DVR Diary: THE COSSACKS (1928)

Ernest Torrence was silent cinema's father from hell. It's curious that an actor who first established himself as a heavy came to be seen as the embodiment of impossible standards for sons to live up to, but I suppose it tells us something about the 1920s concept of a he-man. Torrence's patriarchal aspect is played for laughs in Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill Jr., but it's in deadly earnest in M-G-M's adaptation of an early Tolstoy novel. Torrence is the ataman of the local Cossack band in the romantic days when they fought the Turks rather than internal dissidents. John Gilbert is his disappointing son Lukashka, whose disinterest in warfare makes him a misfit Cossack and an embarrassment to the ataman. When Lukashka's peers finally tie him to a post and pelt him with grapes, the ataman has had enough. So, it turns out, has Lukashka, but not until his father takes a whip to him. Lukashka takes it from him and gives him an epic thrashing. As he stomps away, the old man studies his wounds in the mirror and smiles: his boy has fighting spirit after all. Lukashka proves this when he takes his rage out on some escaping Turkish prisoners; the village, you suspect, is fortunate to have had them around.

Now Lukashka is hell-bent for war, and his new passion alienates him from his girl Maryana (Renee Adoree), who sort of liked him the way he was despite finally cracking and joining in the grape pelting. It's time to fight the Turks again, so Lukashka joins his dad and the other warriors riding off on horseback. The Cossacks was a reunion of the romantic leads of The Big Parade, and just as Adoree allowed herself in the prior picture to be dragged by an automobile in her determination to cling to Gilbert, so here she hangs on to Gilbert's horse until he kicks her to the ground. Such is love in Cossack-land, but now comes a serpent to tempt our Eve: an emissary from Moscow (Nils "General Yen" Asther) with a message from the Little Father instructing the Cossacks not to fight the Turks, with whom Little Father has signed a treaty. Cossacks apparently don't know what to do with themselves in peacetime -- their oft-repeated rule is, "Men fight, women work, and above all is God" -- so the ataman sets about dictating a provocative letter to the Sultan while the emissary seduces Maryana, who's willing to listen to alternatives after seeing Lukashka dance passionately with a gypsy woman. War does resume despite the emissary's best efforts; the Turks reward him with a sword in the back. Lukashka, his father and Maryana are captured and without further ado it's time for the Torture. Cossacks laugh at flogging -- they do worse to each other from the evidence we've seen -- but it's tougher to maintain a brave front when your shins are being crushed by slowly tightening cords. Our father and son are still a little too funny for Turkish tastes, so each gets a hot coal in an open palm before the ataman is blinded with a slash of a sword. Just before Luksashka gets the same the cavalry arrives, despite an attempt to drop the side of a mountain on them. That's actually an impressive special effect for the time, but the best shot in the picture --directed either by George Hill or an uncredited Clarence Brown in relief -- is a tracking shot of Adoree crawling through a crowd while the men are at prayer before going into battle. It illustrates her obsessive devotion better than the Bolshoi Parade bit with the horse a little later.

The film as a whole is a pulp romp with plenty of action, and the dance with Gilbert and the gypsy, shot from a low angle, has some erotic energy that helps explain the doomed actor's great appeal before his voice and his addiction betrayed him. Speaking of doomed, Gilbert at least outlived his principal co-stars, both of whom died in 1933, Torrence of gallstones and Adoree of TB. Less than a decade after The Cossacks was released they were all gone. If silent films seemed so distant so soon, it was partly because so many of their stars were as obsolete as their medium: dead, defeated or disappeared. Seeing them in their glory while knowing their fates is often more tragic than the stories they tell. When Gilbert weeps over Torrence's corpse at the end you can't help but think, "You'll be joining him soon." Audiences spared the burden of that foreknowledge may miss some unintended pathos, but those that can stand the lack of spoken words might still have fun with this picture as its makers intended.

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.

Real Pulp Fiction: ARGOSY, MAY 27, 1939

From this week's "Argonotes" letters column, responding to a letter from J. H. Calderman of the Bronx who protests that Argosy is a "day nursery" whose editors lack "the nerve to hold the mirror up to life," and that "the day of escapist fiction is over."

