Too Much TV: FAHRENHEIT 451 (2018)

With all the talent involved it's stunning how bad the new version of Ray Bradbury's dystopian classic is, but 2018 is probably both the right and the wrong time for dystopias. The Donald Trump presidency has put a lot of people in a dystopian frame of mind, but that creates too great a temptation to turn any dystopia into a commentary on Trump and Trumpism, which are at most symptoms of potential dystopia rather than precipitating events. If someone uses "America" and "again" in the same sentence, especially as a slogan, as is done in Ramin Bahrani's film, it's all too obvious that you're saying something about Trump that isn't necessarily relevant to Bradbury's vision. Worse, however, is the new film's preoccupation with social media as the alternative to not only literature but all the arts, demonstrated mainly by using the fronts of skyscrapers as Facebook Watch style screens flooded with comment emojis (and words!) and constant invocation of "the Nine" as the place where everyone looks at everything. The story's message is muddled for no good reason by the idea that some of the classics, at least, survive in emoji translation, as if that somehow dilutes their dangerous potential. In general, Bahrani goes for a "day after tomorrow" look rather than the more futuristic vision Francois Truffaut aspired to in his 1966 adaptation, the Second Civil War that led to the rejection of books, on the ground that they provoke ideas that in turn provoke conflict, having happened only very recently from appearances. Bahrani's 451 is arguably more about 2018 than Bradbury's or Truffaut's were about the actual dates of their creation, to the new film's disadvantage. Its presentism arguably explains its abject failure as a dystopia, since it portrays a moment where the new order doesn't really seem to have sunk in, but must still resort to terror against a resistance (the "Eels") of uncertain scope. We never do meet true believers who take the post-literate order for granted, or at least we encounter none as important characters in the story. Instead, we get a villainous authority figure, the top "fireman" of Cleveland (Michael Shannon) who appears obsessed with text, writing excerpts from literature from memory on cigarette papers only to destroy them, even as he lectures his protege Montag (Michael B. Jordan) on the perils of books. This character is too ambiguous for the story's own good, while Montag himself, Bradbury's protagonist, is fatally detached from the ordinary dull society that actually alienates him; the scenes featuring his wife (Laura Harrier) were left on the cutting room floor for some reason. Perhaps Bahrani decided that her storyline and its preoccupation with status and conformity dated the overall story as a relic of the suburban Fifties. Whatever his reason, he reduces Montag to a loner who is, if anything, egged on to explore books by his conflicted commander -- and worse, he saddles the character with a hackneyed "fathers and sons" story in which flashbacks conveniently reveal long-suppressed truths about the elder fireman's fate. For an indie filmmaker who won acclaim for social-realist views of immigrant and working-class life, Bahrani is strangely determined here to reduce Bradbury's fiction to a collection of genre cliches, down to an inept climax involving a bird infected with the sum total of human knowledge needing to fly through a hole in a barn in a race against time with Shannon's slow-motion flamethrower, distracted by a Montag angling for martyrdom. As I recall, the Truffaut Fahrenheit is generally thought of as a failure, yet in retrospect it seems superior to the new Fahrenheit in every way. It shouldn't have been so, because it really isn't that hard to see how a consensus against uncomfortable ideas could arise in our time, and it shouldn't have been hard to translate that vision to film, yet the new film pays only lip service to how appealing and tempting that reaction might be in its rush to turn Bradbury's dystopia into just another action movie.

On the Big Screen: MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS (2017)

After an unlikely period as a director of high-profile tentpole pictures -- Thor, Jack Ryan, Cinderella -- Kenneth Branagh returns to more personal filmmaking with this new adaptation of Agatha Christie's beloved novel, previously filmed to great effect by Sidney Lumet in 1974. It's a more personal picture this time because, unlike those recent efforts, this one stars Kenneth Branagh, following in the prominent footsteps of Albert Finney and Peter Ustinov, and the deeper tracks of David Suchet, by taking on the role of Christie's fussy Belgian, Hercule Poirot. For that you need an accent and a moustache. Branagh's Poirot accent -- I don't know whether it can be described accurately as a Belgian accent -- is at least superior to his attempts at an American accent; he's one of the few British actors who can't really do that well. It's with the moustache that Branagh really tries to differentiate himself from past Poirots. Certainly the preemptive favorite for the Best Moustache Oscar, should that category suddenly come into being, it's big, brown and bristly where the typical Poirot look is small, black and oily. As the years tell on the former boy-wonder actor-director, you wonder sometimes whether this is a Poirot mystery or The Sam Elliott Story. Ultimately, however, there's no mistaking the familiar story of a murder with a seemingly ever-expanding number of likely suspects, and if you've seen the Lumet movie (I have) or read the Christie original (I haven't) the only suspense the new film offers is whether Branagh's writer, Michael Green -- who was very busy this year with Wolverine, Alien and Blade Runner sequels -- would dare change Christie's ending. Spoiler alert: he doesn't.

That leaves it up to Branagh and his cast of actors to make the story fresh in other ways. There are some stabs at progressive casting that let Penelope Cruz and Leslie Odom Jr. into the picture, but only Willem Dafoe as the Pinkerton man (with an extra level of imposture) is arguably an improvement over his 1974 predecessor. The other actors aren't bad, though Michelle Pfeiffer goes maybe too far over the top, but as a director of actors Branagh, for all his Shakespearean experience, is no Sidney Lumet. He proves that further by indulging in overblown camera movements in an effort to give what should be an economically staged story -- apart from the Orient Express's necessarily luxurious furnishings -- a quasi-epic feel. If two characters are chatting in a boxcar, he'll have the camera hovering at some distance, and then he'll have it rise from below, or descend from above. Toward the end he rolls out a long shot following Poirot through a number of train cars, but it only reminds you that he'd done a much more impressive tracking shot in his debut film, Henry V, nearly thirty years ago. He even gives Poirot a Bond-style prologue as a mystery-solving peacemaker in the Old City of Jerusalem, and for all we know, given the nod toward Death on the Nile at the very end, he may have a franchise in mind, if audiences demand it. The theater where I saw the film is a neighborhood arthouse where the audience skews older, and there was a healthy crowd for a second matinee on a cold November afternoon, but I doubt the houses will look the same at the multiplexes. If he wants and gets another chance at Poirot I'd recommend that Branagh not go for the pre-sold titles but look for stories that have not been filmed as theatrical features. His Murder is not a bad film by any means, but in the end it did nothing to make me forget the Lumet film or what I knew to expect from the Christie mystery. But as someone who remembers a 43 year old movie fondly, perhaps I wasn't this film's target audience. Maybe those who know nothing of Agatha Christie or Sidney Lumet are the ones who'll rightly decide this film or this franchise's fate.

On the Big Screen: FRANTZ (2016)

The U.S. marks the centennial of its entry into World War I this month. Hollywood will mark the occasion later this year with the release of Patty Jenkins' Wonder Woman, but Francois Ozon had a centennial present ready in advance. The arrival here of Frantz closes a circle, for the film is a French remake of a Hollywood movie (by a German director, Ernst Lubitsch) based on a French play, The Man I Killed. Lubitsch's dubiously retitled Broken Lullaby is a Pre-Code film I haven't yet seen, but after reading a synopsis I see that Ozon's screenplay, co-written with Philippe Piazzo, proposes an alternate ending to the original story, presumably with the idea of undermining whatever message of reconciliation Lubitsch or the original authors intended to send.

The setting is the German town of Qudelinburg, where in 1919, with the war freshly over, Anna (Paula Beer) mourns her fiance Frantz, who was KIA in September 1918, two months before the Armistice, with his parents, who have taken her in as a virtual daughter. One dreary day in this black and white world she finds that some stranger has placed flowers on Frantz's grave. The groundskeeper explains with a contemptuous spit that the stranger is a Frenchman. This proves to be Adrien (Pierre Niney), who gets a hostile response from the defeated Deutschers, among whom revanchist sentiment already stirs. Frantz's dad, a doctor (Ernst Stötzner), wants nothing to do with Adrien until the Frenchman reveals that he was no mere poilu but Frantz's best friend in Paris, where the young German studied art until called to war. His flashbacks to happy pre-war days are in color (Pascal Marti's tricky cinematography won last year's Cesar) and his repentant earnestness colors Anna' drab world a little. Improbably, Anna finds herself falling for the Frenchman, but before things can go too far Adrien makes a terrible confession: all his stories of friendship with Frantz were lies. In fact, Frantz was someone Adrien had encountered randomly and killed in a trench. The fact that the German had not tried to defend himself -- the letters he carried on him betrayed pacifist sentiments -- gave Adrien a case of guilty conscience that he hoped to cure by making a pilgrimage to Frantz's home and family.

