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SIMON SAYS: Even in 3D, it’s still a PHANTOM MENACE II society

Prologue

In 1999, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace was released theatrically. The rest is a blur – for me, at least. I was 12 years old at the time, the ideal age for an uncritical Star Wars fan to see the first entry in George Lucas’ then-new prequel trilogy.

And I liked it!

Or, more accurately, in that hazy period I now refer to as my “pre-taste” period, I devoured it. Though I’m still convinced I’ve only seen Episode I once or twice before last night, I knew the film by heart, having played two of the PlayStation video games inspired by the film. (There was the podracer game and the action-adventure one that always gave me motion sickness…. I only owned the latter once my peers had moved on to the PlayStation 2. I led a deprived childhood, I think.)

My taste in films evolved as the prequel trilogy was released. When Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones came out, I was 15. At the time, I was (and still am) an unabashed nerd but I was only slightly more opinionated. There were things in Episode II that I wholeheartedly enjoyed, like watching Yoda fight Count Dooku. (My sister and I gushed about that scene as we exited our Douglaston multiplex: Dracula versus a Muppet! Okay, a CG Muppet, but still!) Still, there were things about the film I distinctly recall disliking, like Hayden Christensen’s performance. I remained fairly uncritical at this point, though.

Finally, when Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith came out in 2005, I was 18. I was (and probably still am) a raging asshole and as opinionated as I’ve ever gotten. And I hated Episode III. I didn’t think it was the worst thing I’d ever seen but I did think it was pretty awful. Christensen was still bad, his character’s moral conflict was stilted (I still can’t get over the minute pause between, “No, I won’t cut his head off,” and “Okay, I’ll cut his head off!”), the romance sucked, the dialogue sucked and the fight scenes were labored but unmoving. I saw that film under ideal circumstances of a kind, too: with the high school Science Fiction Club that I founded and quickly disbanded thereafter. (This was our last group activity; almost all of us hated what we saw.)

End Prologue

The prospect of revisiting Episode I was daunting. By now, watching awful movies has become something of a passion of mine. But I didn’t watch this film, one that I still have fond preadolescent memories of, for the sake of rubbernecking. When I heard that George Lucas had post-converted The Phantom Menace into 3D, I knew my morbid curiosity would get the better of me and that attention must be paid. I earnestly wanted to know if the film could hold up for me. So I held a seance for my inner child at the Ziegfeld last night.

First, I had a beer and some bangers and mash at the Oldcastle Pub just down the street. This made Semi-Adult Simon happy (I’m 25, lemme alone). Then, I bought a big honking Pepsi and sat down with a friend at my favorite Manhattan movie theater (the opening night 7pm screening was not well-attended, though it wasn’t empty either). I was determined to give Kid Simon a fighting chance against George and what I rightfully feared was a three-dimensional cavalcade of crap.

And for a while there, I thought I could happily regress. The trailer for The Lorax looked like fun and I wanted to see the new Spider-Man movie and, hey, even the Ice Age cartoon in front of the movie made me laugh more than once. I was ready. I even wanted to shush my friend when he audibly rolled his eyes at the instantly recognizable “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” intertitle. But I was ready to like Episode I again. And I wanted to pretty desperately. But while I was open to suggestion, I anticipated the worst.

Everything seemed to be going well for the first few minutes: Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor fighting robots…but then there’s some aliens that talk like caricatures of Asian people, complete with slit eyes, Oriental robes and “w”- for-“r”-and-“l” wisps. Well, that part made sense, I rationalized frantically. In Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, a film whose story was co-written by George Lucas, there’s also an attempt to ground the kind of pulpy story we’re watching in the chauvinistic terms of “white man with whip knows best.” But that superior action film suggests that while Temple of Doom is inhabited by racial and sexist stereotypes, those characters (ex: Short Round and Willie Scott), the good stereotypes, prove themselves to be made of sterner stuff than the bad ones. So before Jar Jar Binks showed up, I was willing to give Lucas’ use of flagrantly offensive racial stereotypes a chance, too.

Then Jar Jar Binks showed up. And my inner child vanished.

