Deep-Thought

Caronte is the Italian, Portuguese and Spanish name of Charon, the boatman of Hades, who appears in numerous versions of the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. It's also the name of a computer game being played by Debbie's younger brother Nicholas in the real world: it's the name of the fighter spacecraft the computer character Lieutenant Arsys commandeers with which she escapes an alien space battleship and flees home while fighting off the full force of the alien space fleet. Debbie is the stereotypical sullen, peevish, self-involved adolescent: concerned only about herself, her cell phone, and her social media. She is especially rude to her younger brother Nicholas, whom she sees as nothing but a nuisance, and in fact this is not surprising, because Nicholas IS an annoying little twerp. He is constantly making weirdly superstitious statements like, "If I can cross the street while stepping only on the white lines, we'll have chips for dinner," or, "If I can score 3 times in a row, you'll automatically pass." No 11-year-old I've ever known, including myself, acts like that. It's a plot contrivance, and not a felicitous one. The irksome Nicholas takes the game wherever he goes, including the back seat of a moving car, where Debbie rudely rebuffs Nicholas's plea for help finishing the game, which leads to the last (and crucial) annoying superstitious remark: "If I can finish these last two levels before the sun goes down, Debbie will always be with me." Again: what normal 11-year-old boy says things like that? (In fact, the sun already IS down, but we'll skip over that.) But it's the bit of dialogue that motivates the final part of the plot, because after Debbie is left the only survivor of a disastrous automobile accident, she feels bitter remorse at the way she took her family and her brother for granted.

So "Caronte" is the interweaving of two stories: The real world of Debbie and Nicholas, and the computer-game world of "Caronte." It's a great idea, but its execution falls short. The Arsys sequences are fantastic, but they lose quite a bit of their excitement by being intercut with the distractingly slow pace of the real-world scenes. When the computer-game scenes are viewed by themselves, with the Debbie-and-Nicholas scenes cut out, they are absolutely spectacular, much more so than when they are interrupted by the real-world story. The idea here, obviously, is to contrast the two stories by meaningfully alternating between them, but each story does not provide the best counterpoint to the other story.

This short is definitely worth watching (on YouTube), but despite all the fireworks and the skill that went into making it, it is just not quite satisfying. Still, I would love to see the Arsys story fleshed out into a full-length film. The juxtaposing-contrast plot of the short, I think, would be extremely difficult to develop to feature-film length.

(Note: Melina Matthews, who plays Arsys, is Spanish but speaks perfect British English because her father is Welsh. Everyone else speaks perfect American English, so you'd think that the film was made in the States, but in fact it was made in Spain, where the Lardner kids, who play Debbie and Nicholas, also live.)

"The Favourite" is not your grandad's period piece. Queen Anne was the last monarch of the House of Stuart to reign over the British. This was pre-Victorian, and this film is post-Victorian, meaning that while the couture and the architecture are elegant and grand, not much of anything else is. Is this humorous exaggeration to the point of absurdity, or is this the way it really was? It may be more like it really was than we'd like to think. In fact, it's a parade of cynical, conniving, vulgar, spiteful, loathsome characters. It's also gloriously foul-mouthed; in particular, there is liberal use of two ancient English words that are considered so vulgar that they did not appear in a standard English dictionary until the 1970s.

Nevertheless, despite all that, despite it's being well written and well acted, with major stars of British and American cinema, its parts never quite add up to a satisfying whole. Instead, the sum of its parts is pallid entertainment. The promised dazzle and sparkle are almost but not quite there; you wait for them to bloom, but they never do.

British and Australian actors can do convincing American accents, whereas I find the opposite not to be true; however, Emma Stone's British accent sounds quite convincing. What a native Brit would think, I don't know. Anyhow, I was quite disappointed; I expected to enjoy this film, but it didn't deliver.

This is the second film adaptation of Philip K. Dick's story "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale," and it owes more to the first "Total Recall" with Arnold Schwarzenegger than the original story, which has no violence, only the threat of violence, and that is brief and understated; the story is all dialogue. Both movies (loosely - very loosely) follow the plot until about two-thirds in, when Quaid goes to Rekall, Incorporated, to be implanted with false memories of a trip to Mars. From there on, the violence-drenched plots are a complete departure from the story: they are wholly the inventions of the filmmakers. The original story really does explore the question of true and false memories. Most of that doesn't make it into the films, which are rock-'em, sock-'em, hyperkinetic shoot-'em-ups. As Quaid/Hauser, when Colin Farrell is not shooting, dodging bullets, or engaging in hand-to-hand combat, he is jumping from things and landing on other things, more often than not glass ceilings or windows that shatter. That's the problem with this film, and it's the filmmakers' fault, especially director Len Wiseman: The nonstop action quickly wears thin and becomes drearily monotonous. The film would have been much better with maybe half as much violence as it contains, if not less; that would have made the violence and the nonviolent interludes much more meaningful, and the fight choreographers would not have run out of invention before the end, which they obviously do. But I guess a thoughtful movie was not what the filmmakers were after.

Quaid's name is Quail in the original story. His wife's name is Kirsten, which was not a popular girl's name when the story was written. Her name is Lori in both films. It's not clear whether Kirsten is in on the deception or not; she doesn't try to kill Quail, she just dumps him. The character of Melina was created for the 1990 Total Recall. In the 2012 version, you wonder why the two roles were cast with two actresses (Kate Beckinsale and Jessica Biel) who bear more than a passing resemblance to each other, down to their hair and clothing. In the Arnold version, it was easy to tell the difference between blonde bombshell Sharon Stone and black-haired, fiery sex goddess Rachel Ticotin, and in any case, the two characters lived on different planets, unlike here (and the original story), where Mars is only talked about, not shown.