In Broken Lullaby, the German girl convinces the French boy to keep up the noble lie, and he remains in Germany to fill the hole in the bereaved family. In Frantz, Adrien returns home after asking Anna to tell Frantz's parents the truth. Now it is Anna who tells a noble lie by refusing to tell the old folks the true story, telling them instead that Adrien was called home on family business. After a thwarted suicide attempt, she decides to go to France -- I'm sure that the homonymity of Frantz and France is no accident -- and reunite with the Frenchman. She has few clues to work with, but at least she's as fluent in French as Adrien was in German, and after a brief tease of Adrien's suicide she finds him in his country home -- with a woman who is either his wife or fiancee. She heads for home the next day, but not before making another stop at the Louvre to look at Edouard Manet's The Suicide, the sight of which, she says cryptically, makes her want to live.

If Frantz is a remake of Broken Lullaby it also has a little Vertigo in its DNA, from its motifs of imposture and suicide to its near-obsessive attention to a painting in a museum to some Hermannesque hints in Philippe Rombi's score. It may be that Vertigo, less that film's extreme fatalism, is what you get once you strip Broken Lullaby of its fairy-tale romanticism. It may be that Frantz is telling us that there can't be the sort of imposture Adrien indulges in without betrayal and bitterness. Whatever his good intentions, Adrien's mission inevitably has a self-indulgent, self-serving aspect that can't help but leave Anna feeling, as I presume she does ultimately, exploited and abused. Maybe I'm reading my knowledge of events to come into Ozon's ending, but I can't help thinking that what really keeps Anna going after the end is the thought of revenge, a hint of the revenge Germans probably hoped already to take on France. Ozon's thought may have been that Broken Lullaby needed a do-over that reflects the history to come of which Lubitsch and his writers were innocent. Perhaps a more faithful remake could be set after World War II, since reconciliation did seem to come then, nationalist stirrings in 2017 France notwithstanding. In any event, Frantz is a grim, fascinating bit of cinematic revisionism with the sort of ambiguous ending designed to keep people talking well after they leave the theater. From what I've read about Broken Lullaby, I doubt whether it provoked much discussion, so in that respect, at least, Frantz is a rare remake that improves on the original. It's up to each movie fan, of course, to decide which sort of story he or she would rather see.

On the Big Screen: GHOST IN THE SHELL (2017)

It's been more than twenty years since I saw the seminal cyberpunk-style anime that inspired Rupert Sanders' new film, and to be honest I don't remember much about it apart from the giant holographic signs and Kenji Kawai's tremendous theme song, which gets a welcome reprise over the new film's end credits. After doing some research to refresh my memory, I see that there's only superficial resemblances between the two films. The new screenplay boils down to a very ordinary "everything you thought you knew is wrong" story in which The Major (Scarlett Johansson), a highly skilled cyborg working for a shadowy department of the Japanese government, learns during her investigation of a crime wave masterminded by a cyborg terrorist that her makers fed her a fake story about her human origin. The one clever thing about this is that it inscribes the controversy over the "whitewashing" of the main character into the film itself. Since Ghost is known worldwide as a Japanese product, offense was taken -- more in the U.S. than in Japan itself, as I'm given to understand -- that an American actress got the lead role. Never mind that Scarlett Johansson probably is the most popular female action star on Earth right now, and that while Marvel Studios insanely refuses to put her in a solo Black Widow movie she has been typecast in recent films (Her, Under the Skin, Lucy) as a higher form of life. Never mind that the ability to make a cyborg look like whatever regardless of the "ghost's" true identity is part of the point of the project. What mattered to those this bothers, I suspect, is mainly that Johansson, so to speak, took away someone's rice bowl. In any event, the new film tells us that the Major herself has been whitewashed, that she was Japanese in her corporeal life but changed into something else, presumably because the head man of the robotics company is white himself. This still may not make sense given that she was purchased by the Japanese government and lives and works in Japan. Taking this into consideration, shouldn't she have been designed as a Japanese? Write it off as the whim of a villain, but note also that this film's Japan is quite the cosmopolitan place.

The Major's boss (a deceptively feeble looking Takeshi Kitano, splitting the difference between his directorial and thespian billings as " 'Beat' Takeshi Kitano" in the credits) has an international but Anglophone team of agents, including rising global star Pilou Asbaek as Major's sidekick Batou, who understand his Japanese but talk to him in English, which he understands just as well. Cybernetics, I guess. I waited the whole film for Takeshi to talk English in some badass moment, but the great man actually is so badass that he doesn't have to talk anyone else's language. Indeed, this is as international a film as you'll get this year, co-financed by American and Chinese companies and boasting Juliette Binoche, reigning queen of global cinema, in its supporting cast. Unfortunately, probably for the same reason it feels as completely generic a film as any you'll see this year. It's certainly not a bad film, but by 2017 there's no way that a live-action Ghost can be the sort of conceptual forward leap that the anime Ghost was in its time. It touches only lightly on the implicit horror of an age in which identity has grown almost helplessly vulnerable to manipulation, its best scene demonstrating the point during the interrogation of a hapless human implanted with false memories, who comes to realize with horror under questioning that everything he thought he knew was ... well, you get the idea. For all its spectacle, Sanders' Ghost is merely competent rather than visionary. It's Johansson's movie but I suspect that if anyone gets a rub from it it'll be Asbaek, who cements his action-hero credentials as Batou. Overall this isn't really a bad movie, but for a work of science-fiction contemplating a possible post-human or trans-human future it suffers a possibly insurmountable handicap of appearing to look backward rather than forward.

On the Big Screen: BEN-HUR (2016)

I was probably the youngest person at a screening of Timur Bekmambetov's film this afternoon, and I am not a young man. The word is that Ben-Hur is bombing, and I think I understand why. This third Hollywood version of Lew Wallace's "Tale of the Christ" is by no means a B-movie, but for anyone to whom "Ben-Hur" means anything, the fact that a remake of the Oscar-winning 1959 blockbuster is not being treated as a tentpole event must make it look sight-unseen like a poor imitation of both the William Wyler epic and its 1925 precursor. In 1959 there was no bigger tentpole than Ben-Hur; probably something bigger couldn't be imagined. Biblical or Bible-era epics were the superhero films and CGI extravaganzas of their day, just as contemptible in many critics' eyes and just as compulsively spectacular for the masses. By then, Ben-Hur had set the standard for spectacle for generations, in theater before movies. If you had a big action climax in a movie you called it your "chariot race." But when was the last time your chariot race was a chariot race? Movies can soar in so many ways now that they'd seemed to pass Ben-Hur by, so that to remake the story again with such inevitable modesty as one must have in the 21st century must seem like an insult to those for whom the Wyler film was the biggest thing ever.

By now, you've probably detected a note of regret implying that the 2016 film has gotten a raw deal. So let me end the suspense by saying that Bekmambetov's movie is an often-worthy remake into which a lot of creativity has gone, that it shouldn't be judged by comparisons of scale to previous versions of the story or the hype surrounding them, and that I recommend it despite the way it trips across the finish line and falls on its face.

While some people may dismiss the new Ben-Hur in advance as another product from Bible-film purveyors Roma Downey and Mark Burnett, it's still a film from the director of Nightwatch (and, alas, Wanted), co-written by the screenwriter of 12 Years a Slave. It is no mere "Bible movie," though the biblical parts are certainly its weakest. Inevitably it embraces Christianity, but it does so almost in pragmatic rather than proselytizing fashion, its message being that Jesus's message is the only thing to keep people from destroying themselves and each other. But it's a minimalist, theology-lite Christianity that boils down to little if not nothing more than "Forgive Your Enemies." Unlike the previous Hollywood Ben-Hur films, this one looks Jesus in the face and lets him talk, but in the most perverse casting choice of the year the actor who played Frank Miller's god-monster Xerxes in the 300 films here plays Our Lord & Savior. While the new film departs from its cinematic predecessors in normalizing Jesus -- watching the Wyler film I can't help wondering whether Jesus was horribly deformed, given the way one Roman reacts to that face we can't see, though a Roman in a similar situation reacts the same way to Rodrigo Santoro here -- it also departs from Lew Wallace's story (or so I assume, not having read of it) in important and interesting ways.

