February 15, 2008
Two Movies with Nothing to Do with Each Other, #9.
Akira Kurosawa's Drunken Angel (1948) and George Lucas's Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith (2005).
So Barb emails me and asks me for my review of Drunken Angel. There's little I can add to what Barb has already said so well, except to note that the real highlight of the evening was culinary rather than cinematic. (Barb, let me tell you that that was the best arroz caldo I have ever had in my life, scout's honor.)
But back to Drunken Angel. The excitement here is seeing a very young Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimizu -- Mifune, in particular, looking oddly like an even more dissolute Bryan Ferry circa 1982 -- gain each other's wary trust. Shimizu is a doctor who lives in the slums not out of any commitment to the downtrodden; it's because he is downtrodden, reeling in a drunken haze most of the day and with no one to call family except for a former gun moll / bar girl he is harboring in his house. That is, until Mifune arrives, as a similarly dissipated Yakuza gangster who has been diagnosed with tuberculosis.
It has all the elements of noir, and it's filmed that way, with oblique shadows and pinstripe suits. In his pre-color films, Kurosawa seems to have a visual fascination for soiled squalor, suggesting the indignity of the proceedings, and there's a knock-down, dragged-out fight scene in spilled white paint, the equivalent of all that mud in Stray Dog and The Seven Samurai.
Drunken Angel has the muscularity of a "character study" film from the '70s -- you can almost imagine an alcoholic Paul Newman or Jeff Bridges (or Nick Nolte, later), gargling with vodka in the morning and flailing around in impotent rage the rest of the day -- and if it sounds somewhat hackneyed, it kind of is. Shimizu, in his inexplicable eagerness to save the dying gangster, will inevitably save himself in the process as well, and he does. In the end, it's probably lesser Kurosawa, which -- considering his body of work -- means that it's better than ninety percent of the films out there. Especially the one below.
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It took me all of three evenings to try to finish Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith, one of the more unwatchable movies I've seen in a while. More like "Revenge of the Shit", actually.
It's a shame because this is the one episode of the series that had the most potential in terms of character development, because it's not just get-the-Princess-to-the-Hidden-Fortress, but about a psychological and emotional turning point in the series, i.e., how Darth Vader came to be. (In fact it could have been easily subtitled "The Seduction of Anakin Skywalker", and that just might have been a far more interesting film.)
Instead, the last temptation of Christensen is dealt with in a couple of dispensable scenes, dripping with fake, obvious portent, and with many sideways glances IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN: "This Jedi had the power to prevent death NUDGE NUDGE." "You can learn that power, but not from a Jedi WINK WINK." And so on.
We are at least rewarded with the little thrill of recognition at the end: "Look, there's the Death Star!" "Look, it's the dark helmet!" "Listen, it's that heavy breathing!", but, like love, it's fleeting, and takes up only a sixteenth of the screen time accorded to an increasingly ludicrous lightsaber fight on some collapsing big iron thingie at some planet that looks completely uninhabitable because it's, like, made of fire, and at this point I can't even remember why Anakin went here in the first place, and how Obi-Wan managed to track him down, and later on they still manage not to behead each other with their lightsabers or get burned despite the thin clothes they are wearing or slip into the lava or fall off those tiny scraps of metal they're actually surfing on or get beaned by any of the countless hurtling balls of fire, probably because they're not just any kind of Jedi, they're Jedi Masters, except one is Lawful Good and the other is slowly turning into Chaotic Evil, which probably explains why one turns into Alec Guinness and the other into barbecue at the beach.
The acting is uniformly terrible, and it's indicative of the film's level of acting that Yoda is the most humanly expressive of the characters. If this were a different film, the actors' delivery might be called "mannered" -- but the context of this film obviates such magnanimity. The humorless, artless dialogue lands with the proverbial thud, and those bleeps you hear in the background is the sound of ATM buttons being pushed, as a group of generally able actors -- MacGregor, Portman, Smits -- deposit their paychecks. Even the beloved Samuel L. Jackson is reduced here to further a plot twist we knew was going to happen anyway. Couldn't George Lucas have at least let him get away with saying something like, "You're Darth Motherfuckin' Vader?" That would have made me happy.
Posted by the wily filipino at February 15, 2008 12:13 AM