As far as we know we haven't consciously avoided looking at the world of today, but we also haven't made any particular point of dwelling on the sickening tragedies that are piling up around that poor bewildered animal, mankind. We thought we might give you a place where you could get away from all that for a little time each week. But the reader ... seems to think otherwise. We are cowards, purveyors of rose-colored glasses -- a kind of cross between pink lemonade and a marijuana cigarette. Comes the revolution, and we will be, it appears, the first to go.

The editor goes on to cite the serial "Wild River," which continues this week, as proof that "we'd found the happy medium between entertainment and the realistic view." He also cites this week's cover story.

We're little more than three months away from Germany's invasion of Poland, and seven months removed from the infamous "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast. People are so scared that they can choose their poison. There's Nazi Germany, of course, which most recently had taken over what had remained of Czechoslovakia after last year's Munich settlement. There's the Soviet Union under Stalin and the enduring threat of world revolution through Bolshevik terror. And for pulp readers, there is always the yellow peril.

In 1939 the peril was arguably more real than it had ever been since the days of Genghis Khan. While Japan so far was more of a menace to its fellow "yellow" people in China than to the western world, the island empire's rise in less than a century from isolated backwater to modern superpower seemed to fulfill many racist prophecies of a great threat from the east. Arthur Leo Zagat, last seen wrapping up the "fantastic" serial "Seven Out of Time," doesn't identify the invaders in "Tomorrow" as the Japanese. He doesn't need to go into that much detail, probably because he knows he's just starting a series of stories for which there'll be a voracious market. Likewise, he doesn't give us a specific date for this initial story. All we know is that it's little more than a decade since the successful invasion of the United States by an overwhelming force that is not white. "Some of them were black-faced, and some yellow-faced," Zagat writes, but the yellows seem to be in charge. Cities have been leveled by bombs, able-bodied people enslaved in work camps. There are hints of mass rape: "Did you hear how they wen through all the houses that was left and dragged out--?" someone says in one of the story's flashbacks.

These are the all-too-literal dreams of Dikar, born Dick Carr, one of a small group of children smuggled out of a falling city and raised in isolation on a mountain the invaders haven't yet explored. These now-grown kids have forgotten more of their culture than seems plausible in approximately a decade, and now live according to a code of "Do-Nots" laid down by the last of the "Old Ones." The "Bunch," as they call themselves, still live in separate quarters for boys and girls, each of whom have their own Boss. Dikar had been Boss of the boys, but is exiled after getting caught cheating -- inadvertently: a friend had put a rock in his fist somehow without his knowing -- during a formal fight for dominance. He explores the wilderness and has his first encounter with the invaders after discovering the slave camp. Having developed into a strong man in his healthy environment -- getting food apparently was no challenge for the Bunch -- Dikar beats a black soldier to death and finds he has no choice but to return to the Bunch's territory, where he redeems himself by defeating his old enemy fairly and begins to plan an insurgency.

'Some day, Marilee,' Dikar ended, 'I shall lead the Bunch down there. I have to, because down there is the America of which the man spoke, an this is the Tomorrow he talked about, an we are the children of yesterday who will reconquer those green and pleasant fields for democracy, and liberty, and freedom.'

And all at once there was a light shining on the land down there, a great and golden light that cast no shadow.

That's a sample of Zagat's imagination of a language for people whose education was stunted in mid-childhood. As you can see, he evokes little in the way of juvenile slanginess beyond the "an" in place of "and," while the Bunch's rhetoric gets downright purple at times. Today's readers might expect something sounding more like the kids in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome but Zagat can't really push beyond his usual style. Anyway, the main attraction is not how funny they talk but the post-apocalyptic circumstance they find themselves in, and the flattering promise that guerrilla warfare waged by untested (if brawny) youth will accomplish something. Argosy already intends to fulfill that promise, announcing that the first sequel, "Children of Tomorrow," -- not "Children of Yesterday" despite Dikar's opinion -- will appear very soon.

The actual Japanese figure prominently in Alfred Batson's "Glory Hill." In this short story a group of British "old China hands" in a hilltop hotel hold off a Nipponese army until they can negotiate an honorable withdrawal. I suppose its a hymn to racial fighting prowess, but the moral seems relevant beyond Asia: "If we had surrendered to them at the outset they'd surely have been rough with us. But when we stood up against them they respected us. I guess life is like that."