Part of the modesty of scale that has handicapped the new film is that it comes in at nearly 90 minutes shorter than the 1959 film. Keith Clarke and John Ridley do this by eliminating the Nativity prologue and, more significantly, the whole storyline of Quintus Arrias, the Roman admiral who adopts Ben-Hur as his son and secures a pardon for him after the wrongly-condemned galley salve rescues him during a sea battle. The new writers prefer to have Judah Ben-Hur (fourth-generation film dynast Jack Huston) a criminal and fugitive when he returns to Jerusalem for vengeance on his enemy Messala. As for the Roman antagonist, his is the most dramatically altered storyline. In the new film, Messala Severus (Toby "Koba" Kebbell) is Judah's adopted brother, his own family having been disgraced, if not condemned, for its participation in the conspiracy to assassinate Julius Caesar. Some wags have speculated that Messala has been made Judah's brother to preempt the homoerotic reading of the story inspired by Gore Vidal's  purported injection of subtext into the 1959 screenplay. But given that Clarke and Ridley have Messala fall for Judah's sister Tirzah (Sofia Black D'Elia), establishing a family tie need not rule out any shipping or slashing between the men. In any event, brotherly love prevails until Messala, feeling alienated as a practicing pagan among Jews, enlists to reclaim his Roman heritage. Before that, to show what a good guy he is, we see him and Judah drag racing in Bronson Canyon until Judah's chariot hits a rock and tosses him headfirst to the ground. Messala's own ride having run away, the Romano-Judean carries the unconscious Judah all the way back to the city. Throughout, we're reminded of the almost unbearable pressure Messala is under to prove himself and restore his ancestral family's good name by getting tough with Judean insurgents. Even past the point of no return, certain moments illustrate his horror at what has happened. Just before the chariot race, as Judah guides his team to their starting position, we see Messala in the foreground, leaning his head forward on his arms as if struggling to absorb what's about to happen. Even during the race, the film softens Messala by having him do without the scythes on his chariot wheels that did so much damage in the 1959 race. In sum, the new Messala is an intriguingly, evocatively ambiguous figure, at once embodying the arrogant occupier and the unassimilable immigrant. He threatens to be irreconcilably Other, except that this Ben-Hur is doggedly dedicated to reconciliation.

Meanwhile, Judah starts out dangerously ambivalent toward the enduring Zealot insurgency against Roman rule. He doesn't believe in violent resistance himself -- and for that is accused of privilege -- but can't bring himself to rat out Zealots when the returned Messala, now the right hand of Pontius Pilate (Pilou Asbaek), asks for help in pacifying Judea. Judah believes in peace but has no clear idea of what peace requires. He's unimpressed by his first encounter with Jesus, who you may be surprised to learn plied his carpentering trade in Jerusalem for a time. When Jesus tells him that God has a plan for everyone, Judah asks how that's different from slavery. Perhaps tellingly, Jesus doesn't have an answer to that just yet. Whatever Judah's plans are, they begin to unravel when he ends up reluctantly harboring a wounded Zealot who takes the place of a loose roof tile as the instrument of doom for the house of Hur. When Pilate and his army make their entrance into Jerusalem, after Judah and Messala have tried to discourage violence, the Zealot can't resist the opportunity to take a pot shot at Pilate and incriminate his hosts. The entry into Jerusalem is one of the new film's best scenes. Because the script has emphasized the importance for both Messala and Judah of the event going off peacefully, tension is established early. It's heightened when the Romans come in chanting belligerent sounding marching songs in Latin, almost as if daring the Zealots to do something. Making Pilate the victim of the roof incident rather than some pointless, otherwise nameless Roman also helps tighten up the plot.

From here the plot develops in familiar ways, apart from Judah washing up after the sea battle directly into the custody of Sheik Yilderim (Morgan Freeman). The sea battle has been the most acclaimed part of the new film so far, since it's probably the easiest part of the 1959 film to top. However, the CGI skies and waters don't look that much less fake than the studio tank Wyler had to use. On the other hand, Bekmambetov's strategy of staying inside the doomed galley, with only fleeting glances of the action through oar windows until the ship is rammed, earns the scene some honest suspense, as does Judah's climactic escape, which requires him to unchain himself underwater from a line of drowned men. Freeman's Yilderim is a more ruthless character than Hugh Griffith made him in his Oscar-winning 1959 turn. The sheik is ready to turn an escaped galley slave over to the Romans until Judah shows some horse-whispering and horse-doctoring skills that will make him useful to a breeder of chariot-racing animals. Yilderim is a realist whose cynical wisdom comes from futile experience as an insurgent against Rome. The most you can do to Rome, he advises Judah, is humiliate their champions in the no-holds-barred environment of the chariot circus. Since chariot racing is for all intents and purposes a death sport, racing for Yilderim gives Judah an opportunity to embarrass Rome and kill Messala, especially after Yilderim makes immunity for Judah part of his bet with Pilate.

The 2016 chariot race has been criticized, mostly, as a poor, CGI-fake imitation of the 1959 race contrived by Wyler, Andrew Marton and Yakima Canutt. But I don't think Bekmambetov need be embarrassed by comparisons with 1959 or 1925. While CGI allows him to come up with plenty of new stunts, the 2016 race is also soundly structured dramatically. Yilderim has advised Judah to hang back for the first half of the race, since the front of the field will be a demolition derby early on. Since Messala heads for the front immediately, this means the two antagonists will be separated for half the race. The new film solves this problem by giving each man a preliminary antagonist, Judah a bald Egyptian in the back of the filed, Messala a turbaned lunatic up front prone to yelling "I kill you!" These early rivalries are punctuated by disasters befalling other drivers, all of which sets us up nicely for the main event. Some of the stunts are frankly preposterous. To top Charlton Heston's somersault bump, Huston actually falls out of the chariot and is dragged for a seemingly-lethal period of time before he pulls himself back in by the reins. Other moments are brutally spectacular, and one of my most vivid memories of this movie will be of one chariot tumbling into the seats and the horses running amok in the stands as spectators flee in all directions. Overall the 2016 chariot race works as a climactic action scene, and thematically as well. In a way it exposes Judah and Messala's feud as irrelevant and petty, since all the other drivers seem ready to kill each other with nothing personal entering into it. It also exposes the hollowness of the symbolic vengeance on Rome Judah and Yilderim hoped for. As Yilderim enters Pilate's box to collect his winnings, he sardonically consoles Pilate over the Roman's defeat.  Strangely, Pilate doesn't feel defeated at all, apart from the money he's losing. Surveying the Judean mob that's swarmed onto the track to celebrate Judah's victory, some of them bouncing a seemingly-lifeless Messala about like a meat puppet, Pilate observes that they're all Romans now.

By the way, this film's Pilate is rather unbiblical in one important respect. In the Gospels, you get the impression that Pilate doesn't know Jesus from Adam when first presented with the prisoner, and of course he famously states that he finds no guilt in the man. Here, Pilate actually witnesses an impromptu Jesus sermon after the carpenter rescues some petty thief from a stone-throwing lynch mob. Hearing Jesus preach forgiveness, Pilate advises Messala that the carpenter will prove more dangerous than any Zealot. Violence can be answered by violence, after all, but what is Rome's answer to Jesus's message. The answer, of course, is crucifixion, and since the Sanhedrin isn't shown at all in this picture, there's no doubt where it places responsibility for Jesus's execution, which has been foreshadowed both by Judah's march to the galleys, arms tied behind him, which Jesus witnessed, and Judah's floating on a cruciform fragment of a ship's mast.

Jesus's capture at Gethsemane begins Ben-Hur's death plunge. I suppose there was no way to escape the ending we got given how the screenplay had harped on forgiveness and reconciliation, but even if you still believe that Christianity is capable of achieving those results you'd probably concede that this film's resolution is way too good to be true. Lew Wallace himself would probably think so. For the most part, of course, the denouement follows the familiar story. Judah tries to intervene during Jesus's march to Golgotha but is told to stand down by the condemned man, who goes to death willingly. Judah watches the crucifixion and hears Jesus's dying words, "Father, forgive them..." making an especial impression by provoking flashbacks to better times with Messala. Upon Jesus' death a healing rain falls, curing Judah's mother and sister of the leprosy they contracted in a prison where they were sent by Messala's subaltern without his commander's knowledge; the man had explained to Judah that he'd wanted to save Messala from himself on this point. Yilderim uses some of his race winnings to pay for the Hurs' release. Judah heads to the Roman barracks to see what became of Messala. He survived the race (as he does in the novel, though he doesn't survive the novel) but has lost a leg. He deliriously vows revenge, promising to grow his leg back the better to kill Judah with, until Judah reminds him of the time he carried Judah home after the chariot accident. After everything, this suffices to reconcile the brothers into a sobby embrace of mutual forgiveness, and that brings Messala back into the family fold, and back into Tirzah's embrace, all of them presumably Galileans now. Obviously the writers wish this to happen, and for the film they are God, but they're the ones in a delirium for the last five minutes or so of the movie. It's an embarrassingly bad finish given how good most of the movie is, but it's not enough to sink the film, especially if you concede that this version of the story probably couldn't end any other way. If no other Ben-Hur movie existed, I suspect most people would think more highly of this one. As it is, in some respects it's better than the Wyler film or the 1925 picture. None of them are truly great films because, or so I infer, Wallace's novel isn't really great source material. But as a Ben-Hur for our time, Bekmambatov's film will do -- or it would have had people really wanted one.

