Dredds

Funny how we can't praise one movie without bashing another. Or how we can't praise the current iteration of a character/franchise without smearing the reputation of those that came before.

Case in point: Judge Dredd, the anti-hero from the pages of British comics weekly 2000 AD. Patrolling the sprawling future metropolis of Mega-City One, never cracking a smile from beneath his helmet (we haven’t seen his face since the strip premiered in the 70s), and empowered to dispense justice on the spot, Dredd is one of comics’ greatest icons. In its 40-odd-years-and-counting existence, Judge Dredd has covered about every genre imaginable, from futuristic action to social drama to wacky comedy to epic horror. It was only natural that the strip would eventually be adapted for the screen.

The first attempt, starring Sylvester Stallone in the title role, hit in 1995. Many fans who had been keen for a Dredd flick had issues with Stallone, not just because he's Stallone, but because he removed his helmet. Many felt that putting a face on the character betrayed him, and further felt that, imposing a physical presence though Stallone was and is, he simply wasn’t/isn’t Dredd.

And yet, like a Shakespeare tragedy with a bad actor in the lead but a solid supporting cast, there was plenty for fans to enjoy in the margins. The movie went out of its way to capture many of the iconic occurrences and characters of Dredd’s sizable universe: Mega-City One becomes a living, breathing setting, with a slew of decadent futuristic sets and laughably under-helpful social services; Chief Judge Fargo (played by Max von Sydow, no less) resigns in disgrace, taking the Long Walk into the wasteland outside the city; Judge Hershey (often Dredd’s conscience in the comics) is given dimension and grace by Diane Lane; and the murderous outlanders in the Angel Clan are also vividly, accurately realized, right down to the dial on the Mean Machine’s head. Hell, the movie went OUTSIDE Dredd’s milieu and into the pages of 2000 A.D.’s other worlds to recast the ABC Warrior robot Hammerstein (gorgeously realized via animatronic effects) as one of its many colorful villains.

And yet Stallone’s admittedly distracting presence at the center of the movie remained most fans’ abiding memory of it. Which is part of what made the recently released Dredd such a pleasure for those fans. The title role was played here by Karl Urban (then recently seen in his downright uncanny performance as Dr. McCoy in J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek). Fans were immediately reassured by Urban’s initial statements that he was taking the role quite seriously (being a fan himself), and assured viewers that, as in the comics, Dredd would never, ever remove his helmet.

Once the movie arrived on our screens, fans rejoiced: Urban WAS the stoic, unstoppable force for justice they knew from the comics. (And Olivia Thirlby was quickly noted to be equally as impressive as Dredd’s more humane, less experienced cohort Psi-Judge Anderson.) Limited somewhat by its budget, the movie focused on gritty urban action, reducing Mega-City One to a single imposing city block. This strategy and the ensuing violence were familiar to action connoisseurs from recent fare such as The Raid: Redemption and even Attack the Block, and worked fairly well as a background for Dredd and Anderson’s story.

Longtime Dredd fan that I am, I was just as pleased by this film as any other member of its smallish but passionate cult. In addition to the virtues named above, its use of 3-D was novel and thrilling, and its pedigree was unmistakably Dreddian. And yet I wished we’d been able to see a bit more of the neon, sleaze, and desperation of the ’95 Mega-City One. Though Dredd was deemed “the perfect Judge Dredd film”, I felt a truly perfect Dredd film would succeed, as the ’95 edition did, in making Mega-City One a character in its own right. (The CHOPPER graffiti is a nice Easter egg for fans, but it isn't Max von freaking Sydow taking the Long Walk.) But any such arguments were quickly swept aside by fans who went out of their way to slam the earlier movie as a means of expressing their love for the new one.

Perhaps the world of comics is more forgiving than that of movies. After all, Dredd has gone through a number of writers and countless artists, all of whom have brought their strengths and perspectives to bear on the character. And if you don't like a Dredd story, you need only wait for the next week's Prog for a new one; thousands of stories in comics form versus two cinematic adaptations nearly two decades apart perhaps breeds more patience and breadth on the comics front. And maybe there’s just a vocal minority of cinephiles who are simply incapable of praising one movie without bashing another.

