Category: Film

Later tonight, The Culture Tsar is going to a special showing of David Lynch’s Dune, the 1984 adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic science fiction novel. Dune has been The Culture Tsar’s favorite novel for decades now, with nothing much else coming even close to it. There’s really no other book that provides the same combination of imaginative sci-fi worldbuilding and adventure with compelling questions about politics, society, ecology, economics, and religion.

Lynch’s Dune adaptation is…well…interesting. Judging it on a spectrum of “good” to “bad” seems to miss much of what makes it worth talking about almost 35 years since its release. To get that superficial detail out of the way quickly, though, Dune is not a good film. The pacing is awful, the story is all over the place, the voiceover narrations are jarring, the performances are uneven, and the character motivations are opaque at best. As a piece of filmmaking, Dune is kind of a mess.

But nobody remembers or cares about that because Lynch’s Dune is an amazing work of visionary cinema. In retrospect, it’s unbelievable that a major Hollywood studio spent millions of dollars on this movie and released it hoping to score a big hit. Dune is weird, dangerous, and utterly fearless in most of its choices. The bizarre Jules Verne meets Renaissance Italy art design sets the film apart from contemporary sci-fi epics like Star Wars and Star Trek while being a strangely appropriate fit for the baroque society of Herbert’s Imperium. Lynch’s nightmarish vision of House Harkonnen’s Giedi Prime homeworld nicely embodies Herbert’s themes of corruption and resource exploitation in addition to giving us one of cinema’s most memorable and grotesque villains. The competing organizations of the Dune universe, the Spacing Guild, the Mentats, the Bene Gesserit, stand out as distinctive groups deeply enmeshed in their own institutional history and culture. There’s a sense of “otherness” about them that feels very true to Herbert’s book, even if the portrayals themselves are rather far afield from the book’s aesthetic. Lynch instinctively understood that film is a visual medium. While the book could take the time to explain the history and practices of the Spacing Guild, the film could accomplish the same thing with visual design. One look at the Spacing Guild and the viewer understands that it’s far more than just a group of powerful people with a monopoly on interstellar travel.

Not all of these choices work (although The Culture Tsar would like to register his dissent with popular opinion by saying that Sting is great as Feyd Rautha). Fantastic art design stands alongside some rather shoddily conceived ideas (the god awful ornithopters and the haz-mat worker lookalike Sardaukar soldiers come to mind), but on the whole, Lynch’s unique visualization of Herbert’s world is a success. Even the biggest divergence from the book, the “weirding module” sonic weapons, kind of work. Most of the desert scenes are great, giving the film a sense of scale that would be sorely missing in the later television adaptation (the 2000 Sci-Fi Channel mini-series, which was also flawed, but in completely different ways).

Honestly, the movie’s biggest problem is that it tried to be too faithful to Herbert’s novel. If Dune were being adapted today, it would probably wind up as a ten episode HBO series rather than a single film. There’s just too much information to pack into a two and a half hour film without fatally compromising some aspect of the novel. Lynch’s adaptation strips the story down to the absolute minimum and sacrifices a lot of the setting’s depth in an effort to make everything fit. As an adaptation, it doesn’t really come close to succeeding. The story is moving so fast and the characters so beholden to the demands of the plot that we really don’t become invested in anything. A lot happens in the movie, but you don’t really care about any of it, especially on the initial viewing when you’re just trying to keep up with what’s going on. The 2000 Sci-Fi Channel adaptation does a better job of making you care and giving more depth where needed, but it’s hampered by extremely uneven production values and some frankly mediocre writing and design. It’s worth noting that Sci-Fi Channel’s 2003 sequel mini-series, Children of Dune, is fantastic and easily the best film adaptation of Herbert’s work (despite a painfully cringeworthy Susan Sarandon performance). While bringing Dune to the screen is difficult, we have clear evidence that it’s not impossible.