It’s not enough to say that Jar Jar Binks is the nadir of The Phantom Menace: he’s pretty much every hyperbolic mean thing that’s ever been said about him by internet trolls and dejected fans alike (there might be a difference…). Jar Jar Binks (voiced by Ahmed Best) is a comic relief character so thoroughly miscalculated that he makes it nigh impossible to totally suspend your disbelief – in every scene he’s in. He’s too clownish, too offensive, too naïve, too pseudo-cute. He’s just awful!
And unfortunately, so is Episode I. Lucas took a film that I now recognize as being full of problems – especially bad dialogue, stiff acting with bad accents and illogical plot points (why is the Bedouin home of Anakin Skywalker full of so much STUFF? Isn’t this kid supposed to be a slave or something?) – and he made it worse by adding more stuff to it than it ever really needed. Darth Maul is unnecessarily introduced earlier than he previously was, Anakin’s acceptance into the Jedi Order is now over-explained, the podrace is overburdened with more instantly forgettable racers than were previously highlighted and the final fight scene with Darth Maul is now padded with extra footage. Anything that was once almost-spectacular in Episode I is now marred by new, distractingly cheap-looking sequences where characters stiffly intone lines as their CG-bodies bob from side-to-side to simulate human movement. It’s just awful!

Now I’m not sure how to feel about the prequels. Part of me wants to make a pilgrimage to the Ziegfeld for the remaining two 3D re-issues. But I honestly don’t know why. These films were important to me, so the sight of Jabba the Hutt’s son being randomly inserted into the podrace scene does bother me, just as it bothers me to see that a movie I remember semi-fondly was always awful. But George Lucas didn’t rape my childhood and he certainly didn’t ruin anything that wasn’t already ruined. I guess I just want to see this prequel 3D-fication thing through, because I feel nostalgic and, yes, I want to see a Star Wars film on a big screen again. I want to regress that badly, even though I’m now sure that I can’t while watching a Star Wars prequel. Sometimes, being an arrest adolescent really sucks.

Simon Abrams is a New York-based freelance arts critic. His film reviews and features have been featured in the Village Voice, Time Out New York, Slant Magazine, The L Magazine, New York Press and Time Out Chicago. He currently writes TV criticism for The Onion AV Club and is a contributing writer at the Comics Journal. His writings on film are collected at the blog, The Extended Cut.

SIMON SAYS: THE WICKER TREE needed a different director

Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Tree could have been a much stronger film had it not been directed by Robin Hardy, which is a weird thing to think when you actually waste time thinking about it. Hardy is the director of the original 1973 film The Wicker Man and the author of 2006's Cowboys for Christ, a thematic sequel to The Wicker Man. He’s now synonymous with The Wicker Man, a canonical British horror film about a murderous community of Scottish pagans. Hardy’s the first guy that balked in terror and dismay when Neil LaBute’s The Wicker Man, an underdone parody-cum-remake, came out (also in 2006). While playwright Anthony Shaffer scripted the original Wicker Man, it is now considered Hardy’s baby, so who else could direct The Wicker Tree, an adaptation of Cowboys for Christ, but Hardy?

Anyone but Hardy, really. To be fair, The Wicker Tree’s script, which Hardy also adapted, is pretty sharp. He capably evokes the main ideas and wryly cynical sense of humor that makes Cowboys for Christ so entertaining. (Christopher Lee, who starred in the original Wicker Man and has a cameo in The Wicker Tree, heartily endorsed the book by saying, “It's comic, romantic, sexy but also horrific enough to melt the bowels of a bronze statue.”) But as a director, Hardy hasn’t improved drastically in the intervening four decades between The Wicker Man and The Wicker Tree. If there’s anything holding The Wicker Tree back from being the adaptation Hardy’s charmingly mean-spirited source material deserves, it’s unfortunately Hardy.

First, the good news: Hardy does a great job of slimming down Cowboys for Christ’s tangent-filled story to a 90-minute narrative. There are a couple of supporting characters that could have been left on the cutting room floor, like the Scotsman that speaks only in portentous selections from poems and songs. There are also some supporting characters that could stand to be fleshed out a little more, like Beame (Clive Russell), a Scottish butcher that does a lot of dirty work in Hardy’s story. But The Wicker Tree is mostly a very sharp version of Cowboys’ story.