John Stromberg's "Wild River" is nothing if not relevant, even if it's set several years in the past, when the Boulder Dam was still called Hoover Dam and FDR had not yet become President. Ludicrous as Argosy's billing of it as "The Great American Novel of 1939" may look, this is an ambitious story with some mature ambivalence amid the action scenes. In the second installment our hero Speed Foley barely survives a tunneling accident in which his mentor is killed. They were working along the Arizona-Nevada border, and the contractor wants Speed to testify that the accident happened on the Nevada in order to avoid a lawsuit from the deceased's Arizona relations. Speed knows (or believes) that it all happened in Arizona. He feels pressured to testify a certain way to keep his job, and for that he's accused of being a sell-out by his sort-of friend Joe Mendel, a Ph.D. forced by circumstances to take a small-time job in the timekeeper's office. If the lawsuit angle hints at corporate deviousness, Stromberg is also skeptical toward Mendel's obsessive class-consciousness. If any character in the story is idealized its Danny Henderson, the old-timer killed in the accident. "Joe liked to argue about Workers, and old Danny had only worked," Speed muses. Stromberg seems to favor a sort of rugged individualism that can't really take sides between Capital and Labor, or between private and public sectors. "I couldn't see that it made any difference," Speed says, "The System or the Government -- there still would be a lot of men at the bottom whose importance was their numbers, and the river and the rock would kill them just the same." For all that, "Wild River" isn't exactly a novel of ideas, though it may be just that by Argosy's standards. For those less captivated by politics, there are vivid descriptions, most likely based on experience, of the dangerous work on the dam project, and the occasional fight. Its virtues make the fate of author John Stromberg, a pulp mystery man, a more intriguing mystery as we go along.

You probably don't get less relevant than the final installment of Fred MacIsaac's "The Golden Woman." This three-parter closes in action-packed fashion as the title character, her admirers in the Company of Jason, and their former captor make their escape from angry Araucanian Indians. It's corny action, though, punctuated by hokum, as when the golden woman eases tensions between different factions in the escape party by reciting the Lord's Prayer and singing "Adeste Fidelis." There's a terribly old-fashioned sensibility here that MacIsaac tries to pass off as the attitude of the ficitonal 19th century narrator, but is more likely his own melodramatic manner.

The whole company kneeled. Laura de Lorme, more beautiful than any woman I had ever beheld, seeming almost exalted in that moment, stepped forward. Her head was raised, and the golden pennant of her hair billowed about her shoulders. Her breast rose and fell with the gentle stir of her breathing....She sang in Latin; presently one or two of the men began in halting tones to follow her, using the English words. Others joined in. Slowly the sound grew firmer, deeper, and swelled to a mighty chorus; the mighty crags of the Andes caught it and filled it with what seemed divine echoes until the sound was of a mighty angel chorus singing in unison with our lady. The moon bathed the scene in pure silver....

This sort of thing may have been what J. H. Calderman, however unfairly, had in mind when he wrote to Argonotes. Calderman would have been right, in the most unfortunate way, if he felt that MacIsaac was an obsolete writer. MacIsaac may have felt that way himself when he committed suicide the following year.

Elsewhere this week, Hugh Pentecost's "Cancelled in Red" continues to complicate itself nicely in its penultimate installment, while Richard Sale reappears with "Fish Aint Got No Brains," the story of a heroic dolphin that must have gone over well, since Sale would write a sequel in 1940. Dale Clark contributes the latest adventure of the chiseling talent agent J. Edwin Bell, "The Spitting Image," in which the notorious flesh peddler rips off a ragged bootblack before realizing he'd be ideal for the part of the star's child in a forthcoming production. After a rare week without a western story, Howard R. Marsh resumes a series about desert hotel proprietor Itching Foot Davis  and his Chinese sidekick Wong Tong, who this time help a poor rancher and a poor but pretty young woman get hitched with the reward for recovering stolen money. What entertainment value there is is in the colorful dialogue and the tease of disastrous consequences of Itching Foot's intervention before the inevitable happy ending. Whether that counts as pink lemonade or marijuana is a matter of taste.

Next week, Hugh Pentecost does double duty, resuming his true identity as Judson Phillips for a timely baseball story while wrapping up his mystery serial. I rather dread reading sports stories, but the phenomenon itself will be something new to write about, so stay tuned....

TO BE CONTINUED!

