In Defense of The King's Speech



Why defend The King’s Speech, one of the most acclaimed films of 2010?  If anything, the film has been overrated in many ways, sweeping the Academy Awards and winning the Best Picture category over more stylish and energetic movies such as Black Swan, The Social Network, True Grit, and Winter’s Bone.  The King’s Speech had been relentlessly promoted as an Oscar favorite ever since its premiere at last year’s Toronto Film Festival, making it nearly impossible for professional critics to avoid framing their reviews around whether the film was worthy of such prestige.  Unsurprisingly, this has led a number of industry commenters to have knee-jerk reactions to The King’s Speech, some falling in line with the publicity and declaring it the best film of the year (and thereby overrating it) and some rejecting the film based on the negative baggage associated with award season (and thereby underrating it).  While the immediate association of The King’s Speech with the Academy Awards undoubtedly helped it at the box-office, it has also irrevocably clouded its public perception, making it difficult to arrive at a sane assessment of the film’s actual merit.

In fairness to those leading the backlash against The King’s Speech, the film undeniably has a number of qualities that make it seem, on the surface, like awards-bait.  It is a historical drama about the Duke of York (Colin Firth) who gradually overcomes his speech defect with the help of charismatic and lovable speech therapist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush).  Firth and Rush aren’t the only high-fallutin’ British thespians in the cast, which also includes such ringers as Helena Bonham Carter (as the Duke’s wife), Michael Gambon (as the Duke’s father, King George V), and Guy Pearce (the Duke’s elder brother, who resigns from the throne to marry a twice-divorced American socialite).  The simply told story becomes, predictably enough, an inspirational tale of a man overcoming his fears and bravely leading Great Britain into the Second World War.

But director Tom Hooper and his collaborators wisely sidestep most of the negative trappings of the “prestige picture” by standing out of the way and simply telling their story.  The King’s Speech may have been endlessly promoted by the Weinstein Company as an Oscar-worthy masterpiece, but the film itself is admirably modest and unencumbered by pretensions to greatness.  The filmmakers also smartly avoid the usual biopic problem of trying to condense too much of its subject’s story into two hours by focusing on a very specific element of the Duke’s life rather than attempting to be a definitive biography. Watching the film, one doesn’t have the impression that the filmmakers were straining to make a world-beating timeless classic so much as they were interested in telling a compelling personal story.

This lack of ambition obviously prevents The King’s Speech from being the greatest film of last year – indeed, with the exception of The Kids Are All Right, it is easily the least ambitious of the ten films nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards.  Yet Hooper and co.’s straightforward, almost play-like depiction of the story is undoubtedly the right approach to this material.  If the film gives off a feeling of reserved, old-fashioned mustiness, it’s only because that type of atmosphere is as appropriate to the film’s story and setting as The Social Network’s high-tech flashiness was to its tale of young software entrepreneurs, or as Black Swan’s operatic camp was to its story of psychological intrigue at the ballet.  There is no indication that Hooper would be able to handle the cinematographic and editorial flash that David Fincher and Darren Aronofsky bring to their respective films, and it is a little ridiculous that he defeated those more innovative filmmakers for the Best Director Oscar.  Still, Hooper’s restraint is the logical aesthetic for The King’s Speech’s story, and he deserves some credit for keeping the story’s potential for melodrama under control and staying out of the way of his talented cast (though the director’s one auteurist touch – his occasional habit of framing the characters in corners of cinematographer Danny Cohen’s attractive wide angle compositions – is a tad distracting and unnecessary).

And that cast is very talented.  Firth handles the Duke’s speech defect with realistic frustration, reserves of long-building anger present in his every vocal inflection.  He also doesn’t labor too hard to make his character likeable, a palpable sense of entitlement effectively offsetting his occasionally charming sarcasm.  Geoffrey Rush is equally good as the speech instructor, showing just enough hints of his usual over-the-top hamminess to suggest his character’s theatrical ambitions, yet holding himself back enough to remind the viewer that he is playing a real human being.  The film is essentially a two-man show, but Bonham Carter, Gambon, and Pearce each turn in vivid character sketches that allow the film to subtly suggest aspects of the Duke’s psychology without having to underline them too much in the dialogue. 