At any rate, The Culture Tsar is eager to see Lynch’s compelling, if flawed, adaptation on the big screen tonight. Even when the movie showcases its worst features, he can always take comfort in its fantastic score. In keeping with the theme of not much about Lynch’s Dune making sense, the soundtrack was composed by the rock band Toto.

Yeah, that Toto.

It’s one of the great soundtracks of the 1980s. Go figure…

Yesterday, The Culture Tsar came across a Sonny Bunch article in the Washington Post reminding everyone waiting to write articles about the upcoming Black Panther being the first superhero movie to feature an African American protagonist that Blade accomplished this milestone almost twenty years ago. Actually, as Bunch later points out, even that isn’t accurate given that Spawn came out a few years before Blade. In any case, it’s a good article on the topic and you should definitely read it, but The Culture Tsar is more interested in talking about Blade.

Why? Because Blade and Blade II are fucking great.

Seriously, Blade is one of the most underrated action movies of the 1990s. The action is great, the story is well constructed, and the characters are memorable. It’s not a movie that tries to reinvent film. From a technical and narrative standpoint, Blade is a pretty conventional action movie about a hero learning to come to terms with who he is in order to prevail over the forces of evil. The script is good, but not great, and a lot of the film’s vampire mythology is rather derivative. But Blade rises above all of that for two reasons. First of all, the filmmakers treated the material with respect, consistency, and care. Blade never descends into camp, but it also never takes itself so seriously that it forgets to have fun. It strikes the same delicate balance that the Marvel Studios films would eventually perfect with the original Iron Man. If you think this is an easy task, go back and watch the first two X-Men films, which feel ponderously self-important in retrospect.

The other reason Blade works is far easier to understand: Wesley Snipes. Easily the most underrated action star of his era, Snipes is also an underrated actor by pretty much any objective measure. Seriously, name a movie where Wesley Snipes didn’t light up the screen in every scene he was it.

Go ahead, think about it. The Culture Tsar will wait…

Right, you can’t think of one. That’s because Wesley Snipes has more on-screen charisma than 95% of his contemporaries. He still holds one of the top spots in The Culture Tsar’s Action Movie Villain List (the one I just made up right now) for his electric role as Simon Phoenix in Demolition Man. And before you dismiss him as just being a good action movie star, remember that this is the same guy who went all out playing a drag queen in 1995’s To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar.

Anyway, Snipes is awesome in Blade. Part of it is the physicality, of course. There was always something special about Snipes’s martial arts work that felt more brutal and real than that of his contemporaries. In a lot of ways, he was a preview of the type of cinematic fighting that became commonplace thanks to the Bourne series. But more importantly, Snipes understood how important it is to embody the visual essence of a comic book character. His movements and facial expressions always look like they could be ripped straight from a comic panel. A big part of Blade’s appeal is that he just looks cool, and Snipes absolutely nails that aspect of the character.

The movie also benefits from a sneaky great performance by Kris Kristofferson. I have no idea why on Earth Kris Kristofferson wanted to be in this movie, but it wasn’t simply for the paycheck because he sells the hell out of it. There’s an amazing little snippet where he sloppily spills gasoline all over Blade’s car while he’s filling the tank, then leans against the car and lights a cigarette. It’s a tiny moment, but it’s memorable and hilarious, the type of thing that makes Blade such an endearing and enjoyable movie.

Blade II is probably a better film, although some of the visual effects don’t hold up terribly well. Directed by Guillermo del Toro, Blade II oozes style and features one of the most terrifying vampires ever put to film. Snipes is again fantastic as Blade despite having a bit less to work with from the script. The movie is more about the people around Blade than Blade himself, so there’s not as much of a character arc for him to go through. It doesn’t matter, though. Snipes is so good at playing off the other actors that you barely notice Blade is pretty much the same character by the end of the movie. Speaking of the rest of the cast, there’s a great performance by Ron Perlman, who plays a neo-Nazi skinhead vampire. In retrospect, it’s a rather weird and daring movie that you can’t see the Marvel Studios brain trust of today making.