Regrettable though this tendency is, I am of a piece with the rest of the Dreddcult in hoping that a sequel does eventually manifest. Urban is no doubt ready to take on Judge Death, who’d look magnificent in this new, grittily urban MC-1. (UPDATE TO ADD: the creative team of Arthur Wyatt, Alex De Campi, and Henry Flint completed this story in comics form: The Dead World wrapped its fine six-issue run in the pages of the Judge Dredd Megazine a while back.)

In the meantime, where the hell's my ABC Warriors movie?



This post previously appeared on another workblog.

KRULL (1983)

From this desk, the two best reasons to become an actor are Shakespeare and fantasy cinema. These worlds often intersected in the late 70s through the 80s, with many an outlandish fantasy given dramatic heft (and perhaps a dose of grounding realism) by expert, classically trained thespians. Star Wars balanced the work of its talented newcomers with performances by British veterans Alec Guiness & Peter Cushing. Brian Blessed makes the strongest impression in the 1980 Flash Gordon as the bombastic King Vultan, but he's not the only classically-trained actor giving his all to that berserk, colorful fantasy. Even the makers of the gaudy and delirious StarCrash were canny enough to bring in Christopher Plummer for a crucial role. (Props to Max von Sydow, who seems to have accepted every sci-fi role offered him.) And had Jodorowsky's Dune been distributed by someone rich and insane, it too would have married the work of some of its era's finest fantasy artists with a stellar cast able to truly run riot within the world imagined by those artists.

1983's Krull is well-remembered (both fondly and disparagingly) by those who came of age around that year. There was some critical resistance to Krull, which cited both the movie's bloated budget and its busy script as drawbacks. But at least on the two-pronged front being considered here, Krull delivers.

There's something lovely and otherworldly happening in every scene in Krull. The movie reportedly had 23 different sets built in England to create Krull's fanciful, Dark-Ages-yet-sorta-high-tech world, from the richly realized palaces inhabited by its characters to the teleporting fortress housing the Beast, Krull's glistening, evil antagonist. Even the designers of the weaponry went above and beyond, manifesting equally in the the single-shot laser spears wielded by the Beast's army of Slayers to the frankly awesome 5-pronged Glaive tossed about by the heroic Prince Colwyn. Look at this damn thing:

No one actually saw Krull in 1983, but everyone who did wanted a Glaive.

The story is packed, the world is vividly realized, and everyone in the cast just runs with it. Ken Marshall is fleet-footed but earnest as Colwyn, and everyone in the band of adventurers that gels around him during his quest gets at least a moment to shine. Freddie Jones holds the Ben Kenobi role with ease, guiding Colwyn with generous elder wisdom (and holding his own in the movie's most spellbinding sequence, a reunion with a former love presided over by a giant crystal spider). A band of thieves that falls in with Colwyn is led by Alun Armstrong, moonlighting from acting duties at the Royal Shakespeare Company and fully inhabiting the arc of a potentially tertiary character. (You'll recognize youthful Liam Neeson and Robbie Coltrane among his fellow thieves, and see strong hints of the leading men they'd become.) Beloved stage actor (and Carry On mainstay) Bernard Bresslaw is, naturally, covered in effects makeup as a cyclops, but endows the character with indelible pathos. Even Ergo the Magnificent, a third-rate wizard serving as comic relief, is given a rich character arc, beautifully realized by comic veteran David Battley; we see him level up from inflated egomaniac to a team player, able to sprout teeth when the chips are down. And Lysette Anthony makes the most of what could have been a rote damsel-in-distress, finding real strength within her innocence to survive as captive of the Beast.

