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THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK 1980
Written by Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan.
Directed by Irvin Kershner.
Starring Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Alec Guinness, Anthony Daniels, Kenny Baker, Peter Mayhew, David Prowse, James Earl Jones, Frank Oz and Billy Dee Williams.
You know what the dirty little secret about The Empire Strikes Back is? While many people would claim this is the best Star Wars movie, it really isn’t…and it isn’t even close.
Which isn’t to say Empire isn’t a great film. The last 25 minutes or so are as good as anything in Star Wars and there’s plenty before that to keep you entertained. But I think folks get caught up in how much bigger, bolder and darker this sequel is compared to the first movie that they don’t notice the little cracks that run throughout the story.
Empire picks up the story of Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and the rebellion against the Empire at least a few years after the events of Star Wars. The rebels have just settled in to a new secret base when Luke gets bushwacked by a snow monster and sees an image of Ben Kenobi (Alec Guinness) telling him to go to the Dagobah system and be trained by Jedi Master Yoda (Frank Oz). A probe droid leads the Empire to the Rebel base and after a big battle, Luke sets off for Dagobah while Han Solo (Harrison Ford), Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) and company get trapped by the Empire and eventually have to flee to Cloud City, where Han’s old friend Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams) will help them repair the Millennium Falcon and hide from the Empire. As Luke trains, we learn that Darth Vader (David Prowse and James Earl Jones) is desperate to find Luke and considers his Jedi potential to be extremely valuable or extremely dangerous to the Empire. Vader eventually lures Luke to Cloud City, where we get one of the all time great revelations in movie history, and witness our heroes battle to survive.
Empire is definitely a bigger film than Star Wars. There’s far more action on a much grander scale with more speed and thrills. But a lot of the big effects in Empire have not aged that well. Watching Empire, you can sort of understand how George Lucas became obsessed with going back and fixing things in the original trilogy.
This is also one of the boldest movie blockbusters ever. The story is basically about how our heroes fail over and over and over again and barely escape by the skin of their teeth. And these are real failures, where Luke and Han aren’t smart enough or strong enough or good enough to succeed, not flukes or situations where winning is impossible. Empire is very much about how the characters we loved from the first movie fall short and get beaten down.
Which is one of the things that make it much darker than Star Wars or any other SW movie, except perhaps Revenge of the Sith. But that’s not all. Star Wars was largely the story of Luke Skywalker growing from a boy to a man, but in a triumphant, cheerful, fairy tale sort of way. It’s a hero’s story. Empire is also about a boy becoming a man, but not in triumph. This is a story about Luke becoming an adult and learning that the world doesn’t work the way children think it does. This is a story of lost innocence.
Empire is a great movie and I don’t want to overly criticize it, but you can see some basic problems compared to Star Wars. It doesn’t really have a central plot propelling things along. For a big budget sci-fi spectacle, Empire is rather like one of those art house films where stuff just happens to the characters. The story also breaks up the Luke/Leia/Han triangle suggested in Star Wars and leaves Leia with little to do in this film other than be the foil for Han’s amorous advances. And while the story is more adult in some ways, it’s also simpler. There was a lot of stuff in Star Wars that suggested a wider universe in which that particular story was only a part. Empire shrinks everything down and links everything together in a much less sophisticated way. Darth Vader also becomes almost cartoonishly evil in Empire after having a core of believability in Star Wars. Although, the story does do a good job of illustrating how being that evil is ultimately self-defeating. And there’s a lot of little comedic bits crammed into the story, with most of it C-3PO related. It’s not as bad a Jar Jar Binks, but it’s a step down that road.
One of the other striking things about Empire is seeing puppet Yoda again after getting used to CGI created characters. There’s no denying that while puppet Yoda looked great in 1980, now he really looks fake. But puppet Yoda actually seems more alive than the CGI Yoda of the prequels. Puppet Yoda looks fake but feels real, while CGI Yoda looks real but feels fake. It think it must be because puppet Yoda was mostly the creation of a single artist, allowing his talent and personality to shine through, while CGI Yoda was a product that was sort of manufactured by a large team.