Then there’s Blade: Trinity. Something something something, sequel exhaustion, inexperienced director, something something something.

As we all get excited for Black Panther, The Culture Tsar thinks everyone would do well to heed Bunch’s advice and rewatch Blade and Blade II. They’re not perfect films and some aspects of them haven’t aged very well (which is typical for late 90s/early 00s movies), but they’re great fun and absolutely worth your time.

Seeing as how Blade Runner 2049 came out on Blu-Ray/DVD last week, this is as good a time as any for The Culture Tsar to render a few thoughts about one of his favorite movies from last year.

To begin with, Blade Runner 2049 (hereafter BR2049) belongs in the same group with Mad Max: Fury Road as one of those rare movies we were never supposed to get. Seriously, it’s kind of crazy this is a direct sequel to a movie that came out over thirty years ago (and was a dismal failure at the box office). The Culture Tsar first saw the original Blade Runner around 1997, and the possibility of a sequel wasn’t even a hypothetical conversation worth having. There was a series of books that continued the story, a forgettable computer game, and every so often somebody whispered about the idea of a television show, but nobody ever thought a major studio would undertake development of a big budget movie sequel. In that sense, BR2049’s very existence is almost as miraculous as the replicant child depicted in the film.

I say all of this up front because I want to make it clear that The Culture Tsar loves this movie. While not a perfect film, it’s certainly a great one on a number of levels. It might even be superior to the original, but that’s a debate for another day.

But…

The film exists in a strange conceptual space. It makes the wise decision to completely ignore real world events that transpired between the original film’s release and now. While the original Blade Runner has aged incredibly well visually, there are some quaint aspects to it that bedevil almost all near future science fiction and certainly all classic cyberpunk fiction. Wireless technology is completely absent, as are cellular phones and portable computers. In fact, computers are barely present in the original film. Instead of trying to retroactively insert updated versions of contemporary technology into its world, BR2049 uses the original film as its reference point and pushes its technology and society forward a few decades. This is the primary reason why BR2049 feels like such an authentic sequel; it doesn’t try to rethink Blade Runner’s vision of the future.

This creates a bit of a problem, however. Blade Runner is a distinctly late 1970s/early 1980s vision of a dystopian future. If you spent much of BR2049 wondering why there’s so much Japanese advertising, it’s because the original movie was conceived in an era when people feared Japan’s burgeoning economy was going to take over the world. This fear of Japanese economic and cultural dominance was a strong theme in a great deal of 1980s cyberpunk fiction. More important for our purposes, however, is the film’s depiction of race, gender, and sexuality. For all the great questions the original film asks about the nature of humanity, it presents a decidedly conservative vision of the future, with little ambiguity around gender identity and not much consideration of racial diversity. Aside from its “yellow peril” subtext (which is significant), the original Blade Runner depicts a world dominated by straight white men. This makes a lot of sense given that it was trying to imagine the future of a society that was, in the late 70s/early 80s, predominantly white and culturally heteronormative.

While BR2049 does a good job of projecting that particular vision of the future forward and adjusting it in some respects to accommodate our current cultural sensibilities, it also leaves a lot of possibilities on the table. This is a common failing of modern science fiction, especially cyberpunk fiction, which is almost doggedly stuck in its 1980s vision of the future. The film flirts with some transhumanist issues, but it doesn’t want to dive in with both feet. For a world in which artificial humans are a reality and AI companions are common, BR2049 remains stubbornly committed to binary gender norms and makes no attempt to grapple with race.

You could make the case that exploring these concepts would make the film feel less like Blade Runner and more like something else. Perhaps. While The Culture Tsar certainly enjoyed the movie, it raised enough issues (or rather it didn’t raise them) that he would love to see addressed in a different film.

The Culture Tsar has been looking forward to seeing Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets since seeing the trailer for it during the Super Bowl. Although the early critical buzz wasn’t particularly good, this movie wasn’t exactly promising to be a Best Picture contender, so the Culture Tsar didn’t put too much stock in the prerelease chatter.