DVR Diary: WELCOME DANGER (1929)

Harold Lloyd had finished shooting his latest silent film before he started taking talking pictures seriously. The way he told it afterward, he realized that talkies were here to stay when he dropped in on a theater and found the audience enthralled by the sound of bacon frying in a pan. That doesn't quite sound right, since the only movie I know of with such a scene is King Vidor's Billy the Kid, made a year after Welcome Danger was released as a 100% talking picture. The point stands, however, that Lloyd abruptly determined that the film he'd just made was obsolete. Since he was his own producer, releasing his films through Paramount, he went back into production, shooting new talking scenes while post-syncing as much of the original silent footage as he could get away with. The film reached theaters in the fall of 1929, making Lloyd the first of the major silent clowns to make his all-talking feature-length debut.  It was a big hit, but soon gained a bad reputation, not just for the poor quality of the synchronization but also for its excessive length (113 minutes was outlandish for a comedy at the time) and its political incorrectness. Inevitably, Clyde Bruckman's film is a mixed bag, including some good gags, some jokes on the new talkie audience, and some or the worst stuff Lloyd ever did.

The first act establishes Harold as an amateur botanist traveling to San Francisco. Switching trains at a station, he stops in a photo booth to get his picture printed on a paper medallion. He gets a double-exposure, since the paper disc had gotten stuck when the previous customer, Billie Lee (Barbara Kent) had her picture taken. Getting a two-shot for the price of one, Harold is smitten, convinced that the girl in the picture is his destined love. He then proceeds to meet cute with Billie, though it plays out as the opposite of cute. Having missed his train, Harold finds Billie and her lame kid brother in their car; they're driving to Frisco and camping out nights. Billie is in grease-monkey clothes to work under the car, and when she appears Harold takes her for a dirty boy. Mishaps ensue along the way, the joke being Harold's increasing contempt for the "boy" who's actually his dream girl. He gets pretty insulting as Billie's difficulties with the car increase. The thing is, Billie seems to be just as stupid as Harold takes her to be. Asked whether there's a problem with the spark plugs, she answers that they're certainly clean because she washed them with soap and water the night before. They later run out of gas because she forgot to fill the tank. Thinking something else may be wrong, she removed the carburetor and then leaves it on the running board of a good samaritan's car after borrowing gas from him. Forced to camp on the spot overnight, Harold and Billie are equally incompetent as tent-pitchers. Finally Billie retreats into the tent and femmes herself up so Harold will recognize her as the girl whose picture he's been mooning over all along. When it finally sinks in he's so crestfallen that he runs off into the woods. Destiny finally asserts itself when Billie is frightened by a stray cow. Her rush into his arms inspires Harold to keep on frightening cows. This sequence retains much of the original silent footage, badly dubbed, but the clearest sound you hear is Harold Lloyd digging his own grave. Harold is often brash to the point of obnoxiousness in his silent films, but with sound he's almost irredeemably so. His put-downs and his high, smug voice are really repellent. Slowed by sound-film speed, he seems (at age 36) suddenly too old for his archetypal role as the earnest, aspiring young man. He acts like an utter jerk with Billie, but she comes across as so stupid that she hardly deserves better. And after half an hour we still don't really know what this film will be about.

It turns out to be a police comedy. We learn that Harold Beldsoe is the son of a famous Frisco cop, and that one police captain in the big city believes that blood will tell. He's summoned Harold with the thought that young Bledsoe will have a hereditary talent for dealing with the crime wave in Chinatown. The opium trade there is controlled by a masked mystery man called The Dragon, while the eminent orthopedic surgeon Dr. Gow (James Wang) aids the forces of law and order. Lloyd gets to have it both ways in Chinatown, indulging in nearly every stereotype of sinister, secretive Chinese crime while portraying Dr. Gow as such an advanced specialist in his field that Billie Lee has brought her brother to San Francisco to be treated by him. In addition, Bruckman establishes early that the Dragon is a white man, and none other than the moral crusader John Thorne (Charles "Ming the Merciless" Middleton). This is established early so we'll note the irony when a desk sergeant (Edgar Kennedy), annoyed at Harold's new obsession with fingerprints, gets a sample from Thorne and as a practical joke tells Harold that it's the Dragon's fingerprint, lifted from "the neck of a strangled Chinaman." The storylines converge when Harold meets Billie again while Dr. Gow is examining her brother. Harold has brought a potted plant that he stole from a Chinatown florist when the proprietor refused to sell it to him. When Gow accidentally smashes the pot, they find that the Dragon is using the potted plants to smuggle opium. Gow is promptly kidnapped by the Dragon's spies, who had chased Harold all the way from their shop, and Harold makes a crusade of rescuing the doctor so he can operate on Billie's brother. His sole helper is Clancy (Noah Young), a breathtakingly stupid Chinatown beat cop --frustrated at a Chinese corpse who doesn't savvy English, Clancy asks him, "Sprechen sie Deutsch?"-- who proves more of a handicap as Harold has to fight his way out of the secret basement passages beneath the flower shop and save Dr. Gow from a human sacrifice to the Dragon. After all that, Harold must overcome the skepticism of the regular cops as he confronts Thorn with proof of his criminal double life.