A lot of people say Empire was as good as it was because people other than George Lucas played such a big role in making it. But noticing the weaknesses in Empire really only emphasizes how great a job Lucas did in Star Wars…which also emphasizes how poorly he did when it came to making the prequels.
ENIGMA 2001
Written by Tom Stoppard.
Directed by Miachael Apted.
Starring Dougray Scott, Kate Winslet, Saffron Burrows, Jeremy Northan, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Tom Hallander, Donald Sumpter, Matthew Macfadyen and Robert Pugh.
Enigma is a decent little WWII movie that tries to blend historic and fictional drama. There are moments when both the real and the pretend are quite thrilling, but they end up detracting from each other so much the film is left flatfooted at its conclusion. Based on a novel by Richard Harris, too many essential details of the book are awkwardly crammed in during the last half hour. Watching Enigma is like taking an enjoyable car ride but then realizing you’re late and rushing the final few miles to your destination.
The historical aspect of the tale concerns the small group of British geniuses enlisted to crack the Nazi’s infamous Enigma code. As the movie begins, the Germans have changed the code and left the British completely in the dark just as three huge supply convoys set out from the U.S. to Britain. The codebreakers have 4 days to crack Enigma to prevent U-boats from destroying one or all of those convoys.
The fictional element of the story is Thomas Jericho (Dougray Scott), the leading genius among the codebreakers who’s returned to work after a stint in an asylum. The intense but halting Jericho fell in love with the beautiful and mysterious Claire (Saffron Burrows), who drove him to a nervous breakdown when she sought out and then spurned his advances. Jericho is still obsessed with Claire, but finds she’s disappeared without a trace or explanation. In his efforts to discover what happens to Clarie, Jericho is ably assisted by the almost irresistibly cute and spunky Hester Wallace (Kate Winslet), a secretary at the codebreakers’ military base. Jericho is also confounded and harassed by Wigram (Jeremy Northram), a smilingly hard British intelligence agent who has multiple agendas.
Both parts of Enigma are fairly good on their own merits, though the struggle to solve the Nazi code and win the war is understandably more compelling than the mystery of a missing woman, no matter how involved it may be. The difficulty is that by splitting its attention, the movie is never able to fully commit to either piece of itself. Though Enigma admirably tries to weave the two together and have them mirror each other, the on screen time spent with each dilemma inevitably gives short shrift to the other. As a viewer, you want to spend more time with the codebreakers AND you want to spend more time with the slowing budding romance of Jericho and Hester AND you want to spend more time on the conflicts between the intellectual men of science and the practical men of war AND you want to spend more time with the subtlely blunt confrontations of Jericho and Wigram AND you want to spend more time with Jericho’s memories of Claire. This is a case where you’re left wanting more, but it’s not a pleasant sensation.
And as Enigma winds to a finish and the story starts throwing new things at you to set up and explain its big ending, it confirms the imbalance you’ve been feeling is the real product of a script that needed some things cut out and other things expanded to take their place.
While legitimate, that complaint should not distract from the reality that this is a pretty good and entertaining production. It’s well acted, well directed and the individual scenes are well written. While not a modern classic of the WWI genre, it’s well worth it to spend a couple hours wrapped up in this Enigma.
EQUILIBRIUM 2002
Written and Directed by Kurt Wimmer.
Starring Christian Bale, Sean Bean, Emily Watson, Taye Diggs and Angus MacFadyen.
Have you ever watched a dumb movie and wondered if the people who made it were dumb or if they just thought the audience was dumb? Equilibrium is that sort of movie.