AGE OF UPRISING: THE LEGEND OF MICHAEL KOHLHAAS (2013)

Don't blame director Arnaud des Pallieres for the video-gamey title of the American release of his film. It was just plain Michael Kohlhaas to him, just as it was to Volker Schlondorff back in 1969. Both films adapt the legend of a minor German rebel as it had been canonized by the novelist Heinrich von Kleist 200 years ago. Schlondorff's film (here's my review) was a product of its time, a blend of New German Cinema and late-Hollywood risk-taking in the "history of cruelty" mode popular back then. Retelling the story now could easily have become an excuse to tart up the action with modern effects, but Pallieres resists that temptation. Instead, he films the story's violence with a cold objectivity and an absence of choreography that are bound to disappoint people expecting something "cool" from that awful American title. Yet there is, I suspect, a strong American influence over this new Kohlhaas film, and if I'm right it's a very good influence.

They killed his wife and hurt his horses; now Michael Kohlhaas will fight!

You can read my review of the 1969 film for more detail on the Kohlhaas story, but to sum it up, our hero (now played by Mads Mikkelsen, succeeding David Warner) has had his rights and his horses violated, and his wife has been killed while protesting on his behalf, so he starts a private war against the local baron who wronged him, and the war threatens to escalate into a full-scale political rising. Michael Kohlhaas remains apolitical, however. He'll lay down his arms and send home the small army that has rallied around him if only the baron will personally restore Michael's two black horses to full health and their former beauty.

In the most noteworthy story switch from the 1969 film, Kohlhaas negotiates not with a male potentate (nor with Martin Luther) but with a female ruler, a young princess (Roxane Duran) whose guileless if not stupid appearance hides a calculating and treacherous, yet on some level still honorable character. She must destroy Kohlhaas to restore order and set an example, but she makes sure that he gets what he'd asked for all along before he dies. In place of Luther the 2013 film gives us an anonymous Theologian (Denis Lavant) who chides Kohlhaas for his violent self-indulgence. Unimpressed by Kohlhaas's execution of one of his own men for looting, the Theologian challenges our hero's assumed right to rebel and his presumption of taking justice for himself when God alone, ultimately can judge. While the 1969 Kohlhaas is a kind of figurehead for an all-out rebellion reflecting the mood of 1969, the 2013 model is more intimate, arguably more morally serious, and it seems to owe many of its distinguishing qualities to Clint Eastwood.

I think it was the emphasis on horses that clicked things together for me. While the figure of Coalhouse Walker Jr. in the novel and film Ragtime are the most obvious American version of the Kohlhaas legend, Eastwood's Unforgiven, written by David Webb Peoples, is arguably a reflection of the Kohlhaas theme. In Unforgiven, horses are proposed by the local marshal as suitable compensation to a pimp for the disfiguring of one of his whores, and one of the cowboys held responsible for the disfigurement tries to offer the horses directly to the prostitute as a gesture of personal repentance. In this case, the whores as a group refuse the gesture and demand revenge instead, offering a bounty to whoever will kill the cowboys. Peoples (if not Eastwood) may have understood this as an ironic variation on Kohlhaas: the one gesture Kohlhaas would have accepted as a peace offering is spurned by the whores of Big Whiskey. But while the influence of the Kohlhaas legend on Unforgiven is purely speculative, the visual influence of Unforgiven on Arnaud des Pallieres seems hard to deny. The unromanticized violence: check. The bleak landscape: check. The resemblance is closest when Kohlhaas and his young daughter watch his men ride down upon and massacre a wagon train. We see the action from the Kohlhaases' perspective, at a great distance that refuses us any visceral thrill from the killing. As father and daughter watch, she asks him why he's fighting. For his horses? For his wife and her mother? Michael has no answer. Meanwhile, his faithful minion Cesar (David Bennent), who had earlier survived an attack from the baron's dogs, breaks from the attack and rides back up to Kohlhaas's position, only to fall dying to the ground. It's strongly reminiscent of the great "We've all got it coming" scene in Unforgiven, when William Munny and the Schofield Kid talk about killing on a hilltop as one of the whores slowly rides their way with terrible news.  Eastwood is a popular and honored director but doesn't seem to have inspired many stylistic followers, but Michael Kohlhaas hints that there's at least one out there.

With his squinty slits of eyes Mads Mikkelsen is more a Robert Mitchum than a Clint Eastwood but his own enigmatic charisma is essential for portraying a character who may well be an enigma to himself, a man who can't acknowledge and may not even recognize his deepest motives. He's a powerful figure who bends yet never quite breaks under the weight of conscience and the pressure of religion and custom. As Kohlhaas's daughter, Melusine Mayance proves herself a formidable child actor by holding her own with Mikkelsen. As the Princess, Roxane Duran isn't on screen much but she brings an almost eerie presence to the picture, dressed in plain black, that makes it plausible that people might have trembled before royalty. If the look of the film as well as its themes bring Eastwood to mind, Jeanne Lapoirie's cinematography has much to do with that. If "Age of Uprising" makes you think of a video game, Lapoirie's imagery is just about the opposite of that. I can't stress enough how stupid that American title sounds to me, but I'm happy to report that few films recently have been as superior to their titles, if you accept Age of Uprising as its title, as this one is.

On the Big Screen: GODZILLA (2014)

Could Gareth Edwards's picture possibly live up to its trailers? The great thing about them is that they sold the second American version of Toho Studio's famous daikaiju as a horror movie: ominous, mysterious, apocalyptic. The trailers let your imagination rampage. Those paratroopers whose red tracers of descent, streaming like the stripes of the American flag, particularly intrigued me. Were they actually thinking of landing on Godzilla? A crazy thought, but the trailer that could inspire it was something special. The film is a far more ordinary experience, inevitably, but the parachute descent is still a great moment, especially when we get the falling-worm's eye view of a city-wrecking giant-monster battle in progress. The problem is that Edwards wants us to care about what these paratroopers do once they touch the street, while the monster battle continues. In normal Godzilla pictures the humans step back and let the monsters do their thing. The new American picture pays lip service to that idea, but the filmmakers seem to assume that someone will be bored if there aren't people in the middle of the melee doing something we deem important. This inspires some nice camera movements as we pan down from the monster fight to the army guys scurrying through the streets with their dangerous burden, but the implicit equality of Godzilla's struggle with this film's evil monsters and the principal hero's (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) race to rid San Francisco of a doomsday device doesn't quite compute. I'm not as hostile to the human characters as some critics have been, but I must agree that Ford Brody isn't a very compelling personality. He makes the film about "family" and "fathers and sons," but not as offensively as one might fear. We're supposed to care about Ford because his father (Bryan Cranston) was killed in an evil-monster attack. Ford the elder is a generic obsessed crank; we're supposed to care about him because his wife (first lady of global cinema Juliette Binoche) died in a nuclear meltdown ultimately blamed on the evil monsters. Evil is perhaps too judgmental a word for these radiation-hungry survivors of a far-earlier epoch; they're just hungry and horny and we're in the way. But if Godzilla is a force for good, or at least for nature's balance, as this film's Dr. Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) insists, then whoever he fights are the bad guys.

In his original cycle of films, Godzilla was the prototype for the badass menace who becomes a hero because audiences thought him cool. The Edwards film, presumably envisioned as the first in an American cycle, skips ahead to make him the hero immediately -- he even departs to the cheers of an appreciative city -- and something feels unearned about that. Making him the hero also betrays the implication of the trailers that all the destruction shown were his handiwork. The film invites us to think of Godzilla almost as a god, but generically speaking it makes him a superhero. It becomes less about our anxiety over a threatening future, though that remains a necessary context, than about our desire for a hero with the power and will to set things right. This Godzilla is a characteristic product of Legendary Pictures and could, like last year's Man of Steel, be accused of purveying "destruction porn," except that Godzilla's been doing that since before most people involved in this production were born. Oddly, it also offers Godzilla, like Superman, as a sort of symbol of hope -- here it's the hope that nature will set things right -- while the rush to get the bomb out of the city echoes 2012's The Dark Knight Rises. What some see as destruction porn is an acknowledgment that casualties -- or collateral damage, if you will -- are inevitable, that America isn't immune anymore. Menacing clouds of dust and smoke are shadows of September 2001, while a monster-generated tsunami in Hawaii reflects our recent understanding of just what such calamities look like. The porn is in the details these days, but it strikes me that Godzilla isn't being criticized for this the way Man of Steel was -- most likely just because we expect this from a monster movie while many expect "better" from superheroes. Perhaps paradoxically, while Man of Steel disturbed many, Godzilla is almost reassuring, or aspires to be. We wouldn't want to think of a man as a god, but a monster, maybe!