The flower-shop sequence drags on almost interminably, punctuated by repetitive bits of slapstick from Lloyd and Young and literal blackouts as rooms go dark for one reason or another. There's something brazen in Lloyd's decision to give the audience sound and nothing else for long moments in these bits, but his audacity is more admirable than laughable. Funnier is a slow-motion sight gag involving a turtle with a candle on its back first burning Young's butt -- he leaps about thinking himself shot as Lloyd scoffs while the turtle inexorably brings the flame to Harold's own rear. Better still is a multi-part gag involving changes of clothes. Clancy is KO'd by a gang member who takes his police uniform and puts him in Chinese clothes, gags him and trusses him up. Later, Harold is fighting off a small horde while yelling for Clancy. Clancy manages to stumble into view, his costume making him look like a hopping vampire, but Harold mistakes him for a Chinese and clobbers him. He does this several times over, all the while yelling for Clancy. Later, Harold dons Chinese clothes to get out of a tight spot by mingling with his pursuers. By that time Clancy has freed himself and, taking Harold for another Chinese, clobbers him back. Too much of this sequence is simply sprawling knockabout violence, while the climactic showdown with Thorne and his whip-wielding black servant (Blue Washington) is more brutal than funny. Writing of Lloyd's next talkie, Feet First (a quasi-remake of Safety Last!), Walter Kerr noted that the comedian undercut the mute grace and humor of his exertions with constant grunting and yelling. You can see that already in Welcome Danger's cacophonous violence, while Lloyd's reedy voice coarsens his persona nearly as much as Buster Keaton's croak did his. Once the novelty of a talking Lloyd wore off, his audience must have noticed that some of his magic was gone; Kerr notes that each subsequent Lloyd talkie made less money than the last one. Sound didn't bankrupt Lloyd creatively; he'd have a strong run of films in the Thirties, including one, The Cat's Paw, that refines many of the Chinatown tropes of Welcome Danger by making Lloyd himself a Sinicized American and a fish out of water in the Depression U.S.A. While Welcome Danger itself looks like a failure in retrospect, making it a talkie may have been a can't-lose proposition for Lloyd. It could very well have been a total dud as a silent, but the assured box-office success of his talkie debut, regardless of its quality, gave him breathing room to experiment further until he got sound comedy right.

The last of the singing cowboys

Just last weekend I saw Herb Jeffries on an episode of the Virginian TV show. I was intrigued when he was listed as the main guest star in the cable guide because I'd heard of him as the star of all-black westerns and, as far as I knew, the only black singing cowboy during the heyday of the genre. It was odd to see him in living color, as they used to say, since as the obituaries have noted following Jeffries' death this week at age 100, he was quite light-skinned for his historic role, by virtue of his very mixed ancestry. He could have passed for white fairly easily, and reportedly sometimes did -- while The Virginian had a good record of casting black actors in non-race conscious roles -- but Jeffries chose to star in race films. Better to reign than to serve, I suppose. I'm tempted to call his westerns an alternate universe, but what they really show is that the singing west was an all-American dream in those Depression years, when a new frontier, accessible by automobile if necessary but best enjoyed on horseback, was what we all seemed to need. Here's a clip of Jeffries singing his western theme song, "I'm A Happy Cowboy," as uploaded to YouTube by SyberkaPL.