When the Duke - recently promoted to King after his father’s passing and his brother’s abandonment of the throne – finally delivers his big speech announcing Great Britain’s entry into World War II, it is a genuinely stirring moment both because the acting is so strong and because the film has spent so much time focusing exclusively on the relationship between Firth and Rush’s characters.  (Obviously, it doesn’t hurt that it’s a great speech).  It is a powerful climactic moment that underscores how wrongheaded the inevitable backlash against The King’s Speech is.  If anything, that type of criticism should be directed at the Weinstein Company for framing the film as a “prestige picture,” or toward the Academy for being so susceptible to a certain type of film.  The King’s Speech is not the best film of 2010, or even a particularly great one, but it is a very good movie that deserves to be appreciated on its own terms rather than in the context of the awards season.



In Defense Of Rob Zombie's Halloween

American horror directors are running out of ideas.  For every Drag Me to Hell or House of the Devil there are ten remakes of horror movies from the '70s and '80s.  In the last decade alone we've seen remakes of The Amityville Horror, The Crazies, Dawn of the Dead, The Fog, Friday the 13th, The Hills Have Eyes, Last House on the Left, My Bloody Valentine, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Stepfather, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and that's just naming the few that instantly come to mind.  None of these remakes were considered improvements on the originals, but that hasn't stopped movie studios from pumping them out regularly, or horror fans from flocking to theaters to see them., even if they inevitably wind up disappointed with the results.

One director who is not lacking for ideas is Rob Zombie.  If anything, House of 1,000 Corpses and The Devil's Rejects suffer from an overabundance of ideas.  Densely packed set designs rub up against a dozen half-formed plot points, which add up less to a coherent story than a clearinghouse for the most lurid fantasies of Zombie's pop culture-saturated youth.  But even if those films don't ultimately cohere, there is still a palpable sense of joy to their making, and a feeling that Zombie is paying tribute to some of his favorite filmmakers without actually stealing from them.  For all of their gore and vulgarity, Rob Zombie's first two features feel like the work of a talented kid showing what he can do with his favorite toys.

So it was a bit disappointing to hear that his next project would be a remake of John Carpenter's seminal 1978 slasher Halloween.  After seven increasingly pointless sequels, it was hard to see what anyone could do with the Halloween franchise.  And although Zombie's take on the material made enough money for Dimension Films to finance a sequel two years later, it didn't take with critics.  Rotten Tomatoes gave the film a paltry 26% approval rating, and many critics predictably compared Zombie's version unfavorably to the Carpenter original.

But Rob Zombie's Halloween deserves better than being lumped in with the aforementioned crop of assembly-line remakes.  In many ways it rises above the disreputable slasher genre, and offers a fresh perspective on seemingly moribund material.  It isn't a flawless film by any means - some of the dialogue is embarrassingly juvenile, there are some pacing issues, and the film's second half is noticeably less interesting than the first.  And yet the 2007 Halloween is a visually stunning, surprisingly ambitious, and even occasionally emotionally resonant film that could hardly be further apart from the average horror film of the last decade.

Obstacles to Appreciation


The Reputation of the Original Film
John Carpenter's Halloween is often considered to be the landmark slasher film, an artistic high water mark that an army of sequels and imitators has consistently failed to live up to.  But it is not the best or the most interesting film of its genre.  It isn't as genuinely terrifying as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or as witty and imaginative as A Nightmare on Elm Street or Child's Play.  And the film is so basic and elemental that it won't reveal anything new with multiple viewings; much of its power comes from its stripped-down narrative and simple characterizations.  Halloween is to slasher films as Stagecoach is to westerns or The Maltese Falcon is to private eye movies, which is to say that it is perhaps the definitive example of its genre, the one that most clearly displays the traits of the genre by not deviating from them in any significant way.  Carpenter's film is essentially a girl being chased by an unstoppable maniac, with few embellishments other than his memorably creepy synth theme music and autumnal cinematography.