Beth Boothby (Brittania Nicol) is a Texan pop star that used to sing empty-headed, salacious pop songs and now performs Christian-themed country music. Together with Steve (Henry Garrett), her cowboy boyfriend, Beth sets out to convert the residents of Tressock, Scotland to Christianity. This makes Beth and Steve prime targets for the sardonic Sir Lachlan Morrison (Graham McTavish) and his wife Delia (Jacqueline Leonardas), community leaders that are more bemused than off-put by the Americans’ arrival. To Lachlan and Delia, the two missionaries are unexpected but not entirely unpleasant additions to their May Day festivities: Beth will be their Queen of the May and Steve will be their Laddie.

The Wicker Tree is as satisfying as it is because there’s a substantial give-and-take inherent in Hardy’s representation of Cowboys’ central Americans vs. Scots/sincerity vs. sarcasm/chastity vs. sex/Christianity vs. paganism feuds. Both Lachlan and Beth understand that their respective beliefs are determined by a combination of necessity and convenience. Lachlan tells Delia that he’s not a priest or a rabbi but rather a Maypole-worshipping pagan because he feels that’s the religion that will best serve the people of Tressock, whose population has steadily declined after they’ve become more reliant on a new nuclear power plant.

Likewise, Beth wants to turn her back on her past as a randy sex object and focus on her current position as a symbol of Christian piety. But the fact that she acknowledges that she willingly objectified herself in the past suggests that Beth’s also adept at role-playing. It’s fitting then that the character that bridges the ideological gap between Lachlan and Beth is Lolly (Honeysuckle Weeks), a nymphomaniac that has sex with whomever Lachlan tells her to—for the good of their community.

That dichotomy is pretty prominent in The Wicker Tree, for which Hardy fans should be very grateful. What’s not in the film is the crass kind of energy needed to make what’s already a rude and macabre story memorably depraved. There are several key scenes, like the one where Steve meets his demise or when Beth dispatches Beame by almost severing one of his “googlies” with a broken glass, that just aren’t as effectively unnerving as they should be.

For instance, as it’s written in the book, Steve is literally torn apart by a hungry mob. A mob of people, armed only with their zealotry and prying fingers, strip a man of his clothes, skin and muscles and eat him alive. This is Looney-Tunes-by-way-of-Tales-from-the-Crypt kind of stuff, and in The Wicker Tree, Hardy shies away from representing the gristly, ridiculous nature of this sequence. He shows a crowd of Scotsmen frenziedly tucking into some kind of raw meat but never highlights the agony of Steve losing said meat. So while Cowboys’ ideas are present in The Wicker Tree, Hardy inexplicably tries to remove some of the more base aspects of his novel. The Wicker Tree consequently falters where it should bounce around gaily without restraint or a functioning ethical compass.

Still, I wish more people would watch The Wicker Tree. There’s so much of what made Cowboys for Christ terrific in Hardy’s film that I can’t help but want to overlook the bits of The Wicker Tree that simply don’t work. If you’re even remotely curious, seek it out. Come for the half-hearted impromptu castration, stay for the provocative moral relativism.

SIMON SAYS: Celebrate Chinese New Year with these blockbusters

This weekend is Chinese Lunar New Year, a cultural landmark that even some of my Chinese friends needed to be reminded is almost upon us. One way you can tell that the holiday is impending is to look for Chinese films at your local movie theater. In the same way that a crop of big budget Bollywood premieres are perennially released in time for autumn’s Diwali festivities, so too are a number of studio-produced would-be Chinese blockbusters released in time for the new year. But blink and you'll miss ‘em: there are only two Chinese films being released at AMC theater chains.

But hey, that's more than you knew were being released last year, right?

