Cinephobia Reviews

Solid adaptation of Shakespeare's most famous and quotable play, directed by and starring Laurence Olivier, who won an Oscar (as did the film). Olivier does well to open up the play visually and make it more cinematic, though it seems positively restrained when seen against the more florid Zeffirelli and Branagh versions. The black and white cinematography and the excellent set design give it a darkly gothic feel, but it's never oppressive. Some decisions could be quibbled with - the conversion of the soliloquies to interior monologues heard over the soundtrack seems pointless - but for the most part this is a fine version, offering a good compromise between the overly simplified Zeffirelli film and Branagh's more demanding four hour epic.

The first scene of Zeffirelli's Hamlet, a wake for Hamlet's father, doesn't exist in Shakespeare: the dialogue has been trimmed from elsewhere in the play and made to work in a different context. This typifies Zeffirelli's approach to the material, which is decidedly non-reverential. He isn't afraid to take liberties with the material, or to eliminate descriptive exposition in favour of showing us the actual events. The result is perhaps the most accessible filmed version of the play: this is, after all, the version of Hamlet that the Alicia Silverstone character in Clueless could quote.

The extent to which this accessibility is a good thing is a matter of taste. There's a lot to be said for pruning the play - it returns some of the clarity that time has stolen. This version could hardly be cut further: it's almost soliloquy-free, so that "to be or not to be" seems like a grudging concession to tradition. With little but the most essential dialogue left, this is probably as clear to modern ears as Shakespeare will get. The film also benefits from many small touches that bring a freshness to the familiar material. An example is the ghost of Hamlet's father, who is far from a supernatural presence: Paul Scofield leans wearily against a battlement as he tells Hamlet of his murder. Visually the film is a treat too, with surprisingly sunny Scottish locations making a spectacular Elsinore (you feel you're getting a look at what the castle in Olivier's version looked like during the day).

Of course, Shakespeare can live or die on the strength of the cast. Mel Gibson, in the lead, was a very pleasant surprise. I don't mean to put down Gibson with this, as he has been excellent elsewhere before. Yet I was still caught unawares by the strength of his work here: he gives a very empathetic performance that remains coherent despite the Prince's erratic and inscrutable behaviour. Alan Bates and Ian Holm (as Claudius and Polonius, respectively) lead the impressive supporting cast: both are strong, if not exceptional. Helena Bonham-Carter is a winsomely bewildered Ophelia, effective despite the even more truncated than usual nature of her part. The only real weak link is Glenn Close, decidedly unimpressive as Gertrude: she never quite seems to find any strong attitude to take to the character.

Despite the strong performanes, I remained fairly indifferent to this Hamlet. Zeffirelli is right not to be afraid of the text, but I felt by the end that too much had been cut. The worst example (already alluded to) was Ophelia's madness; undermotivated at the best of times, it here seemed particularly arbitrary. (I can imagine a first time viewer failing to make the link to Polonius' death). This is unfortunately typical of the film's entire treatment, in which events seem to happen at random, and far too suddenly. (I kept saying to myself "What? They're up to that already?"). Zeffirelli also hits trouble on a couple of the occasions in which he switches Shakespeare's verbalised events to visualised ones. The death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is one example of this device not quite working: even less successful is the odd compromise depicting Ophelia's drowning. We don't see it, exactly, but on the other hand we don't really get the drama of Gertrude breaking the news either.

Kenneth Branagh's four hour Hamlet is, I'm fairly confident, the longest film I've seen. It's that long because Branagh has made the interesting choice to film Shakespeare's entire text... every damn word. There's an element of bloody mindedness here on Branagh's part that's hard to deny, and it's easy to think that maybe Branagh was just hoping to claim a place for his film as the definitive interpretation. At the end of the day, though, I can't really complain. This is an extremely fine film, and the time (mostly) flies by.

I have to start with the visuals. Faced with the English language's linguistic highpoint, Branagh has clearly decided to pull out all stops to create a fitting on-screen counterpart. This version is updated to an approximately 19th century date, and the lavishly evocative sets have been photographed in crisp 70mm. The result is gorgeous, with the centrepiece being the huge mirrored hall at the centre of the royal court. This set must have been fiendishly difficult to shoot on, and there are numerous tricky moments in which Branagh turns his camera round without catching reflections. The result is a decidedly non-Gothic feel; you don't get the idea that Hamlet would have been okay if he'd just spent less time skulking in shadows. Branagh's direction is florid without being overly so: some visual pyrotechnics are needed to keep our attention, but Branagh doesn't fall into the trap of distraction.