Against this blockbuster era in which beloved books are stretched into multi-movie events, a movie like Krull that packs so much detail into a scant two hours seems, unfairly, quaint. The thing's been part of my life for so long that I can hardly be objective about it. And yet I like to think that its charms wouldn't be lost on a generation weaned on digital effects. That we haven't been so blinded by CGI that we can't recognize the abundant imagination of an older movie like Krull, its world beautifully conceived and built by hand, and inhabited by a cast that makes even the smallest roles seem larger than life.

(Ported over from a now-defunct work blog. There will be more.)

THE MAGIC FLUTE

Kind of a metamovie day this last Saturday - reading the lovely essay "On Moonlight Bay", in which Jonathan Rosenbaum charts his responses to the same movie over four viewings over three decades, so do I head to Berkeley to see Ingmar Bergman's The Magic Flute, for the first time since its mid-70s theatrical run in the US.

At four years old I'm pretty sure The Magic Flute was my first arthouse movie (though considering my parents, who knows?) There were only a few images from the movie that I remember from my first viewing, but I do recall being as obsessed as a four-year-old could be with the opera, listening to the album while reading the libretto (my father told me that my position in the libretto was always where the music was). What could possibly have been firing my synapses with regards to either Mozart's opera or Bergman's film at that age is lost in memory. And yet even after four decades of learning more about both Mozart and Bergman, having seen the opera performed live at least once, and having revisited Amadeus earlier this year, there were a couple of resonances between my viewings, then and now.

I remembered this dragon, for example, though as you can imagine it seemed a mite more fearsome to my four-year-old eyes. (And the thing resonated in my dreams - at some point in my childhood I vividly dreamed the opening of Act I, played out in a light show across a closed theatre curtain, a square of projected light representing Tamino, a long line of projected light representing the dragon pursuing him. A fun conflation of opera, avant-garde theatrics, and 4-bit video game.)

The fairy tale aspect of the opera is beautifully amplified in the film - the whole thing feels pitched to four-year-olds on one level. But it's rife with the experimental touch Bergman brought to earlier movies. It takes in both the story of the opera and the lives of the singers and crew backstage. The audience of the opera is seen as well, and Helene Friberg (who was only a little older than I when I saw the film) appears in close-up throughout, her reactions serving as a chorus to the thing.

Bergman explodes the theatrical space as wildly as Busby Berkeley, though where Berkeley went macro, sending his musical numbers into a gigantic cinematic space, Bergman goes micro, framing his characters in closeup, rendering their props with more minute detail than any prop handler would muster. Perhaps as a nod to the opera's Masonic elements, an occult connection is played up through various images and the recurrence of prime numbers: there are three ladies (of the Queen of the Night) and three child-spirits, seven ladies in attendance, and Bergman ups the ante in act II by giving us thirteen priests.

Familiarity with both the opera and Bergman's work gave me many more ways into the film than I had at four. The story of the opera as presented in Milos Forman's Amadeus stuck with me, suggesting that Mozart's association with the Theater auf der Wieden began when he attended a parody of one of his operas the company presented. I mused that The Magic Flute was therefore Mozart's Dark Room opera (given my own association with that local, parody-driven but fun theatre), and I was pleased that the film did nothing to dispel this impression. The film also felt like Bergman's own "Lady From Shanghai," a sub-genre of movies, somewhat instinctively defined by me, modeled on Welles' film: a genre-driven film, sometimes compromised or on the cheap, in which a great filmmaker finds space to flex his/her aesthetic muscles.

Through this viewing, of a new DCP struck by Swedish cultural authorities, I found myself amused by the subtitles (by Annika Brant, I stuck to determine). They of course conveyed what the singers were saying, but I noticed that, unusually for subtitles, they were plotted to the meter of the music, placing character names exactly where they occurred in the lyrics. The subtitles added another layer of fun to the whole thing as I counted off beats with each syllable in the subtitles (which went truly above and beyond in making it all rhyme!). Once again, over four decades later, I found myself scanning the words closely, staying on point with the words and action on screen, resonating in mind and heart with the unfolding opera. The beat goes on.