On the Big Screen: X-MEN:DAYS OF FUTURE PAST (2014)

Bryan Singer is bucking a trend in superhero movies. The trend is away from the auteurist approach that entrusts characters, if not whole "universes" to individual visionaries of the Christopher Nolan stripe. While Marvel Studios continues to entrust the Avengers to Joss Whedon, the industry leader apparently wants to avoid identifying any individual franchise with an individual creator. Just last week Marvel parted ways with Edgar Wright, who now won't direct Ant-Man after having lobbied with the company for years to have the film made. Wright's vision made an Ant-Man film possible, but in the end it looks like the "universe" imperatives of Marvel won out over whatever personal vision the director had. Meanwhile, Singer has returned to the X-Men franchise, a Marvel property whose movie rights are held by 20th Century-Fox, after a decade in the wilderness, and after the studio had apparently rebooted the series with the last team film, First Class. What else was Singer going to do? He hadn't set the world on fire with his films since X-Men United, though his misguided approach to Superman Returns is echoed somewhat in his new film. I presume that Warner Bros. really wanted a reboot of Superman, but Singer gave them a very belated sequel to Superman II that ignored the two intervening Superman movies while of necessity completely recasting the franchise. Days of Future Past has a significant recasting from Singer's last X-Men movie, though that decision had already been made for him in the previous film, and it ends up allowing fans to ignore some of the less-loved films in the series. The main thing it does is reestablish Singer as the guiding visionary for the franchise -- with a free adaptation of one of the best-known X-Men comic book stories, and also one of the most influential superhero stories ever written.

Comic book readers should by now have reconciled themselves to the fact that moviemakers are interested mainly in the characters in their favorite books, not in adapting their favorite stories. So there's no use making point-by-point comparisons of Simon Kinberg's screenplay with Chris Claremont and John Byrne's two-part comics story from 1981. The original "Days of Future Past" set the paradigm for decades of stories in which refugees from a dark future go back in time to prevent it from happening. The "Age of Ultron" story from which the title only, most likely, has been borrowed for the next Avengers movie, is such a tale, as is a new weekly limited series, Future's End, from DC Comics. Given the continued popularity of the trope, adapting "Days of Future Past" is a no-brainer, and from the moviemaker standpoint it's just as much a no-brainer to adapt it to the specifications of the X-Men movie franchise. Most importantly, this promotes Hugh Jackman's Wolverine into a more central role as the time traveler, although the film is fair to the First Class cast by taking Logan out of the action early in the climax. Fortunately, comics and film converge in making shapeshifter Mystique the antagonist whose history-shaping crime must be prevented, though in comics she's aided by a roster of Evil Mutants, while in the movie she's a lone wolf.

Were Jennifer Lawrence herself a mutant she would most likely be Juggernaut, but in movies she's stuck in a blue bodystocking most of the time, and never becomes the vicious badass Mystique has been in comics. That's because everyone wants to talk the poor misguided girl out of assassinating industrialist Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage), a Seventies merchant of death who hopes to unite the Cold War world into a market for his anti-mutant technology. His murder is undesirable first because it will fulfill his prophecies of mutant hostility to humankind and provoke global adoption of his Sentinel program for mutant-fighting robots, and second because she'll be captured after doing the deed and her special DNA harvested to make Sentinels into super-adaptoids who'll spend the next half-century kicking mutant ass by mimicking their powers, as well as making the skies very dark. Also, both Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and Eric "Magneto" Lensherr (Michael Fassbender) feel bad about misguiding or otherwise failing the impressionable blue girl. Xavier in particular feels bad about everything a decade after the events of First Class. Crippled at the close of that story, he's been cured by his remaining protege, Hank "Beast" McCoy (Nicholas Hoult), but at the cost of his psychic powers. So Logan, whose consciousness has been projected backwards through time, his future body lying helpless (though still dangerous!) as the Sentinels close in on the surviving mutants' Chinese sanctuary, to possess his past self, must talk Charles into talking Mystique out of killing the evil dwarf before he seals his Sentinel deal at the signing of the Paris peace treaty. And they've all got to fetch Eric out of a concrete bunker deep within the Pentagon, where he's been dumped, depending on who you believe, for assassinating JFK or for trying to stop the murder of our first mutant President. You take a chance letting him loose, of course, and before long he has the notion of (actually?) assassinating (another?) President, as if he can prevent the dark future with a preemptive strike on American power.