It is the language that is at the centre, here, after all: it must be, in any version using full text. Branagh is perhaps not the strongest of the three filmed Hamlets I've seen, but then his job was more difficult. After all, without cutting the play it's impossible to smooth over the character's rough edges and make him more explicable - if Branagh falters, it's because of the extremely difficult contradictions inherent in the part. All the other major parts are perfectly done, with Derek Jacobi's dignified Claudius outdone only by Richard Brier's finely judged Polonius. Julie Christie and Kate Winslett get the difficult job of making Gertrude and Ophelia forces in the play, and both succeed. For once we even have a decent Horatio (Nicholas Farrell).

My only criticisms are relatively minor. The intermission is poorly placed, coming well into the play's fourth act: while some recess is necessary, at that point you'd almost rather just press on. The overblown emphasis given to the "What is a man" speech immediately before hand is one of the film's few embarrasing lapses: it's as if Branagh was afraid we wouldn't come back after the break. The other discordant note is the use of celebrity guests in minor parts. Charlton Heston makes a good Player King, and Billy Crystal - though somewhat incongruous - is a fair choice for the gravedigger. Jack Lemmon and Robin Williams, however, simply distract as Marcellus and Osric. I suppose these appearances helped to sell the film to financiers, though, so I won't complain too much. We don't get films this good often enough to risk any harsh words.

Also in small parts: Sir John Gielgud, Sir John Mills, Dame Judi Dench, Sir Richard Attenborough, and a few people without titles.

Amazing black comedy about high school life that represents the ultimate summation of (or reply to) the eighties teen flick genre. Winona Ryder stars as Veronica in the film that made her a big league minor star. She is the fourth member of a clique of high school bitches, with the other three all being named Heather. They are the coolest people in school, but having labored to join their group Veronica is turned off by their bitchiness and yearns for her old friends. On cue, Jason Dean (Christian Slater) arrives in town and immediately sets out to help Veronica eliminate her problem.

This stunning combination of black comedy and social commentary is brilliant for almost its entire length. The first half is best, full of lines and moments that sting ("What are going to do tonight?" "Oh, mourning, maybe watch some TV."). Ryder is terrific, and Slater does a great Jack Nicholson. Lehmann hits the accelerator so hard that we occasionally slide around the road a bit, and the climax doesn't quite fit, but individual scenes, like the two double executions of the local jocks, are among the most satisfying bits of wish fulfilment ever filmed. You'll laugh, you'll cringe, and if you went to high school you'll lap it up. Remember: "whether or not to kill herself is one of the most important decisions a teenager can make."

This wasn't "an unqualified disaster" or "a phenomenon." This was just - a flop. - Steven Bach

Possibly the finest book written about the making of a film is Steven Bach's Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heaven's Gate, which chronicles the disastrous production of Michael Cimino's epic western. It's written from a rarely revealed insider perspective (Bach was a key executive at United Artist's during the film's preparation), but that isn't its only appeal. It captures an important moment in film history: the last semblance of old-style moguls had been swept away (Arthur Krim departed UA in 1978 after 27 years) and the era of decentralised corporate ownership had begun.

It was a time of great uncertainty about Hollywood's future, and not least amongst the anxieties was how to make films that actually made money. The examples of Jaws and Star Wars (two classic films which arguably have done Hollywood a lot of damage) were there, yet the pattern of big budget, high income, low intelligence blockbusters had yet to arrive. In this environment, it was possible for a studio to naively pour $36 million into a risky western intended to cost $7.6 million. Bach's remarkably honest book details the way good money was rashly thrown after bad as the studio attempted to wrest control back from an out-of-control perfectionist director. And it details the ultimate disaster as the film was greeted by universally bad reviews and the studio that produced it went belly up.

In retrospect, it's clearer Heaven's Gate did not sink United Artists: as obscene as the $36 million figure was at the time (it's chickenfeed now), it wasn't enough to kill a studio. Other forces were at work, and other studios have followed the UA route since with no Heaven's Gate to help them along. It has also become clearer that the critical drubbing the film got might not have been warranted. When a full length version was re-released in the early 1980s, many reviewers went gaga over it.

So who is right?Well, Heaven's Gate is not the turkey the original wave of US critics (led by Vincent Canby) labelled it. Reading those early reviews now, there seems little doubt that most of the reviewers were not so much critiquing the film as reviewing the film's production process, cutting down Cimino and (perhaps) the studio structures that had allowed him to run amok. Back in 1980, it seems, it was impossible to take in the spectacle on the screen without being distracted by the sheer waste that the spectacle represented. Time (and exposure to subsequent, far more wasteful pictures) has diluted this effect. Yet I don't think it has exposed the diamond the second wave of critics saw.

Bach's own assessment is that the meaning of the film was lost in an excessive display of filmmaking prowess. Writing of an early executive screening, Bach writes that "little by little the anxiety of anticipation gave way to satiety, then to a sense of claustrophobia induced by the inundation of image and effect." Summing up the film at the end of his book, Bach presses the point:

Characters and story were sacrificed to the filmmakers love of visual effect and production for their own sakes. The "look" of the thing subsumed the sense of the thing and implied a callous or uncaring quality about characters for whom the audience was asked to care about more than the film seemed to.

