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Reviews
A Cock and Bull Story (2005)
the Unfilmable, made Film
At one point in the film "Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story," the character Tony Wilson states that the novel "Tristram Shandy" is said by "many people" to be "unfilmable." This quote has been picked up by almost all reviewers and commentators, many of them ignoring the point that this is a position held by one of the fictional characters, and not that of the film-makers themselves. Indeed, until this film started to be promoted, I doubt many people ever considered the "filmability" (or not) of Sterne's novel.
(I've read other, similar confusions of statements by fictional characters with facts: At one point the lead, Steve Coogan, states that by the end of the book Tristram Shandy isn't even born. This is not true -- He's certainly born by page 225 in the edition I own -- yet I've read several reviews and blogs (even on this site!) which repeat this as a fact about the novel.)
However, this raises the issue in my mind what makes a book "filmable" or not: to my mind, Woolf's "Orlando" and Burrough's "Naked Lunch" are two of the least "filmable" novels of the 20th century, yet both have been made into quite fine movies. What makes these films, as well as "Tristram Shandy," work, is that more than just transferring plot and characters from words to screen (there might not be much of those), they transfer something less concrete but more important -- mood. In "Tristram Shandy" the spirit is one of playful wit and drollery, expressed in the novel by exuberant use of language and word-play, whimsical digressions (and digressions from those digressions), and reality-bending self-reference. All of these have been transposed to cinematic form, resulting in a very funny film!
This is a costume-drama which mocks costume-dramas, an art-film which mocks art-films. The first 25 minutes, when Steve Coogan is mostly acting in the roles of Tristram or Walter Shandy, I think are the most laugh-out-loud funny of the movie. In the latter two third, when he is acting in the role of "Steve Coogan," the humor is drier, more droll than boisterous. The one (and just one) nagging flaw I find in this film, is that it would be more effective, and truer to Sterne's literary style, to have these two parts less sectioned off from one another, more commingled and spliced together.
As a musician, I must make mention of the sound-track, which cleverly alludes to other costume-dramas by quoting the soundtracks to "The Draughtsman's Contract" (Nyman) and "Barry Lyndon" (Handel), as well "8 1/2" (Rota), like this, a film about making a film.
Dreamchild (1985)
Wonderland Creatures Grow Old, Bitter, Mangy
I had sought out a DVD copy of this wonderful film on Amazon, and was informed that it was un-released; therefore I was surprised one Saturday evening a couple weeks ago, while rooting through a bin of budget DVDs at a local supermarket, to find a copy of "Dreamchild" -- and for $1, no less! The reproduction quality is very poor, but the gist of this remarkable film is still there.
One can read the plot synopsis on other postings -- in 1932, the aged Mrs. Alice Hargreaves (nee Alice Liddell)(played by Coral Browne), has been invited from England to Columbia University to participate in the celebration of the centenary of a friend from her childhood, Rev. Charles Dodgson (AKA Lewis Carroll). She doesn't quite understand why all the fuss about "Queer Mr. Dodgson, who told such amusing tales," nor is she comfortable with the New World of New York, and the New Age of the twentieth century, and the threat they present to her Victorain mind and morality. (The use of names here is very important: she insists on being referred to as Mrs. Hargreaves, and he as Mr. Dodgson, while the world at large thinks on them as Alice and Lewis Carroll.) As she contemplate the passing of her world, and her own impending mortality, we are given flashbacks to her youth -- boating parties on the Thames with her family and their friends, including Lewis Carroll, who regales them with the stories and poems that will become "Alice in Wonderland" -- and dreams and hallucinations that take the form of scenes from that book.
There is a sub-plot which consists of Mrs. Hargreaves relations and attitudes towards her traveling companion, a young woman named Lucy (Nicola Cowper), and her budding romance with a pushy New York reporter (Peter Gallagher).
However, it's the memory and dream scenes that really propel this movie forwards. The subject of the adult Carroll's relationship with pre-pubescent girls is a tricky one -- whether it was pure platonic friendship or sexual paedophilia, repressed or expressed, is a question whose answer is lost in the discrete mists of history, and is less important in the long run than the great and enduring work of literature which it produced. This film treats the matter with a subtlety unmatched by any other film on so delicate a topic. The charisma between Ian Holm's besmitten, uncomfortable, stuttering Carroll, and Amelia Shankley's almost unconsciously flirtatious Child Alice, is astounding.
In the "Wonderland" hallucination scenes, the various characters Alice (represented by the adult Mrs. Hargreaves) meets -- the March-hare, the Mad Hatter, et al. -- are created by Jim Henson's Creature Shop; but get all notion of cute, funny muppets out of your head: these are horrific apparitions, having aged like Alice herself, and grown mangy, snaggle-toothed, and surly (or surlier: they're pretty surly in Carroll's original story) -- in fact, the manifestations of those emotions and memories from her youth which Mrs. Hargreaves has so long repressed, and which, at the touching final scenes of the film, she learns to acknowledge and accept.
Mirrormask (2005)
Allegory, CGI, and thirty Sphinges
Let me start with a disclaimer: I'm more interested in visuals than with storyline. I prefer to view films as moving artwork than as filmed drama, and my favorite directors, Peter Greenaway, early Terry Gilliam, and the like, reflect that. Therefore, I should be the perfect audience for "MirrorMask" I went to this film with a friend at his suggestion, never having heard of it before that afternoon.
The plot, such as it is, is a rather heavy-handed "coming-of-age" allegory: a rebellious, troubled teenage girl, the artistic daughter of two circus performers (in sunny Brighton, England), finds herself transported to a fantastical parallel world (in somewhat less sunny CGI-land), which she must save by completing a Quest. Other reviewers mention "Alice in Wonderland," but I found more in the tradition of Brothers Grimm/C. G. Jung/Joseph Campbell. But get all notions of Magical Realism out of your mind: In "MirrorMask" the magic and the real (Other than the heroine and her double) are kept neatly on alternate sides of the "mirror."
But plot isn't what drives this movie-- visuals are. And what visuals! Fantastic costumes, actors in Mardi-gras masks, flying books, fish which swim through the streets, a pair of airborne giants which revolve like a double planetary system, flying towers with touchy emotions. The highlights of this realm are the widow with thirty pet sphinxes (the correct plural is "sphynges," but no one would know what you were talking about), which like to eat human flesh, but prefer books; and the atonal rendition of "Close to You," performed by a room-full of demonic Jill-in-the-boxes: neither of these are to be missed!
And yet, as beautiful and inventive as these images are, I find the knowledge that they were almost all created with digital animation to be somewhat disappointing: a certain virtuosity of design execution is lost, a certain edge on the fantasy is dulled. In a world where anything is possible, nothing can be surprising.