Okay, enough with the preamble and on to the main question: Is the movie any good?

Answer: It’s fine.

Not a resounding endorsement, to be sure, but it’s certainly not a bad movie. The pacing drags at times, the writing can be a bit cringeworthy at times, and none of the performances are particularly good (although Ethan Hawke’s sleazy cabaret show proprietor is pretty fun). On the other hand, it looks beautiful. The effects and production design are spectacular and probably worth seeing on the big screen. There are a few memorable features, like the comic relief trio of misfit aliens who peddle information, Clive Owen’s cyborg bodyguards, and some imaginative setpieces like the multidimensional marketplace. On the whole, though, this is a movie that bets everything on spectacle, on astounding audiences with something they’ve never seen before.

The problem, of course, is that we have seen most of this before.

Valerian suffers dreadfully from what The Culture Tsar refers to as the “John Carter Problem.” When the film John Carter came out in 2012, many critics and viewers criticized it for not really offering anything new to the sci-fi adventure genre. It felt derivative and a bit uninspired. The problem, of course, had to do with the source material itself. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter of Mars series had a major influence on generations of writers, but the stories themselves are over one hundred years old. The most interesting aspects of those stories have been absorbed and recycled by subsequent works so many times that most audiences can’t identify the line of transmission anymore. People watched John Carter and dismissed it was a Star Wars rip-off not realizing that the original Star Wars took a lot of its cues from the John Carter books.

Now, none of this excuses the fact that John Carter just isn’t that great of a movie (although The Culture Tsar has a soft spot for it). The problem is the filmmakers relied on the strength of the property and sheer spectacle to turn an otherwise lackluster story with bland characters into something memorable. But audiences weren’t impressed by the spectacle because they felt like they’d seen it before. John Carter might have been able to get away with this if audiences were more familiar with the property. Fans will turn out for mediocre adaptations of their favorite book series provided the movies are reasonably competent. But while John Carter more than meets this competency threshold, there just aren’t that many hardcore fans of the series dying to see it on the big screen.

Which brings us back to Valerian.

The film is based upon a French comic series called Valerian and Laureline, which ran from 1967 to 2010 and had a massive influence on a generation of European sci-fi artists and writers. Unfortunately, many of them have already incorporated much of what they loved into their own work. Even the film’s director, Luc Besson, has done this, with many aspects of the comic appearing in his mid-90s sci-fi cult classic The Fifth Element. The original Star Wars almost certainly took some inspiration from the artwork of Valerian and Laureline. But this wide-ranging influence also means that audiences will automatically feel like they’ve seen everything Valerian has to offer. Even worse, for all its influence, Valerian and Laureline isn’t widely known outside of France. The Culture Tsar considers himself a massive sci-fi and fantasy nerd and he’d never heard of the property before seeing the trailer for the first time earlier this year. In other words, there’s no readymade audience waiting for this movie in the US like there would be for even a “second string” superhero movie like Ant-Man.

All that aside, Valerian could have been a great success. It could have followed the example of Guardians of the Galaxy, which was a little known comic sci-fi property that wisely emphasized character over spectacle. Instead, it went a more predictable and conventional route of subordinating the characters and interpersonal conflict to the spectacle of the source material. While Valerian is fun enough, it’s also forgettable due to its bland characters and a predictable, “by the numbers” story.

Maybe The Culture Tsar would have liked it more if he’d read Valerian and Laureline, but that’s the crux of the “John Carter Problem”. If you have to be familiar with the source material to enjoy the movie, you’re probably doing something wrong.

Privyet, Comrades!

The Culture Tsar is pleased to be making a return to praising and damning works of popular culture in all their varied forms. This week, he had a rare opportunity to sit down with a few movies he hasn’t seen in quite some time. Sometimes our memories can play strange tricks on us, causing us to elevate or diminish films far beyond their actual merits. Of course, sometimes those memories are entirely accurate. Upon a recent rewatch, for instance, the plot and premise of Prometheus made more sense but that didn’t make the movie any less terrible than the Culture Tsar recalled.