The Bias Against Remakes
Given that simplicity and minimalism are two key factors in the original Halloween's success, it does seem a bit odd that it would even occur to somebody to remake it.  Fleshing out the characters or providing motivations for Michael Myers' killing spree diminish the effectiveness of the material, as demonstrated in the seven Halloween sequels.  There is seemingly nothing to add to or subtract from the original experience, and who wants to see a more gory version of something they've already seen?  What could a director conceivably add to this tough little genre picture without disrupting its aesthetic?

The strength of Zombie's remake is that he essentially makes an entirely different film out of elements borrowed from Carpenter's original.  The first half of his film is devoted to a biographical study of the young Michael Myers (played as a ten year old by Daeg Faerch), and is therefore made up entirely of original material.  This part of the film is essentially a prequel to the events of Carpenter's original, documenting Myers'   troubled home life, his development into a killer, and his therapy sessions with Dr. Sam Loomis (Malcolm McDowell).  There is a mournful tone to this half of the film that sets it apart from other works in the genre; in fact, it is hardly a slasher film at all, despite featuring a sequence where Myers murders his father, his sister, and her boyfriend.  Zombie successfully aims to methodically creep the viewer out with dreamy looks at nightmare images (the clown mask that Myers wears is seriously disturbing, and the image of the ten year old body wearing the classic Mike Myers mask for the first time is memorably fucked up).  The film uses elements of Carpenter's original (the famous mask, the theme song) but is otherwise telling a completely different story, demonstrating that remakes needn't be slavish recreations.

The Baggage of the Slasher Genre
Zombie's Halloween only really suffers when it becomes a slasher film in its second half.  It is nice that the filmmakers didn't feel a need to exactly copy Carpenter's plot, and I like that Zombie doesn't ask Scout Taylor-Compton to mimic Jamie Lee Curtis' performance as the original film's heroine in any way.  But it still feels as if Zombie has certain genre expectations that he feels he needs to fulfill, and when the film turns into one killing after another it turns somewhat dull.  The slasher film of the second half is fundamentally incompatible with the character study of the first half; it isn't possible to accept Myers as an unstoppable "boogie man" when the film's spent an hour humanizing him. If Zombie had stuck to his guns, he might have made one of the best horror films of recent years; as it is, the 2007 Halloween is simply the most interesting remake.  But it deserves credit for trying something new and ambitious in the mercenary world of slasher remakes, and largely succeeding beyond the standards of its genre.

In Defense Of Chinese Democracy

On November 23rd, 2008 Guns N' Roses finally released their heavily hyped, nearly mythical album Chinese Democracy.  After over 15 years of leaked tracks, pushed-back release dates, lineup overhauls, and cancelled tours, the album had become a punchline in the mainstream media.  There was literally no way that Axl Rose & co.'s 70-minute opus could possibly justify the amount of time and money spent on it, and the best that most people hoped for was an entertaining trainwreck.

But the actual response to the album was strangely muted.  Early reviews were largely mixed, with many critics damning Chinese Democracy with "its surprisingly good" praise, and the more negative write-ups predictably focusing more on Axl Rose's craziness than on the music itself.  The general consensus was that the album was neither the masterpiece that some people hoped for or the disaster that it could've been.  Guns N' Roses didn't manage to rewrite rock history, but they also didn't embarass themselves by aiming for an instantly dated nu-metal sound or by trying to recapture the bluesy hard rock of their glory days.  Listeners wanted an album that either rose to ecstatic heights or fell to an extreme low, but what they heard was an okay album that they'd listen to once or twice and then discard.