The new Godzilla is less than the sum of its parts, but the best parts suffice as pure spectacle. There's a crass reliance on endangered individual children in some scenes -- again, the filmmakers seem to want us to care in a way we don't really need to -- but the climactic monster fight is just about everything you'd hope for, including a creative and very satisfying kill move for Godzilla. The effects make it great to watch, and fans of effects movies in particular are used to sitting through dull stretches to get to the cool stuff. They shouldn't feel disappointed by this latest American version, but they may wonder where Legendary will go from here -- presumably without Edwards, who's jumped to Disney's Star Wars franchise. "A different monster!" works for a B-movie series, but may not justify the expense of tentpole films. There have been three distinct series of Godzilla movies in Japan; I doubt whether the Americans will match the longevity of any of them, but it'll be interesting to see them try at least once more.

DVR Diary: THE JACKALS (1967)

A dead man wrote The Jackals, and it shows. Robert D. Webb's film is the story of a gang of bandits who flee across a stretch of desert to escape a posse after a bank holdup. Barely making it through the parched landscape, they end up in a ghost town, where they encounter a tough young woman who lives alone with her grizzled grandfather. The gunmen guess that the only reason the pair stays on is gold. Everyone else thought the vein had been played out -- hence the ghost town -- but grandpa knows better. The gang wants the gold, but the gang leader grows a conscience. Finally, the gang divides against itself as the repentant leader faces off against his dandyish rival with lives and a fortune at stake.

Perhaps this rings a bell. Imagine a black and white desert and Gregory Peck and Richard Widmark leading the gang across. Imagine Anne Baxter as the tomboy decking Peck with a punch but later falling in love with him. That's William Wellman's Yellow Sky (1948), one of that decade's best westerns. Lamar Trotti adapted a story by gangster specialist W. R. Burnett to grim, gritty effect. Trotti died in 1952, but Twentieth Century-Fox resurrected him when the opportunity arose to remake Yellow Sky. The dead man shared script credit with Harold Medford, whose job it was to translate place names and monetary units into terms fit for the story's new setting, the wastes of South Africa. Medford and Webb did a similar translation of Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street the same year, calling it The Cape Town Affair. I haven't seen that, and now I better not, given how godforsaken The Jackals is. The direction is uninspired. The music almost invariably finds the wrong tone. The actors, with one exception, may as well be an amateur production of Yellow Sky. Jackals replaces Gregory Peck with Robert Gunner, best known (if known at all) as one of the other astronauts in the original Planet of the Apes. It replaces Richard Widmark with Bob Courtney, a British actor with a grand total of 12 screen credits, which is more than Gunner has. It replaces Anne Baxter with Diana Ivarson, best known (if known at all) for appearing in two episodes of the Batman TV show. They stink. Billed above them all is the actor playing our grizzled grandpa, a role played in Yellow Sky by veteran character actor James Barton. This part they needed a star for, and they brought in Vincent Price. He stinks. Whatever his virtues, grizzled is a type Price could not do. He camps it up like he thinks himself the comedy relief. Not one line he speaks rings true. I hope whatever painting he bought with his paycheck was a fake.

Robert D. Webb directed at least one halfway-decent movie in his career, the 1956 Robert Ryan western The Proud Ones. Others more familiar with his work may cite other films worth remembering. The Jackals was his last feature film, not counting a 1968 documentary, and it's clear that he was played out by the time he ended up in South Africa. He brings nothing to this picture; he either copies Wellman's shots or comes up with far less effective shots of his own, and he has no control over Price. His direction is as uninspired as the idea of remaking Yellow Sky in another country. Maybe my high regard for the original handicaps Jackals in my eyes, but I'd like to think that someone who's never seen or heard of the Wellman film would also recognize the Webb for the inert crap it is. It's hard to see any historical interest or curiosity value that would justify anyone else wasting their time with it, however, so take my word on this one.

DVR Diary: RUN FOR THE SUN (1956)

In the story "The Most Dangerous Game" Richard Connell gave cinema one of its most popular tropes. You can probably trace any movie in which people are hunted for sport to Connell's 1924 story, which was first made into a movie by Merian C. Cooper's crew in 1932. Roy Boulting's Run For the Sun, made for a production company partly bankrolled by Jane Russell, takes the trouble to credit Connell as its source -- and for all I know they may have paid Connell's estate (the author died in 1949) for the rights. Rights to what, though? Once you watch the picture, you wonder why they acknowledged Connell at all. Had it become established legal precedent that the idea of people hunting people -- and not necessarily for sport -- was the intellectual property of Richard Connell and his heirs? Maybe Boulting and co-writer Dudley Nichols originally intended a more faithful retelling of the old story, but that's not what they ended up with.

Instead, we have Richard Widmark playing Michael Latimer, a famous author clearly based on Ernest Hemingway. Like the protagonist of Connell's story, Hemingway was a famous hunter. Like the protagonist of Boulting's film, Hemingway was a best-selling novelist and a war correspondent. Latimer's latest novel has bombed, much like Hemingway's Across the River and Into the Trees in 1950. Unlike Hemingway, who bounced back with The Old Man and the Sea -- which turned out to be the last major work published in his lifetime -- Latimer has reacted to failure by disappearing. Katie Connors (Jane Greer) is out to track him down for Sight magazine. She finds him somewhere in Central America living a dissolute he-man lifestyle. She tries to conceal her interest but it doesn't work. Like Hemingway, Latimer resents reporters prying into his personal life, but eventually warms to Katie. He even offers to fly her to Mexico City, the first leg of her return to New York. But her magnetized notebook screws up the compass of his plane, forcing them off course and into a forced landing deep in the jungle. This becomes an international news story, echoing the premature obituaries written for Hemingway when his plane crashed during a 1954 safari. There are more potentially Hemingway-inspired details in this section, most notably Latimer's pining for a first wife who was his original inspiration to write, but once the plane lands in the jungle Run for the Sun ceases to be a riff on Hemingway without quite becoming "The Most Dangerous Game."

Latimer and Connors are taken in by an Englishman named Browne (Trevor Howard) who already has a permanent houseguest, a Dutch archaeologist studying nearby ruins. Latimer senses something familiar about Browne but can't place it. Meanwhile, local Indians seem to have made off with Latimer's plane, which he had hoped to repair. Something's fishy about that, too, and Latimer starts nosing around the estate until he finds pieces of the plane, his pistol, and various bits of Nazi paraphernalia. Now everything clicks. What Latimer recognized about Browne was his voice. The character is a version of "Lord Haw-Haw" the British voice of German propaganda broadcasts during World War II. Unlike the best-known Haw-Haw, William Joyce, Browne has escaped Allied vengeance and holed up with the alleged archaeologist, who proves to have been a genuine war criminal. Neither of them wants their whereabouts or true identities to be known by the outside world, and Latimer's efforts to bargain for Connors's life prove futile. They have to make a break for it, and the villains have to go after them. At no point is there any proposition that Latimer and Connors win their freedom if they hold out for a certain time. This is no formal or sporting hunt as in "The Most Dangerous Game," nor is there any reflection by Latimer on the hunter having become the hunted, which would have been the bare minimum we should have expected from an official adaptation of the Connell story. It may seem mean of me to criticize a film for actually being original, but it just seems stupid to acknowledge Connell needlessly when Jane Russell could have saved herself whatever money she might have spent on the rights.

On its own merits, the film benefits most from its Mexican locations. Widmark is more convincing as a plain adventurer than as an artist, but that'll do for this picture, while Greer, whose character could represent any number of Hemingway love interests, not to mention Lillian Ross, the author of an infamous celebrity profile of the novelist, gradually recedes into the role of a damsel in distress. The script has its stupid moments, especially when Latimer endangers himself and Connors by  boasting of everything he knows about Browne's past. But the villains are the film's weak point, however odd it may seem that Nazis make less compelling antagonists than decadent aristocrats. That's how it is, just the same. Run for the Sun isn't a terrible movie; at its best it has the urgent technicolor vitality of the period's paperback original covers. But "The Most Dangerous Game" is a better story, and better movies have been made closer to the source.