The story is about a future society where emotion has been outlawed. Everyone is required to take regular doses of Prozium, an emotion-suppressing drug. Anyone who doesn’t is considered an enemy of the state and any item of art, music, color or even any physical sensation that might inspire human feeling has been banned. John Preston (Christian Bale) is a Grammaton Cleric, a supercop in charge of hunting down “sense-offenders” and destroying their hidden caches of contraband.
As you might guess, the film is about Preston rediscovering his own emotions and joining with an underground resistance to challenge the police state that enforces the ban on emotions. If that sounds like Fahrenheit 451, you’re right. It’s a really dumbed down version of that story, though. In fact it’s hard to exaggerate how dumb the film is…or how dumb the filmmakers think the audience is.
Unlike the Matrix, where some deep philosophical concepts of the self and reality inform the story but mainly bubble underneath the surface, Equilibrium wears every single message and idea it has on its sleeve. Characters are constantly telling us what the movie is about and then telling us again, just in case we missed it. There is never a moment when you ever have to wonder exactly what you’re supposed to be thinking or how you’re supposed to feel about this story.
It is a fairly fast moving film until it realizes that it’s run out of story. It takes John Preston to the point where he’s ready to rebel against the society he serves, but then it’s like someone realized the movie was only going to be an hour long, so a bunch of unnecessary scenes were thrown in to keep the characters running in place for another 35 minutes. There is a neat, little twist at the end, something a lot smarter than the rest of the film and so surprising you probably won’t realize right away they ripped it off from an Arnold Schwarzenegger film. But that one, brief moment of brains is followed by one of the stupidest, most ham-handed endings in movie history. It’s worse than any climax from any Jean-Claude Van Damme movie.
Equilibrium is visually striking. Much of the CGI-less action scenes revolve around this Gun-fu martial art that allows Preston and other clerics to perform superhuman feats of violence.
Christian Bale does everything he can with the role of Preston, but he’s terribly limited by what the story does to the character. Preston either commits or allows so many terrible, murderous things to happen that it is extremely hard to care about or root for the character to succeed.
Equilibrium aspires to be a sci-fi morality tale, but can’t manage to be more than a pretentious, B-level action film with some interesting fight scenes. And there’s not much wrong with that, but you wonder if the filmmakers really thought they were making something better.
EULOGY 2004
Written and Directed by Michael Clancy.
Starring Zooey Deschanel, Hank Azaria, Ray Romano, Debra Winger, Kelly Preston, Rip Torn, Piper Laurie, Jesse Bradford, Curtis Garcia, Keith Garcia, Mark Harelik, Famke Janssen and Glenne Headly,
Writer/Director Michael Clancy must be an only child. That’s the only way I can explain him making a comedy about family that has even less connection to familial reality than your average lame sitcom from the 1980s. Eulogy makes Different Strokes, My Two Dads and Mr. Belvedere look like hard hitting, gritty portrayals of human domestic conflict.
The basic story is that the patriarch of the Collins family (Rip Torn) has passed away and his children and their families are returning home for his funeral. As they all get together, the family’s various neuroses and unresolved issues are supposed to spill out all over the screen in a humorous but touching fashion. What actually happens is that a bunch of characters so flat they have less than two dimensions alternately shout, mope, laugh and act like cartoonish fools. These 1-and-a-half dimensional people don’t remind you of the members of your own family. They remind you of the folks you saw in the insane asylum during that phenomenally ill-considered field trip back in 7th grade.
There’s Daniel Collins (Hank Azaria), a former child star who’s more connected to his cell phone than to his own daughter. Danny’s daughter Kate (Zooey Deschanel) is supposed to be the normal one in the family, so her viscously passive-aggressive abuse of her childhood boyfriend Ryan (Jesse Bradford) is brushed off as some sort of charming quirk. Danny’s sister Judy (Kelly Preston) can be described in exactly two words, “resentful lesbian”. His other sister Alice (Debra Winger) is such an intense bitch you’re amazed she’s still alive, because anyone who spends more than 5 minutes around her would want to gut her with a rusty pair of scissors. Danny’s brother Skip (Ray Romano) is the sleazy black sheep of the Collins clan, which fits because Ray Romano looks like he shares more DNA with a lobster than he does with the rest of the cast. Danny’s mother (Piper Laurie) is such a void that the script has to give her a couple of “amusing” suicide attempts, otherwise you’d never even notice she’s on screen.