China Lion, a relatively new company dedicated to releasing mostly mainland Chinese (and some Hong Kong) films to American multiplexes, will release All's Well, Ends Well 2012 (unrelated to the Shakespeare play, though it is the seventh film in the romantic comedy series that began in 1992 with a film starring the likes of Stephen Chow and the lamentably deceased Leslie Cheung) next Friday and The Viral Factor this Friday. That may not sound like a three-car pile-up but considering that China Lion has heretofore staggered their releases over a matter of weeks (sometimes even a couple months), it's a sign that the Lunar New Year is here.

More importantly, it's a good time to take stock and see what China Lion has released over the last year. Sadly, while the idea behind the new company is great—introducing both established and new fans of popular Chinese/H.K. films to the latest pop cinema—the results have been mostly underwhelming. Don't expect China Lion to bring you prime-grade films from Wilson Yip, a guy that went from making films with titles like Bio Zombie and Daze Raper to Ip Man and Dragon Tiger Gate. Don't get me wrong, Ip Man and Dragon Tiger Gate are both enjoyable in their own ways, but Magic to Win, Yip's latest and most flavorless film in a while, is totally underwhelming.

If last year's worth of releases is any indication, China Lion films are, at best, immediately likable but largely disposable melodramas. My vote for their most, ahem, outstanding title would be 3D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy, a funky little softcore comedy that was a hit in Hong Kong last year thanks to its endearingly unsound use of 3D technology.

Sadly, more often than not, China Lion puts out movies like The Viral Factor, a frenetic but totally shallow and mostly inert action movie starring milquetoast stars Nicolas Tse and Jay Chou. Directed by Dante Lam (Fire of Conscience, Beast Stalker), The Viral Factor is a cop drama high on bathos and lackluster action scenes; Lam and co-writers Candy Leung and Wai Lun Ng haven’t met a cliché that they didn’t like. Two estranged brothers, one an amoral thief (Tse) and one a righteous cop (Chou), reunite in order to fight an evil cartel of corrupt policemen-cum-terrorists. Tse and Chou run around and struggle to remind each other of their similarities.

Between lame plot points, Lam delivers typically frenetic but unpolished action scenes that are distinguished largely by their hints of preposterousness. Early on, Chou’s cop gets shot in the brain, and the bullet is still lodged there throughout the film. Still, he persists in running around and fighting bad guys—with an actual bullet lodged in his brainpan. This is impressive even when you compare it to the scene where Tse stumbles out of a hospital after jumping several stories and landing gracelessly on a car below him. If there were more crazy stuff like this throughout The Viral Factor, it’d be worth the price of admission. Unfortunately, such insanity only serves as garnish for Lam’s otherwise flavorless film.

Thankfully, China Lion hasn’t just released disappointing piffle like The Viral Factor. They’ve also released charming piffle like Love in Space, a romantic comedy about three self-centered sisters that struggle to fall in love, and Aftershock, an epic family drama about two siblings that were separated during the 1976 Tangshan earthquake.

Aftershock is probably the more durable of the two aforementioned titles. Its pseudo-progressive depiction of Chinese history is fairly compelling, if only for the light touch that director Xiaogang Feng (The Banquet, If You Are the One) brings to his film’s series of minor domestic crises. Love in Space does have one of the most charismatic ensemble casts of any of China Lion’s films to date, but, like The Viral Factor, it’s mostly worthwhile for its quirks. (Love in Space is just as cliché-ridden as The Viral Factor, but it’s mostly amiably cheesy.) Aftershock is at least compelling, if sappy, for its core story, which is taken from a novel by Ling Zhang.

So if you want to celebrate the Lunar New Year with a new Chinese flick, fire up your Netflix account and check out Aftershock, now available on Instant Streaming. It’s not a must-see film, but it is as good of a representative of the China Lion brand as you can currently get. Unless, that is, titillating comedies about libidinal enhancement (i.e., donkey penises) are more your thing, in which case you’ll probably want to check out 3D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy. Either way, come for the shrill melodrama, stay for the sincere cheese.

Simon Abrams is a New York-based freelance arts critic. His film reviews and features have been featured in the Village Voice< andTime Out Chicago. He currently writes TV criticism for The Onion AV Club and is a contributing writer at the Comic Journal. His writings on film are collected at the blog, The Extended Cut. Simon reviewed 3D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstacy here for Press Play.