MAEDCHEN IN UNIFORM (1958)

Like the U.S., Germany had a "pre-Code" period of film production. They call it the Weimar Republic, and the repression that followed was considerably more sweeping than what befell America. During Weimar Germany was part of the global vanguard of cinema, and plenty of envelopes were pushed. One of the last milestones of the Weimar era was history's reputed first-ever "lesbian" film, Leontine Sagan and Carl Froelich's Mädchen in Uniform. For screenwriter Christa Winsloe, this was just the latest of many titles for her play, which started life as "Yesterday and Today" and morphed into "Sickness of Love" before acquiring its more familiar fetishistic label. The 1931 film survived Nazi suppression and its name endured enough in memories that there was probably no alternative to using the same title when Geza von Radvanyi remade the story in 1958. The uniforms are school uniforms, of course, but on first hearing the title you might expect something more military, and that impression wouldn't be entirely accidental. We first see the students of the film's girls' school marching in formation, and the faculty emphasizes repeatedly that the girls are being trained to be the wives and mothers of soldiers. That doesn't exactly make them Spartan women but it does impose a perhaps-unnatural discipline on the girls. Whether or not the definitive title implies that the militaristic discipline, not to mention the all-female environment, has something to do with Manuela von Meinhardis's dangerous attraction to her teacher Fraulein von Bernburg is open to question, but the story definitely looks like a critique of Prussian culture in general.

I've never seen the original film, and I can't say whether the remake is toned down the way a 1958 Hollywood film might be toned down from a Pre-Code original. But whatever your expectations might be for a "lesbian" film, the Radvanyi version comes across as little more than an adolescent crush. Manuela (Romy Schneider) is sent to boarding school after the death of her beloved mother. She's looking for another mother figure, and perhaps more, when she encounters von Bernburg (Lilli Palmer). She's not alone in her idolization of the stylish schoolmarm, who endears herself to the students by kissing each one of them on the forehead at bedtime. She feels she's getting special attention, however, when the teacher lends her a shift; Manuela sleeps with her head on top of the thing, while a slightly older student seethes with jealousy.

I've just taken a look at the 1931 movie and in the equivalent scene there Bernburg kisses Manuela on the lips. Not so here. Score one for Pre-Code German cinema.

Whatever Manuela's feeling is channeled in an alarming direction when she's cast as Romeo in the class production of the Shakespeare play. From what we see, the play's not only translated but bowdlerized, since it ends with Romeo and Juliet wed. It's a triumph for Manuela that turns to disaster as, intoxicated by both artistic success and spiked punch, she avows her love for von Bernberg in front of a scandalized faculty before passing out.

The remake creates a sentimental tragic mood from the beginning with Manuela's visit to her mother's grave, while a heartbreaking hymn plays constantly on the school's carillon. The very architecture of the school foreshadow's Manuela's fate. The main hall is dominated by a central staircase that winds up at least four floors. From the moment Manuela first looks over the railing to the floor far below, you anticipate someone taking the short way down. The payoff comes after Manuela is disciplined for her outburst and von Bernburg prepares to leave the school. Radvanyi milks the moment for every drop of suspense. Manuela sits dejected near the bottom of the stairs and looks upward to the top railing. The camera follows her all the way up the stairs as the soundtrack adds a sinister undertone to the carillon theme. Then what?

Not for this film the lethal catharsis of Hollywood's near-contemporary contemplation of lesbian attraction in The Children's Hour. While Manuela apparently takes the dive in Winsloe's original play, the Radvanyi film has a thuddingly anticlimactic wrap-up. Von Bernburg holds Manuela's attention long enough for her classmates to pull her off the railing. As she recovers in hospital, the stern headmistress softens and urges Von Bernburg to stay on, but the teacher refuses, arguing that she would only be an obstacle to Manuela's maturation. She leaves and that's the end. It leaves you wondering what the moral was, or if there is one. Palmer gives a necessarily enigmatic performance, while the 20 year old Schneider, already a star thanks to a series of films about Empress Elizabeth of Austria, is convincingly adolescent and earnest. You believe in her attraction to Palmer, and you could buy the attraction being mutual without that necessarily being the case. As time makes the story seem less daring, this version should at least endure as a colorful, sentimental, twofold period piece -- a reflection of the attitudes of 1910, when the story's set, and 1958, when the film was made.

HARA-KIRI: DEATH OF A SAMURAI (2011)

American movie buffs will recognize Takashi Miike's film as a remake of Masaki Kobayashi's 1962 Harakiri and wonder why anyone should remake a classic. Some Japanese fans might have felt the same way, but since both films are adaptations of a novel by Yasuhiko Tamaguchi there's no reason why you can't eventually have as many Harakiris as there are movies of, for instance, Les Miserables. My example has a point, since anyone moved by the grim portrait of oldschool poverty that even the musical version of Hugo offers should be moved similarly by either version of the Tamaguchi novel. The movie are more distinct for Japanese audiences, since they call the 1962 film Seppuku and the 2011 Ichimei. Nevertheless, the stories are the same, and I refer you to my review of Kobayashi for plot details. The two films differ in emphasis and more profoundly on the sensory level, for not only is the Miike film in color, but it was also made to be shown in 3D. It may be a virtue that you can watch it flat and not realize that you missed a dimension. Miike, often a provocateur in his prolific career, works in neoclassical mode here so you can appreciate the widescreen framing and cinematography without ducking at simulated flying gore. You get the impression that he respects the source material, both the novel and the earlier film.

The biggest difference I can see, relying on my memories of the Kobayashi film, is Miike's gimmick of the hero, Tsugumo Hanshiro (kabuki star Ichikawa Ebizo XI) taking his righteous anger out on the heartless retainers of Ii with a bamboo sword similar to the one they made his hapless son-in-law Chijiiwa Motome (Eita) use to commit seppuku. This is a good idea, since Miike has stressed how torturously difficult it is to disembowel oneself with such a weapon. It creates the impression that Tsugumo wants to inflict pain rather than death on the cruel samurai and teach them a lesson in the process. Miike also stages the final battle in snowy weather, most likely to show off the 3D by adding a layer to the image. It looks quite nice flat, too.

Overall, cinematographer Nobuyasu Kita makes a good case for color alone justifying a remake. But the story itself is the best justification of all. If anything, a story of a man forced out of honorable employment and watching helplessly as his child sinks into poverty and sickness has more resonance for Japanese and global audiences today than it had 50 years ago. When I reviewed the Kobayashi version I compared it to Vietnam-veteran films, given the hero's samurai status, but modern audiences should simply see poverty without worrying about the man's profession. Miike seems to stress the poverty of his protagonists more consistently than Kobayashi did. I recall their poverty seeming more genteel for at least part of the earlier film before the illness of Tsugumo's daughter and grandson precipitates a crisis, while even in color the family home in the Miike looks darker and more drab throughout. Miike plays for pathos more blatantly, aided by a poignant score by Ryuichi Sakamoto, but this isn't an inappropriate course to take with this story. The more abject the family's plight, the more righteous is Tsugumo's wrath at the climax. Also helping justify that cathartic violence are the performances of the Ii retainers. I was particularly impressed by Munetaka Aoki, who took over Testuro Tamba's performance in the original as the bullying retainer who refuses to finish off  Motome despite his agony with a broken sword. Since Miike truncates the story's duel between this bully and Tsugumo, Aoki gets by mainly with a formidable and not unhandsome glower and a hissible contempt for the weak, and that's enough. He could play villains for life with that face. The whole cast benefits from Miike's strong sense of dramatic pacing in the very formal dialogue scenes that frame the non-linear story. The sustained deliberation sustains suspense, even for viewers familiar with the story from the earlier film.

My first impression is that Miike doesn't equal Kobayashi, primarily because Ichikawa Ebizo doesn't equal Tatsuya Nakadai in the lead role. But the new Harakiri is a worthy effort that proves the story evergreen. The flashbacks and the pathos and the righteous anger worked before, work now and probably could work again a generation from now. We may not have needed Miike's Harakiri, but I'm glad we have it.

DVR Diary: I DIED A THOUSAND TIMES (1955)

Raoul Walsh's High Sierra is my favorite Humphrey Bogart movie. The first of Bogart's 1941 breakthrough pictures that made him a leading-man star, it's overshadowed by the other one, The Maltese Falcon. So successful was Falcon that Warner Bros. stopped making films of Dashiell Hammett's novel after that third try. The studio did not retire W. R. Burnett's source novel for High Sierra, however. Walsh himself put it in western dress as Colorado Territory in 1948, and seven years later Stuart Heisler brought the story back into the 20th century with a brand new title that suggests something closer to despair than the tragic grandeur of the original movie. Admittedly, the High Sierra story could benefit from color and Cinemascope in ways not obviously beneficial to The Maltese Falcon. While the location work often looks good, Heisler lack's Walsh's more poetic sensibility and his feel for atmosphere. He makes a mistake right out of the gate, dispensing with the opening scene in which Roy Earle, an aging Dillinger type, is released from prison. In the original, you immediately get the contrast between imprisonment and the freedom that matters so much to Earle -- not to mention the mockery of freedom resulting from his surprise pardon, engineered only so he can take part in a hotel heist. Heisler's film opens with Earle already on the road to the tourist camp where his partners await him. Blame that on the script or on studio editing, but Heisler lacks visual flare. He usually stages scenes in long shots that emphasize the wide screen in a way that makes the sets, particularly the criminals' quarters, look oversized and artificial. The color throughout is overly bright and garish. The most interestingly thing Heisler does occasionally is tilt his camera, but you get the impression that he does that mainly so he can fit the heads of tall actors into shots where other performers are laying down. That and the actors are what you'll most likely remember about this film.