There’s also Skip’s degenerate twin boys (Curtis and Keith Garcia), Alice’s emotionally annihilated husband (Mark Harelik), Lucy’s sweaty-faced lesbian lover (Famke Janssen) and Samantha (Glenne Headly), a nurse who’s such a servant of the Almighty Plot Hammer she might as well go through every scene pounding in nails with her forehead.
None of these characters seems like a real person for even a moment. None of the allegedly wacky things they do are even vaguely humorous. There’s only one actual laugh in the entire movie and that comes from a minor character played by Rene Auberjonois, proving he remembers from his time on the TV show Benson how to sell even the most faltering joke. Zooey Deschanel is darling and the rest of the cast give it their all. Kelly Preston even wrings out some tears, but none of it can make any of this dreck work.
I cannot emphasize enough that Eulogy is NOT funny. Watching it is like being trapped in a room with a fat, smelly guy who’s trying to tell you a bad joke and keeps screwing up the punch line. And then when the story tries to act like it has some legitimate point to make about family life, it’s like the fat, smelly guy tries to feel you up. The only thing you can think or feel while it’s going on is how much you want it to stop.
If writer/director Clancy set out to make a deliberately boring, unpleasant and aggravating movie as some sort of ironic commentary on how boring, unpleasant and aggravating family can be…I guess he succeeded. It’s a Pyrrhic victory at best, though. If he was genuinely trying to make an entertaining film, he failed as thoroughly as a man with a script and a camera can fail.
EVENHAND 2002
Written by Mike Jones.
Directed by Joseph Pierson.
Starring Bill Dawes, Bill Sagem Lawrence Stringer, Io Tillett Wright, Mirelly Taylor, Irene Pena, Hector Garza, Kelley West and Lee Stringer.
EvenHand is a slice-of-life-film where the filmmakers remembered that it needs to be an interesting slice. This movie takes a look at the daily grind of patrol life for two policemen in the town of San Lovisa, Texas and the different ways they each try to protect and serve.
Officer Rob Francis (Bill Dawes) is the new transfer into the bad side of town. He gets partnered up with Officer Ted Morning (Bill Sage) and the two of them immediately…well, plunge isn’t the right word. It’s more like they dip into the world of San Lovisa street crime, taking care of domestic disputes, neighborhood fracases, alleyway drug dealers and running off loiterers. Throughout the story, Francis has to deal with the violently ill-tempered David Mather (Lee Stringer) while Morning seems to delight in tormenting a teenage dope head named Toby (Io Tillett Wright). Francis also feebly flirts with a convenience store clerk named Jessica (Mirelly Taylor).
There’s really not much more of a plot than that. There’s no big case to solve or killer to track down. This film is all about two different men and the different ways they do an important but often overlooked job. Francis and Morning aren’t detectives or CSI technicians who swoop after something terrible has happened. They’re the cops on the beat who try and keep the peace, whether they’re called out for the umpteenth time to deal with a squabbling couple or just making high school kids pick some litter on the side of the road.
Francis is the more thoughtful of the two. He wants to understand the situation and make the best decision he can. Morning take a bit more practical approach. He thinks the job of a cop is to show up and arrest people, so that’s what he does as directly as possible. One of the discerning things about EvenHand is that it validates both approaches. Francis seems like the sort of reasonable cop you’d want talking to you, but he’s also shown as being flatly not up to the challenge of the job at times. Morning is exactly the sort of arrogant pain-in-the-ass cop no one wants to deal with, but he’s exactly who you want showing up to save your ass.