It's a view shared by many. Yet I'm not sure that Bach's response wasn't, like the early critic's, driven principally by his overexposure to the facts of the film's creation. Bach had to view recut versions of the films dozens of times during its postproduction, and it would surely be hard for him not to view the film as a "thing" rather than a living, breathing, story.

Which is not to say that the story is very lively or breathes very deeply. I'm just saying that I don't agree that Cimino didn't care about his story or characters, and I don't think the scale of the movie should necessarily endanger the story. After all, the high budget end of the western genre has always been about placing people against a spacious environment and letting them play out their conflicts against an epic backdrop. On paper at least, Cimino's story seems to follow this pattern well. He sets up an effective enough love triangle between the educated Kris Kristoffersen, the mercenary Christopher Walken, and frontier prostitute Isabelle Huppert. And he's onto a good thing with the true (though freely reinterpreted) story of the Johnson County War, in which cattle ranchers attempted a government backed slaughter of suspected cattle rustlers. It's a story that links right into the central thematic conflict of the classic western: the tension between the frontier and encroaching civilization. Essentially, the film is a Marxist take on George Stevens' 1953 classic Shane.

It's the way Cimino tackles this material that brings the film undone. I haven't seen the short cut of the film, as it's the three hour version that has been generally been available since the film's "rediscovery." In the long version at least, though, the film's big flaw is simply that of pacing. The simple story I've outlined above takes forever to unfold. This is partly because Cimino lingers over his aesthetic effects and some big bravura moments, perhaps believing that "greatness" meant "epic," which in turn simply meant "long." These displays cost UA dearly, but they don't bother me too much, with the roller skating sequence (which sounds ridiculous on paper) being particularly effective. The real problem is that Cimino drags out every scene of exposition or character conflict to twice its required length: the film is all meaningful, loaded pauses. By trying to teasing out every nuance of feeling in every moment between his three central characters, Cimino simply dulls the mind and stops you picking up what really matters.

The film also has a serious structural problem. Cimino fought hard to add to the film a prologue and epilogue designed to frame and contextualise the action. Bach recounts how the studio was always keen to include the sequences, believing them to be of considerable merit even as it threatened to withhold the money Cimino needed to complete them. The epilogue, it must be said, is one of those sequences that probably looked great on paper but in fact simply doesn't work. The prologue, however, is probably the film's most effective sequence. It introduces the Kristoffersen character at his graduation, and contrasts him with a fellow graduate played by John Hurt. The idea, here, seems to be that the body of the film will follow these characters and show their divergent paths. Yet the rest of the film fails to follow up on this promise, relegating the John Hurt character to little more than the status of an extra. It's a shame, because Hurt probably gives the film's best performance, and the idea of the conflict between these two graduates is a very good one.

Other problems? Well, there's something about the photography that isn't right. It's not Vilmios Zsigmond's cinematography, as such, since the film is often extremely beautiful. It's the way Cimino constantly sets the camera up to shoot through dust, or haze, or smoke, or steam, or combinations of all four that rankles. It gets to be a joke after a while, as you start to count the ways that Cimino finds of visually obscuring his action and vistas. The problem isn't helped by the even worse soundtrack, which is one of the most disastrously mixed you will ever struggle to hear and has become a source of minor infamy in itself. (I can think of no other film for which reviews so consistently single out the quality of sound reproduction for criticism.) Perhaps as part of Cimino's quest for authenticity and mood, the most minor of sound effects seem to be have been privileged over the dialogue, making the film incomprehensible at times. You come to welcome the stretches with subtitles.

These are employed for the sequences involving the immigrant homesteaders, who wail and caterwaul about their plight for long stretches at a time. Many critics singled these scenes out for criticism, finding the cacophony of foreign voices too much of an assault. I don't mind that so much, since, as I've suggested, I'd welcomed the chance to stop straining to hear and settled back to read the subtitles. The scenes are atrociously written, though. The immigrants are the film's conscience, spelling out the film's political message. Basically, the point is that it's dangerous to be poor, and despite all the talk of welcoming huddled masses, the established wealth in America (as everywhere else) will triumph over the impoverished newcomers. It's an interesting point to be made in a western, and the film's advocates have snidely suggested the film failed because it was too politically courageous. Unfortunately, though, the point is undermined by the didactic, preachy manner in which Cimino delivers it. It's too schematic and reductive to be persuasive: the cattlemen are cartoon-style bad guys, and the immigrants look like the chorus of Fiddler on the Roof. This is Cimino's idea of a sophisticated political message?