The actors face a greater challenge than Heisler. The biggest challenge faces Jack Palance, the remake's Roy Earle. I Died comes from the brief period when Hollywood contemplated making Palance not just a star but a leading man, maybe a Bogart for his time. He's just a little too young for the role, however -- bear in mind that Bogart himself was made to look older to play Earle. Palance is too strange a figure with his height and his angular face to match Bogart's everyman gravitas -- in his dark suits in the film's bright settings he becomes something like a piece of abstract animation. There's an odd serenity about him, when he isn't shooting people or keeping his punk partners in line, exemplified by his line, "I'm not angry at anybody." Maybe coldness is the word I'm looking for, but his co-star is partly to blame for that. If Palance is no replacement for Bogart he's at least an honorable alternative, but in place of High Sierra's Ida Lupino I Died casts Shelley Winters, and it's game over right there. If Palance seems too young for his part Winters definitely seems too old for the role Lupino played. She's too intense, compared to Lupino's slow burn, yet without achieving any real chemistry with Palance. I suppose her performance does help you understand why this film's Earle is initially more interested in the clubfooted but pretty Velma (Lori Nelson replaces Joan Leslie), whose surgery he pays for only to be rebuffed by the shallow girl. But you believed it anyway the first time, while it's harder to understand Earle's attraction to the Winters character. You really shouldn't have that problem watching this story.

Otherwise, this film is a feast of familiar faces, from Lon Chaney Jr. having an easy time (and a good scene) as a bedridden, boozing gangster to Lee Marvin implausibly cast as a mere "punk" whom Palance pistol-whips in one of the few scenes more impressively staged here than by Walsh, to fleeting glances of Warners prospects Dennis Hopper and Nick Adams. The cast deserves a better film than Heisler made, and the idea of remaking High Sierra with modern movie technology wasn't a bad one. But if Heisler was just going to plant Palance in soundstage mountains during the climax while the second unit romps on the real mountain, you can't help asking why anyone bothered.

On the Big Screen: THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN (2012)

Comic books are flexible folklore. The stories of characters' lives are not as set in stone as they are, theoretically, in novels. A volatile combination of corporate authorship and artistic license makes it possible for details to change. Fans distinguish between retcons, in which isolated details are altered, often in the context of "everything you thought you knew is wrong," and reboots, in which monthly continuity goes back to square one or someplace close to that. In comic-book movies, the most prominent example to date of a reboot was Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins, which requires no knowledge and claims no relation to the four Batman movies made between 1989 and 1997. Nolan's picture came out in 2005, eight years after Joel Schumacher's Batman and Robin. Now, five years after Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 3, Columbia Pictures releases Marc Webb's reboot of Spider-Man, and some observers think the reboot has come too soon. Admitting that Raimi had run out of steam, critics ask why the movie franchise should have reverted to square one. Why not simply re-cast and carry on? Does Spidey's origin need to be retold? By comic-book criteria, Webb answers the question by introducing new details and introducing a backstory involving those famously absent figures, Peter Parker's parents. Why is he being raised by an aunt and uncle? Comics writers have been tempted to answer that question, and now comes the movies' turn. Superficial details of the origin event itself have also changed. Elements that Raimi carried over from the original comics, like Parker's early attempt to make money as an entertainer, have been set aside, though the new picture includes a clever evocation of the earlier wrestling angle. Characters prominent in Raimi's films (Mary Jane Watson, J. Jonah Jameson) are absent for now, while a villain left dead in Raimi's series lives again but is held in reserve for a future picture. One reason for movie reboots is the bad habit of comic-book movies killing off their villains, the Joker's survival at the end of Nolan's The Dark Knight being a morbidly ironic exception. Comics almost always find a way for a villain to return from seemingly certain death, but if movies want to use a popular villain a second time they may well have to reboot. Tim Burton killed the Joker and the Penguin. Raimi killed Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus. That's not how comics work -- though the Goblin did remain dead in Marvel Comics for a generation before a retcon revival (he hadn't actually died, you see) in the 1990s. Until studios learn that comic-book closure doesn't require a villain's indisputable death, reboots will remain frequent. Suffice it to say that in story terms, enough is different in the screenplay by James Vanderbilt, Steve Kloves and Raimi holdover Alvin Sargent to justify a retelling by comic-book standards. By movie standards, however, the element of artistic license is arguably more important.

In comics, a reboot is just another way to give a trusted creator carte blanche for reimagining an established character. In movies, a distinctive vision would seem to be the major justification for a reboot. Burton, Schumacher and Nolan have all contributed unmistakably distinctive interpretations of Batman and his milieu. For Spidey, however, Columbia has the alternate model of Marvel's in-house movies culminating in The Avengers, which eschew genius visions in favor of a continuity-based house style. Based on what we see from Webb, a distinctive directorial vision wasn't the studio's first priority. The Amazing Spider-Man doesn't look exactly like a Raimi film because Webb doesn't think in sight gags like Raimi does. But the cityscapes are essentially the same and so are the ways Spidey navigates them, except for the new film appearing in relatively unimpressive 3-D. If Webb brings any particular vision to the project it must be an affinity for young people based on his sole previous feature, a youth film unseen by me. Recall that Raimi left the Spider-Man franchise in part because of a dispute over his desire to cast an older actor as The Vulture, the studio reportedly preferring younger faces. Sony and Columbia apparently wanted a younger, female audience that Raimi wasn't drawing in. Thus rumors that the new Parker would be none other than Robert Pattinson, and the reality of Andrew (Too Tall) Garfield playing high-school student Peter Parker with a Pattinsonian shock of hair at the age of 28. While Tobey Maguire was nearly an ideal Parker by the standard of the original comics, Garfield reflects a studio feeling that the character must be appealing to girls before the fabled spider-bite empowers him. Garfield was impressive in his first high-profile movie role in The Social Network, but he strikes me as wrong for this role, visually and emotionally. The script weighs him down by making his parents' absence a cross for him to bear before the defining death of his uncle and forgetting to write jokes for Spidey apart from one scene involving muggers and cops. Everyone seems more interested in Garfield's scenes with Emma Stone's Gwen Stacy -- admittedly the best thing in the picture and a fair facsimile of the boots-favoring comics character -- than in his super exploits. His feud with Rhys Ifans's Curt Connors, the one-armed scientist whose restorative serum, self-tested under duress, turns him into the megalomaniacal Lizard, has an obligatory if not perfunctory feel. Connors combines some elements of Raimi's Green Goblin and Doc Ock and the storyline crafted for him had potential, but there's nothing revelatory about his CGI fight scenes with Spidey. One encounter falls particularly flat: a confrontation on a bridge during which the Lizard simply leaves without fighting our hero after tossing some cars into the air. The scene actually exists only to set up a labored climax later when a father whose child Spidey rescues offers the web-slinger some high-rise assistance. The 3-D simply isn't enough to make this stuff fresh, and the fight scenes themselves are the all-too-typical muddled messes of hurtling figures and hurtling cameras. The simpleminded, predictable score by James Horner makes the picture sound even less fresh.

None of these criticisms proves that they shouldn't have done a reboot, but they do suggest that they should have done the reboot better. None of the actors really improves on their predecessors, apart from Stone surpassing Bryce Dallas Howard virtually by default. None of them do badly, really, though casting Sally Field as Aunt May misses the point of the character's frailty and Garfield, as noted, is not bad but wrong in his role. The Raimi films are not so great that they can't be improved upon, so I don't think I'm judging the new film unfairly. It just didn't quite work -- it wasn't new enough to justify the expense. Bracketed as it is this year by two climactic films, The Avengers and the imminent Dark Knight Rises, the limitations of starting over from square one are exposed starkly here. But The Amazing Spider-Man's success is probably a good thing, since almost by the nature of these series the second film is almost always an improvement on the first. I suspect that that'll be the case here, and that lets me close with a question: why can't they make a second movie first?