But GNR's troubled LP deserves better than that.  Two years after anyone cares about it, Chinese Democracy holds up as a truly strong modern rock record, boasting an eclectic group of tracks that (mostly) cohere into a satifsying whole.  Few recent pop releases can match this album's scope or level of ambition; even if Axl Rose only accomplished half of the things he set out to do on Chinese Democracy, the sheer audacity of some of the choices he made ought to be applauded.  But the album seems likely to be forgotten, for regretable reasons that are, in some cases, only tangentially related to its actual content.

Objections

Axl Rose
Nobody likes Axl Rose.  Even if he was as talented as he seems to think he is, Rose would still be a walking embodiment of the worst excesses of old-school rock stars, which is frankly not a good look for anyone over the age of 40.  His lyrics suggest that he thinks of himself as the last paragon of virtue in a corrupt world where everybody is out to make him conform.  Unlike self-pitying superstar Eminem, Rose lacks the lyrical wit to make his relentless misantrhopy and paranoia compelling.  It isn't uncommon for rock vocalists to lack a sense of humor about themselves, but Rose's persecution complex is impossible for anyone but himself to relate to.  It's hard to feel sorry for someone whose biggest problem is finishing an endlessly delayed album, but virtually every lyric on Chinese Democracy is either a triumphant "I told you we could finish this!" kiss-off, or a bratty dis to an unnamed collective of haters (critics, former bandmates, ex-girlfriends).  Rose's persecution mania reaches its nadir (or height, depending on how ironically you are enjoying his album) in the middle of the track "Madagascar," when he throws samples from Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech into a song that is otherwise about how Rose won't be swayed by detractors.  Here, Rose somehow conflates his struggles to get an album off the ground with the decades of oppression faced by an entire race of people.

And yet, Rose is undeniably an astonishingly talented vocalist.  I can't think of a single other rock vocalist who could cover the range that he does on these 14 tracks.  Aside from the usual post-Robert Plant yelping, we get some operatic emoting, some weird deep growls, a few hints of Rose's choirboy past, and everything in between.  I wouldn't say that Rose's vocal abilities justify his megalomania, but they do largely make up for his lyrical deficiencies.

Confounding the Notion of Art as Commodity
In our instant-gratification media world, where even unreleased intellectual property is often only a click away, we feel that we are entitled to listen to our music the way we want to, when we want to.  The emergence of music downloading that occured during the recording of Chinese Democracy only increased listeners' feeling that Axl Rose "owed" us a finished product.  Rose probably did owe Geffen an album; if the rumors of a $13 million recording budget are true,  then Rose and his associates were certainly behaving irresponsibly and showing disrespect to their benefactors.  But why should listeners care about this business matter?  Artists do not have a responsibility to give their fans what they want.  Besides, the only original member of Guns N' Roses involved with Chinese Democracy was Axl Rose, so it isn't as if long-time fans had any reason to expect, much less demand, a return of the sound they loved. 

The Baggage of Guns N' Roses
Guns N' Roses were one of the most popular and critically acclaimed bands of the late-'80s and early-'90s.  They occupy an odd place in the pop canon, being too hard-edged to fit in with the hair metal crowd yet too enveloped in old-fashioned rock excess to seem relevant after Nirvana.  Looking back at the Appetite for Destruction era group now, they seem like a competent but juvenile rock band with an unusually versatile lead singer, an above average lead guitarist, and an occasional knack for writing catchy arena rock songs.  Appetite was overrated by the mainstream press back in 1987, but the band clearly took the praise to their heads.  They were certainly taking themselves too seriously when they released the monstrously ambitious twin Use Your Illusion albums in 1991, where they attempted dramatic multi-part suites that pushed their glorified bar band chops past their breaking point.