Bill Dawes and Bill Sage do a great job developing a rapport between their characters. If Francis and Morning only had to deal with each other for a few minutes every day, they’d come to loath each other. By being stuck together all day, they not only have to develop a tolerance but they have to let their guards down and recognize their common humanity.
Writer Mike Jones deserves credit for crafting such complete human beings, exposing a little of their depth and leaving the rest implied. Director Joseph Pierson also does a fine, though not particularly flashy, job. When a movie isn’t being pushed along by a propulsive plot, it’s very common for it to meander, stall and collapse before it’s done. Pierson keeps the story moving always forward, which isn’t that easy when it’s not actually going anywhere.
EvenHand is a skillful blend of good storytelling and good acting. It’s a police drama about the human beings who wear the badge and how they can only do the best they can, just like everybody else.
EVIL DEAD II 1987
Written by Sami Raimi and Scott Speigel. Directed by Sam Raimi.
Starring Bruce Campbell.
All artists change over time. Their evolution reflects their own personal growth, the development of their skills and the different influences that pass through their lives. If an artist is lucky, they’ll produce a work that is uniquely their own. Something that embodies the purity of their own thought and feeling, without being too constricted by external forces or degenerately self indulgent. Evil Dead II is Sam Raimi’s unique contribution to the common aesthetic.
I realize that seems a bit pretentious when focused on a horror movie where a corpse dances, a man cuts off his demon-infested hand and a woman swallows a witch’s eyeball…but it’s true. Evil Dead II is the most honest, purest expression of his own vision. It’s the thing that from start to finish, only Raimi could have made. The fact that it’s a remake is what’s so unusual.
Evil Dead II isn’t a sequel to Evil Dead, it’s a retelling of the same story but freed from the expectations of others. Both films tell the story of a group of people in an isolated cabin with the infamous Necronomicon, the Book of the Dead. Both films feature unclean spirits summoned back into the world by words played from a tape machine. Both movies even feature a young woman who runs into the haunted woods and is molested by devilish shrubbery and the main character in both is a young man named Ash (Bruce Campbell). But there is a profound difference between the two films.
Evil Dead has a great many startling and bizarre elements to it, but it is essentially a conventional horror movie. When he made it, Raimi was making what other people had told him made a movie a horror movie. It has the same dynamic and the same essential nature as other horror movies. When he made Evil Dead II, Raimi made what he thought a horror movie should be. And what Raimi thought a horror movie should be is Man facing terrifying evil…and surpassing it.
Evil Dead II embraces the idea that the grotesque is both frightening and silly. That the proper response to the most extreme situations, circumstances where reality itself is out to get you…would look goofy. Raimi’s vision was that terror taken to the otherworldly limit would be not even a hair’s breadth away from silly. That’s what makes Ash one of the great characters in film. Unlike others in horror films, who represent the audience desperately clinging to the real and the safe, Ash is confronted with the outrageous and the insane and he’s right there with it all, step for step and crazed laugh for crazed laugh. Oh, he’s frightened and he’s frantic and he’s jumping at shadows. But Ash doesn’t reject the horror before and around him. He dives into it. He fights with it, not against it. What Ash represents is the idea that the indescribably nightmare out there isn’t really out there. We’re part of it and it is in acknowledging and accepting that, we can defeat it. What defines Evil Dead II are those moments where Ash is even more inhuman than the hellish monsters in those dark woods.
By the time he did the third film in the series, Army of Darkness, Raimi had lost his purity of vision. There are only moments of the film that are at all scary. Ash become a figure of comedy in a world of laughably over-the-top creatures and situations. If Evil Dead was Raimi making what other people thought a horror movie was, Army of Darkness is Raimi making what other people thought a Sam Raimi movie was. It has all of the style but none of the heart.
Which isn’t to say it’s a bad film. All three are enjoyable on their own merits, like many of Raimi’s other works. Evil Dead II stands out, though, because it wasn’t made by Sam Raimi. It is Sam Raimi.
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