Without further delay, then, let’s take a look at the fruits of this filmwatching labor:

Dragonslayer (1981)

What the Culture Tsar remembers: A decent, but deeply flawed film that’s only memorable for the spectacular dragon effects. For God’s sake, the nerdy, curly haired guy from Ally McBeal plays the hero (Peter MacNicol). If it wasn’t for the dragon (which was THE standard for movie dragons until 2002’s Reign of Fire), nobody would remember this movie.

Upon rewatching: Holy shit, this movie is actually really good! The whole look of the film is great, effectively evoking the dreary, grim environs of 6th-7th century Northern Europe. Aside from a few questionable costuming choices (the king’s garb and the captain of the guard’s dumb helmet), everyone looks like they belong in that pitiful little kingdom. The performances and the writing are much stronger than I remember. Peter MacNicol is great as the unlikely hero, striking a believable balance between bumbling and bravery. While the dragon effects are a bit dated, most of them still hold up quite well. If you enjoy fantasy films, you should absolutely rewatch this one. It’s MUCH better than you remember.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)

What the Culture Tsar remembers: A stunning film with intense action sequences and fantastic character moments. It lost out to Gladiator for the Best Picture Oscar and the Culture Tsar distinctly recalls bitching about how it was robbed. A modern classic.

Upon rewatching: Eh…maybe not. Time has not been kind to this movie. Maybe the action sequences were far more groundbreaking at the time, but they aren’t particularly impressive by today’s standards. The “flying through the air” stunts are awkward and not very convincing. While many of the character moments are still quite good (Michelle Yeoh and Chow Yun-Fat both deliver standout performances), the movie drags, and the mid-story flashback subplot involving the governor’s daughter and her bandit lover is tedious. While the Culture Tsar still enjoyed the film, it’s definitely dropped quite a bit in his rankings of great films.

Dark City (1998)

What the Culture Tsar remembers: One of the Culture Tsar’s all time favorite films. Wonderfully evocative and creepy, with great character moments and inspired art design.

Upon rewatching: Still one of the Culture Tsar’s favorites. The film’s sets and scenery look a bit different in high definition, which only enhances the sense of artificiality permeating the entire city. That artificiality extends to some of the cast, with William Hurt and Jennifer Connelly both turning in strangely stilted performances that perfectly convey the discomfort just beneath the surface of their characters. Kiefer Sutherland makes a good turn as the crippled doctor, which is all the more interesting considering he would be playing uber-manly man Jack Bauer in 24 just a few years later. This film certainly deserves its reputation as a cult classic.

Predator 2 (1990)

What the Culture Tsar remembers: In a barren wasteland of shitty sequels, Predator 2 managed not to suck. Competent, but not particularly memorable, the best thing you can say about it is that it didn’t embarrass the franchise. What more can you ask from a sequel, really?

Upon rewatching: Turns out, you can ask a whole hell of a lot more. And Predator 2 delivers. WAY better movie than the Culture Tsar remembers! The writing is good, the characters are fun, and the action sequences get quite inventive. Sure, the effects are a bit dated, but they were about as good as could be expected for purely optical effects of the late 1980s. The image of “near future” 1997 Los Angeles as a warzone of gang warfare only seems like a caricature because it didn’t actually turn out that way. Back in the late 1980s at the height of the “war on drugs” and the crack cocaine epidemic, it was a perfectly plausible future. That aside, the movie does a good job of taking the rules established in the first film and building upon them to give the audience something it hasn’t seen before. In fact, Predator 2 is probably only a couple of great one-liners away from being better than the first movie. That might seem like overly high praise, but when you start adding up the memorable sequences, Predator 2 compares to the original quite well.

The Culture Tsar hopes you’ve enjoyed this little exercise and encourages you to take a look at your own backlog of movies you haven’t watched for some time. There might be more gems (or duds) among them than you remember.