There was nowhere else for the original group to go artistically, so it's probably for the best that the rotating cast of musicians on Chinese Democracy doesn't attempt to mimic the expected "Guns N' Roses" sound.  For the most part, the new sound reaches a satisfying middle ground between the Use Your Illusion group in "November Rain"/"Estranged" mode and a more daring and adventurous entity.  No one can take the memorable riff of "Sweet Child 'O Mine" away from Slash, but he couldn't come close to pulling off the thrilling avant-garde guitar pyrotechnics that Buckethead, Robin Finck, and Ron "Bumblefoot" Thal deliver on nearly every track of Chinese Democracy.  For better and for worse, the new group does not play it safe. Would anyone actually rather listen to Velvet Revolver than this?

The Critical Bias Toward "Authenticity"
Music critics tend to place more value on the immediate pleasures of songs (melody, vocals) than on their more esoteric virtues (tone, musicianship).  One of the biggest criticisms of Chinese Democracy is that it has a studio-constructed, Pro Tools-assisted sound.  While it is true that a more direct, "live" sound can have a visceral impact that a more overdub-heavy, processed sound can't achieve, there is no reason beyond personal preference to value one over the other.  Setting aside the fact that "authenticity" is a nebulous concept to begin with, there is arguably more skill involved in constructing an artificial sound world than there is in simply capturing a "live" feel.

Much of the pleasure of Chinese Democracy is found in sorting out the details of its dense, elaborate arrangements and mixes.  This isn't the kind of entertainment that settles in on the first listen; it requires more attention than many people give music in the IPod era, and it doesn't really work as background music.  It also isn't the easily accessible, instantly hooky heavy blues-rock that old-guard GNR fans are used to.  But the thick layers of electric guitars, multi-tracked vocals, electronic elements, and occasional unexpected details like flamenco guitar form an overwhelming tapestry that is often over-the-top but rarely less than interesting.  Sure, there aren't many songs here that are as immediately memorable as the Guns N' Roses singles of old - no jukebox surfer is going to choose "Riad N' the Bedouins" over "Paradise City" - but the new sound is infinitely more ambitious, and repays repeated listens in a way that the old music doesn't.

The Guilty Pleasure Factor
A lot of Chinese Democracy is silly.  Every track is overblown and epic, as if Axl couldn't think of anything that he didn't want to try, and then couldn't figure out which details did or didn't work.  "Scraped" sets an earnest cry of "believe in yourself" against a goofy funk-metal backdrop.  The dis track "Sorry" sounds like it was recorded in the mansion in Sunset Boulevard.  "Madagascar" contains a credit for "additional orchestra."  "This I Love" is so melodramatic that Meat Loaf would be embarrassed to sing it.  Rose's insistence on including everything he enjoys about music in every track is consistently laughable, but it's surprising how often Chinese Democracy comes close to living up to its insane ambition, especially on its superior first half.

Cultural Misinterpretations of Perfectionism
Perfectionism in art is often misunderstood.  Stanley Kubrick's incredibly lenghty film productions were viewed as the actions of an indecisive control freak.  Miles Davis' gnomic instructions to his collaborators made some people suspect that he had no idea what he wanted to achieve.  On some level, Kubrick probably was a control freak and Davis probably couldn't have explicitly spelled out what sound he was looking for, but these aren't the same things as artists having no direction.  Kubrick and Davis were trying to surprise themselves, to go above and beyond what their intellects could imagine.  Their collaborators, having been exhausted from endless retakes or bewildered by ambiguous instructions, would sometimes come up with things that were more interesting than anything Kubrick or Davis could've possibly imagined on their own.

No one could reasonably argue that Axl Rose is as talented as Kubrick or Davis, but, all proportions aside, Rose's perfectionism is rooted in similar reasoning.  Rose may not have known exactly what he wanted Chinese Democracy to be, but he was reaching for something even bigger and better than he could've imagined.  In many respects, he overreached - his ambition to create an album's-worth of "Bohemian Rhapsody"-esque ultra-songs gives the album a sense of creative constipation - but it is exciting to hear him go for it anyway.  Even if it isn't an artistic landmark like 2001:  A Space Odyssey or In a Silent Way, Chinese Democracy is a very interesting rock album that deserves some respect.