The film does have virtues, though, which its critics chose to ignore. I've already mentioned John Hurt, but Kristoffersen and Huppert are also very good in their roles (there's nothing wrong with Walken either, except that to me he just looks somehow wrong for the part). David Mansfield, who has a small role in the film, contributes an effective score. And between the smoke and dust and the rest, the film is intermittently impressive to look at.

The combined effect of these flaws and virtues is neither turkey nor masterpiece. It's simply mediocre. When released, the film was a sensation for its cost, its lack of box-office, and its alleged badness. Yet even the most famous of flops have a way of fading from memory. Who remembers now, for example, that Steven Spielberg even made a film called 1941? As new debacles appear (first Howard the Duck, then Hudson Hawk, then the works of Kevin Costner) the old ones fade from memory. Some may get rediscovered in time, but most just recede into obscurity.

And one might just get remembered as the film that had a really good book written about it.

Terrible film with a massive cult audience: teenage boys seem to love it. Christopher Lambert stars as Connor MacLeod, one of a race of semi-immortal beings who can be killed only by decapitation. The last of these immortals will be given a great reward, so they spend their time hunting each other down and fighting to the death.

Sounds better than it is. There are some good bits of location photography in the Scottish sections of the film that, for fleeting moments, suggest the kind of epic feel that the film needed. Yet for too much of the running time director Russel Mulcahy gives us yet another variation on the dark urban thriller. His direction is obtrusive and too obviously inspired by music-videos: he reduces everything to surface effect and somehow strips away the substance. Lambert (who seems to be all forehead) gives an impassive performance that doesn't help a great deal either.

The only things that lift the film are the presence of Sean Connery as Connor's mentor, a funny scene involving a pistol duel, and great music by Queen.

Something of a questionable highlight of the last few filmgoing years. This is one of the worst directed, most stupidly conceived and written films I have ever seen. The great thing about it is that it's bad in a cheeringly idiotic kind of way, though don't for a minute believe this means it is intentionally dumb. The stupidity of the premise is something to behold: the immortals from the first film turn out to be aliens (?!) from the planet Zeist (?!), and the chief one of them, played by Christopher Lambert (the man with more forehead than face), has to try to save the Earth, which has been perpetually surrounded by a giant black shield to prevent the greenhouse effect (?!). You know a film is in trouble when it starts in 1999, then moves 25 years forwards from there, and then backwards 500 more years, without specifying where we start counting backwards from or, as Roger Ebert noted, which planet's years were being used. If pulled off, such a narrative structure could have been one of the most ambitious since 2001- but Mulcahy is no Kubrick. He carries on stolidly with his music video direction (the kind of thing Molly Meldrum mistakes for filmic talent) through plodding action scenes and silly special effects.

The film somehow manages to require knowledge of the first film without actually displaying any kind of continuity or linkage with it. Worse, it discards the one element of that film that was admittedly okay - the spectacular outdoor photography - and trades it for awful, poorly lit indoor sets. Even lovers of the first film, who were mostly undiscerning teenage boys, abandoned this one.

Jim Abrahams did this film spoof (targeting Top Gun) without normal partners David and Jerry Zucker. Cowriter was Naked Gun and Police Academy (co)writer Pat Proft. Its biggest asset is Charlie Sheen, who bears an uncanny resemblance not only to his father but also to Tom Cruise. He has a great delivery, even when subjected to all kinds of humiliations: in one scene he sucks helium from an Indian pipe before delivering his lines. I'd rank it under Airplane but about equal to Naked Gun. What it really needs is a better conclusion- the dogfight it does have is unsatisfying from either a comedic or action standpoint. Valeria Golino is great as the sultry heroine.

Incredibly well made thriller from a Tom Clancy novel, set in the closing days of the cold war. Marko Ramius (Sean Connery), a top submarine captain in the Russian navy, steals a brand new silent submarine and heads for America. The Russian Navy follows in pursuit. Is Ramius a madman trying to start world war three? Or is he trying to defect and hand the submarine to the Americans? Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin) believes the former, and tries to help Connery.

This big scale thriller is everything Hollywood thrillers usually aren't. It's a complex, intelligent, funny, exciting, epic film. As such it requires the intelligent participation of the viewer (some knowledge of naval technology would help too). Alec Baldwin is a natural for the role of Jack Ryan- he doesn't bring the complexity to the role that Harrison Ford did, but he's far better suited to the role.

McTiernan finds a sly and original way to present a sub full of English speaking Russians- it works so well we forgive the range of accents (Connery's Scottish through Tim Curry's English to Sam Neill's Australian/New Zealand). One of the better casts of recent memory (Connery, Baldwin, James Earl Jones, Sam Neill, Curry, Joss Ackland, Scott Glenn and others) helps ensure that the myriad supporting roles remain sharply defined.