Zod and his cronies, busted out of the Phantom Zone and gave Supes a run for his money.

Superman Returns suffered nary the same fate only without the protection of being an original; it’s plainly disconnecting when the protagonist can solve a crisis (a giant Krypton-infected land mass) simply by lifting it from the ocean and launching it into outer space, although the earlier scene where he rescues a nose diving passenger plane is pretty exciting. When it came time for “smashing!” both Ang Lee’s The Hulk and its reboot The Incredible Hulk impressed with what can only be described as state-of-the-art exercises in FX disaster and rampage. Beyond that, how much danger can we feel for a character so indestructible and so completely meta-human?

Next summer Hollywood will try its hand at two more outrages comic book classics, Thor and The Green Lantern. To make comprehensive an Asgard demi-God living amongst regular folk or a test pilot turned intergalactic do-gooder who can project goopy, green glowing abstractions from his power ring is enough to make any filmmaker’s head spin. How well directors Kenneth Branagh and Martin Campbell, and their respective writing teams, handle these adaptations is dependent upon how well they can integrate their heroes into something relatable for the audience and/or how well they translate the visual iconography of these heroes in action, with tension or unique style, and without making it look downright laughable. No matter their extreme proportions, the common thread shared by most comic book characters is some additional aspect of their nature or origins–at least one underlying theme–that can make for engaging storytelling.

Superman and Thor resonate our yearning to believe in mythic ideals; The Incredible Hulk can be fitted with Frankenstein pathos, whose power is not a blessing but a curse; Captain America embodies the WWII motif and a general sense of nostalgic patriotism; characters like Spider Man, X-Men and the Fantastic 4 are ridden with angsty issues regarding coming-of-age awkwardness and social acceptance. The Punisher is a revenge story, Batman explores psychological content.

No superhero is too niche or esoteric for a good script to flesh-out, downsize, or tweak to make interesting: Doctor Strange could be our first psychedelic, mind-bending superhero movie and Swamp Thing would make a great R-rated fantasy horror à la Guillermo Del Toro. Hell, even Aqua Man can be refashioned into something sleeker and seized for its potential environmental themes. I say all of this, of course, in reference to the one well known superhero who, after some consideration, I think is damn near impossible to adapt into a feature film.

The Flash is one of our oldest superheroes, dating back to January 1940. Since then the mantle has been donned by various characters, a quasi-family of Flashes, linked together by one of the more bizarre storylines of the DC universe involving different Flashes who move between time and exist in multiple parallel dimensions. To simplify, the three names most commonly associated with The Flash are Jay Garrick (the Golden Age), Barry Allen (the Silver Age) and Wally West (the Modern Age); and of those three Barry Allen is arguably the most popular and often referenced. What I find notable about The Flash is just how completely square he is as a character. Allen is not an outcast from another world or a millionaire recluse or a misunderstood freak or a troubled teen.

He has no tragic back story, no real personal issues and doesn’t lead any kind of eccentric lifestyle. He’s a (generically termed) police scientist who suffers a lab accident–doused by lightening struck chemicals–that grant him the powers of super human running speed and matching reflexes. As follows, he sports himself a red body suit and fights crime for Central City. That’s it: Barry Allen, The Flash, red tights, runs fast. ‘Tis true, the comic book chronology of the character(s), spanning some 50 years, is ripe with varying dramatic arcs, victories and defeats, loved ones lost, and even death--and then rebirth. But speaking in terms of a condensed or, more likely, single threaded feature film, the origins, rise and generality of The Flash is all but void of any uniquely thematic angle.

With a little invention I’m sure it wouldn’t be difficult for a couple screenwriters to lay down for a film version some sort of conventional internal conflict or driving motivation to fight crime. So a film-worthy dramatic arc might not be impossible to conjure but finding a way to actually visualize The Flash in all his glory quickly reveals some serious roadblocks. Superman flying is preposterous, but also highly cinematic, with wind and clouds and Earth-curvature vistas.

Spider Man web-slinging between skyscrapers gives audiences a virtuoso thrill, and other mentioned superheroes can be visualized with similar effect. Easiest of all are things like Wolverine’s claws and Captain America’s shield, which, if done right, can render some dynamic action. But The Flash poses a definite problem in this department. Bear in mind that a film version is going to require multiple action sequences, which raises the question: How do you make accessible to the audience said action when the character can, in theory, move faster than the speed of film itself?

On the comic book page all is frozen in still imagery, leaving room for the reader to project the whole of action in their own mind. But film is motion – real space and real time. Therefore The Flash would be nothing more than a trailing red blur. Is this enough to sustain viewers for an entire feature length running time? Also consider that much of the narrative is dictated by geography, and when your hero can cover great distances in mere seconds, plotting, pacing and tension take on a whole new dilemma.

Perhaps utilizing bullet-time effects might help with comprehending The Flash in motion, but it might also run the serious risk of gimmicky, unoriginality and could deflate the very aesthetic of The Flash. Perhaps subtle variations can be explored, finding a happy medium where we can experience The Flash’s super speed field from his point of view but also from eyes of an average pedestrian. I don’t know.

Another keen point of interest in this particular DC universe is The Flash’s arch nemeses known as The Gallery of Rogues. They are united band of criminals that include Mirror Master, The Trickster, The Pied Piper and Captain Boomerang. Never mind them; it is the leader of The Rogues that has the most potential. His name is Leonard Snart, aka Captain Cold (a precursor to Mr. Freeze), who is possibly even simpler than The Flash. Having mastered cyclotron ‘absolute zero’ technology, Cold devised what is simply referred to as a cold gun, which fires an energy beam that, you guessed it, freezes enemies – a proven counter defense against The Flash. But Captain Cold is not some maniacally laughing psychopath. Stoic, dignified, honor-bound and highly ethical, Cold does not believe in senseless violence, kills only out of necessity and still feels remorse afterwards. The guy even enforces a no-drug rule over his Rogues! In an age when movie villains have become such disturbing agents of chaos or corruption, Captain Cold embodies a kind of old fashioned lawful evil. This brings up a larger issue anyhow where the totality of The Flash seems the product of a bygone era when a brightly colored, straight-laced superhero that can go *zoom!* was more than enough to captivate the minds of young boys. I wonder if the material is just too naïve for today’s snarky-to-cynical audiences.

Could they make a moody, self-loathing Flash movie? Should they? I’m not a comic book nerd or collector. I read them casually from time to time before discarding them entirely. It was a glancing image of The Flash, a striking one indeed, that got me thinking on the subject to begin with. I personally find the anachronistic nature of the The Flash rather charming, but, technically, am still not sure how one could pull it off as a motion picture.