In some ways the film is an improvement on the comic books. In the original the time-traveler ends up in the dull present, while the movie gets to play with the sounds and fashions of 1973 in a far more effective manner than First Class's aping of 1962. Making Mystique a solo menace allows her to be more slippery and persistent; thwarted once, she survives to fight another day later in the picture. I can't tell you much, after more than thirty years, about the fight scenes in the comics, except that at one point Colossus uses indestructible Wolverine as a fulcrum and a steel girder as a lever to lift the allegedly immovable Blob off the ground. In the film we have two outstanding set pieces: the liberation of Magneto, highlighted by the sight-gag antics of super-speedster Peter Maximoff  (Evan Peters), and the chaotic scene in Paris when the fight with Mystique spills into the street. Singer nicely lends this a sense of historic immediacy by adopting "found footage" techniques, showing the battle through home-movie and TV news footage and demonstrating how the heroes' first intervention has actually made the historical situation worse. The film's weaknesses are typical of the genre. Singer can't resist the impulse to go big at the climax as Magneto surrounds the White House with an uprooted RFK stadium. It ends up less impressive than the Paris fight because its less light on its metaphoric feet. The action bogs down badly and finally grinds to a halt once all depends on Xavier finally talking Mystique out of murder.

The real problem here is bad writing. Wolverine is saddled with repetitive exposition, while Xavier's sappy cliches might convince you not to kill someone only if they provoke you into shooting him instead. Yet lazy writers constantly insult our intelligence by taking for granted that these banal appeals to peace and tolerance or vague notions of redemption are as persuasive as the story needs them to be even though no real effort is made to make them rhetorically or psychologically persuasive. This wishful thinking seems out of place in films dedicated to violence, especially when Mystique has just shot someone and it was a good thing. It's also dishonest to preach peace in a series of films that depends (or at least has depended) on the perpetual hostility of man toward mutant. If reconciliation really happened, there'd be no more need for X-Men movies -- or else the series will be forced in the direction indicated in the post-credits teaser, in which some dude telekinetically building pyramids in ancient Egypt is relevant to mutants somehow. Yes, I know who that is, but I read comic books, unlike most people in the movie audience who, if they stuck around, most likely took this scene as a teaser for the next Mummy movie, or took the man with the gray face to be an Ancient Alien. So Singer may have reclaimed the keys to the franchise just in time to jump the shark with it.

On its own terms Days of Future Past is entertaining enough to get by. It has its little extra movie-movie jokes: Ellen Page is shown teaching Architecture at the Xavier School, while James McAvoy discourses on the implications of bullets curving in mid-air. I promise vintage Marvel No-Prizes to people who get these bits. Jackman is his dependable self and I'm now more comfortable with the First Class versions of Charles and Eric, especially as the originals, Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan, have grown sadly superannuated. Lawrence and the writers haven't yet tapped the depths of Mystique's villainy, though the ending hints at more mischief to come from her over the next forty years. Peter Maximoff's exploits -- this is one character shared by the X-Men and Avengers franchises, though actors and other details will differ -- certainly set a high bar for next fall's Flash TV show in portraying super speed, while new mutant Blink (Fan Bingbing) has one of the coolest powers yet in purely visual terms. If aspects of the movie insult my intelligence, I suppose I'm used to that by now, and I can find qualities to compensate for that. Maybe I should let Peter have the last word on the movie: "It's cool, but it's disgusting" -- though I might change the order of the adjectives.

I need a holiday!

Actually, I had a good time at the movies this weekend. I saw X-Men: Days of Future Past and Godzilla and I'll be reviewing them shortly. Both have problems but have virtues to compensate, and I'll describe these when I feel more capable. But I've just now, on a dare, watched The Lone Ranger, and it has numbed my brain and frankly demoralized me to such an extent that I can't write positively about anything. I'd hoped that Gore Verbinksi's disaster of last year was one of those eccentricities that failed due to audience misunderstanding, that it had qualities that certain viewers could appreciate but were missed by mainstream wire-service reviewers. But if anything it was worse than the critical consensus, and the waste in every frame eventually offended me. Many of its sins are really common to "roller-coaster ride" or "tentpole" movies, but the complete failure of creative judgment here was stunning. There's no point in going into detail; doing so would only darken my mood further. So I'll delay the real reviews I was planning for a day in memory of all those dead dollars and two hours taken from my own life, and maybe tomorrow I'll be able to think positively about movies again.