DVR Diary: VIOLENT ROAD (1958)

William Friedkin's Sorceror is the best-known American remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot's classic road thriller The Wages of Fear, but Howard W. Koch's B-movie is the uncredited first. Don Martin didn't claim to base his story, nor Richard H. Landau his screenplay, on the French film from a few years earlier, but come on, people. A disparate group of drifters and losers haul explosive cargo across dangerous terrain. Please. This time it's rocket fuel, which has to move with a test base after a launch goes bad and the missile crashes into a school. If Violent Road is one part Wages of Fear, it's also part noir. The most noirish thing about it is that, unlike in Wages of Fear, the drifters and losers don't have to leave their own country to have their dangerous adventure. Noir is arguably a looking-inward after World War II closed off most of the possibilities for adventuresome exile in exotic parts. There's no going away to forget for Violent Road's protagonists. Probably the best adjusted of them is top-billed Brian Keith's hard-boiled drifter. Others include a broken-down veteran who never adjusted to civilian life, a young man hoping to redeem his alcoholic ex-football hero brother, and a rocket technician who lost his wife and daughter in the disaster. Tempers are nearly as combustible as the cargo, but Violent Road never really ignites the way a Wages knockoff should. The actors, including Dick Foran as the sarge and Efrem Zimbalist Jr. as the rocket man, do what they can with their roles, but Koch (who got his start as a director collaborating with Edmond O'Brien on Shield For Murder) doesn't deliver the jolts. On the most literal level, to spoil things a bit, none of the trucks goes boom. I don't know if that's a Code-dictated copout or if Koch couldn't spring for an exploding truck. Instead, he offers perils in the form of minor rockslides -- one of the crew saves a truck by drop-kicking a boulder to change its course -- and an out-of-control school bus crossing the convoy's path. Not everyone makes it, I must admit, but when your one fatality results from chemical burns to someone's hand, you're not really operating on Wages's level of intensity. There's decent location work and stunt driving throughout, but someone unaware of Wages's influence on this film would probably feel very little sense of peril, since most of the suspense I felt came from expectations based on my awareness of the source material. No set piece in this picture comes close to the tension of the bridge scenes in either Wages or Sorceror. In fact, the Violent Road convoy never crosses a bridge with anything at stake. That may be another failure of budget or simply a failure of nerve. The first half hour of the picture seems to set up a worthy imitation of the original, but the talent runs out of gas long before the trucks reach their destination.

Wendigo Meets LET ME IN (2010)

In what might serve as an omen for the makers of the American remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Matt Reeves' Americanization of Sweden's other big cinematic export, Let the Right One In, bombed utterly on its release last fall. It must have struck the producers as a cruel surprise, given how the Swedish film had become a cult hit as a film and DVD in America. My friend Wendigo became one of Let the Right One In's admirers once he caught up with it on DVD. He wasn't surprised when the remake failed, and he remains unsurprised now that he's seen Let Me In and found it a respectful remake and a good film.

The Swedish film was only ever an art-house or cult success, he notes, so any effort to retool it for mainstream multiplex moviegoers was doomed. At this time in genre history, the John Lindqvist story has nothing that mainstream American vampire films want. Above all, it doesn't have sex. When he heard that an American version was being made, Wendigo was afraid that "Oscar" and "Eli" would be turned into teenagers and their relationship romanticized in an effort to lure in the Twilight audience. But if anything, Reeves doomed his project by remaining faithful to the original and keeping the main characters as children, or in the image of children.

Let the Right One In impressed Wendigo as a uniquely creepy film because of the deviant relationship between the childish protagonists, the eternal-child vampire and her dysfunctional servant-to-be. He appreciated the intensity of Oscar's alienation and resentment, how the bullied boy could well have been a serial killer in the making even if he hadn't met Eli. The Swedish film is a portrait of co-dependency that emphasizes the neediness of both characters on many levels. It refuses to romanticize the relationship; it offers no fantasies of power or pleasure, but predicts a terrible future for Oscar in the path of the pathetic father-figure who fetches victims for the vampire. The barren Swedish landscape suits and helps set the movie's bleak mood. Above all, Wendigo liked it because it was different and original. He likes Twilight and will defend it against all comers, but he doesn't need or want every vampire film to be Twilight. As we've shown repeatedly, Wendigo likes the versatility of the vampire as a cinema subject, the variety of things that can be done with it. When he sees something new that's well done, he treasures it.

Ronald Reagan (televised, lower right) should get credit for a cameo role in Let Me In.

Let Me In, of couse, is not something new. It's a remake, sometimes shot-for-shot, of a story familiar enough for us not to synopsize it here, moving the location from Sweden to New Mexico but keeping the period the 1980s. If not for the original, Reeves' movie would have become one of Wendigo's favorites. The ranking isn't automatic -- Wendigo likes The Ring better than Ring, for instance. But in this case the Swedish film feels more spontaneous, and the American version a little too overproduced.

"I'm not a girl," the vampire says, and sometimes Chloe Grace Moretz makes you believe it.

Wendigo admits that the comparison is unfair on at least one level, since his unfamiliarity with the Swedish actors allows him to identify them more completely with their roles, while he couldn't help identifying Chloe Grace Moretz's "Abby" with her Hit Girl from Kick-Ass. But the American actors eventually won him over, and he feels that Moretz and Reeves were more successful than their Swedish counterparts (right) in stressing the femme vampire's disquieting androgyny, and complementing it with a certain androgyny in Kodi Smit-McPhee's "Owen." Moretz looks bigger, more robust than her counterpart, and wears pants and hoodies that sometimes conceal her femininity -- as is appropriate given the original character's backstory, while Smit-McPhee's abject wimpiness gets him called a girl by his bullying tormentors.

Who are these masked men?

Owen's uncool weakness only makes his fantasies of violence and revenge more disturbing, and his wearing a clear plastic mask parallels the garbage-bag mask used by Richard Jenkins's father-figure minion, tagging them as two of a kind. Jenkins makes a stronger impression than his Swedish counterpart because he adds a level of bitterness and resentment for both Abby and his own predicament. Moretz comes across as more compassionate and understanding toward Jenkins, though her eternal immaturity makes it impossible for her to fully empathize with him.

Wendigo hasn't seen Smit-McPhee's previous showcase film, The Road, so he probably doesn't see how the young actor probably hurt the film despite his strong performance. Smit-McPhee is the true Wimpy Kid of today's cinema, and I think that fact disturbs a lot of viewers who aren't really comfortable seeing such blatant weakness and neediness on screen. Many Americans would rather that everyone was cool, or at least self-reliant. I think guys especially dig seeing strong, self-reliant female and child characters, not because it's politically correct, but because it takes them off the hook. The thought that someone might become dependent on them might be scarier for a lot of us than many more conventional horrors, and the Lindqvist story, in both forms, is all about weakness and neediness. It's a real modern horror story.

Reeves does some interesting original things, from the odd way he never puts Owen's mother in focus, which emphasizes the mutual alienation of son and mother, to his reimagining of Jenkins's attacks. In America you can't just hang around someplace waiting for someone to walk past, so Jenkins carjacks folks, breaking in and hiding in their vehicles to jump them at railroad crossings. These sequences are nicely done, especially an admittedly Hitchcockian scene when unforeseen complications lead Jenkins from desperation to disaster. As Reeves notes elsewhere on the DVD, his intention is to get you rooting for Jenkins to escape his predicament, no matter how evil his purpose and how foredoomed he is to anyone familiar to the story. With us, he succeeded.

Abby is never so much an American vampire as at moments like this.

If Let Me In falls short of its original, that can be blamed on overproduction. There's a little too much CGI climbing and leaping, and Moretz gets to wear a CG "grr-face" that her Swedish counterpart never needed. Wendigo has nothing against "grr-faces," but he doesn't understand why nearly every American vampire film needs them. Why aren't fangs enough? Maybe they aren't cool or badass enough, and maybe effects teams do it simply because they can. The reductio ad absurdam of that mentality was Stephen Sommers' Van Helsing. Since then, excessive FX often makes it more difficult for Wendigo to take vampires seriously, a problem he never had with more minimalist vampires of the past and present.

The American film doesn't live up to the original's wintry cinematography, despite much imported snow, and Reeves reveals some limitations as a director following the stunt of Cloverfield. He seems to lose track of Owen's creepiness once he starts "going steady" with Abby, and other interesting angles end up underdeveloped. Reeves seems to have a reason for using clips of Ronald Reagan beyond establishing the period, but search us for what it was -- probably something to do with "evil," I suppose. He also lays the pop soundtrack on more thick than the Swedes did, in what struck us as an obvious attempt to sell an album. These complaints don't add up to a negative review. Wendigo stresses again that Let Me In is one of the better American vampire movies he's seen in a while.