Black Gate

The Eagle (2011)
Directed by Kevin Macdonald. Starring Channing Tatum, Jamie Bell, Donald Sutherland, Mark Strong, Tahar Rahim.

Less than a year after Centurion was released theatrically on a small number screens, along comes another historical adventure film telling the tale of the vanished Ninth Legion. Except The Eagle got released on many screens. In a just and fair movie world, the situation would be the opposite. But anybody who has every griped about the Academy Awards knows that we live in no such world. (And by the way . . . no Best Score nomination for Daft Punk’s work on TRON Legacy?)

The Eagle is the opposite of Neil Marshall’s incredibly energetic, almost gonzo Centurion. Marshall’s film uses a great cast to flesh out its characters and themes of survival and duty while keeping an insane and glorious momentum. At every turn, Centurion does its damndest to keep audience’s adrenaline high. The Eagle, given greater dramatic space for characters between battle scenes, sketches out complete blanks for protagonists, contains no sense of the Roman frontier, and features poorly shot and edited battle scenes that emit out not single nanowatt of excitement. (Oh, I’ll be generous. Not a single microwatt of excitement.) No wonder Focus Features unceremoniously dumped this film out in early February, during Valentine’s Day weekend, up against a kid’s CGI animated movie and romantic comedy starring Adam Sandler. The Eagle is totally disposable.

And given the subject matter, it’s a shame. I hate to see any movie mess up the wonders that the Roman Empire can deliver in terms of action and spectacle. It takes a tremendous amount of work to make me dislike a film about the empire, but dammit if director Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland, State of Play) and his cast and crew put in overtime to produce a boring film.

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Valhalla Rising (2009)
Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. Starring Mads Mikkelson, Jamie Sives, Gary Lewis, Ewan Stewart, Maarten Stevenson.

Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn went into his film Valhalla Rising right as he was wrapping up post-production on Bronson, the bizarre biopic about British prisoner Charlie Bronson that turned into his biggest success and pushed star Tom Hardy into the front lines. But Bronson surprised many viewers, going against expectations of what a biopic about Charlie Bronson would be like. In the same way, Valhalla Rising flips around the conceptual idea of “Viking movie” and is unlike anything viewers might expect from an historical epic about skull-crushers like the medieval Norsemen. Valhalla Rising had its festival premiere in 2009 and a theatrical release in mid-2010, but it sits defiantly outside the mainstream. If El Topo is an “Acid Western,” then consider Valhalla Rising an “Acid Viking Movie.”

Although it clocks in at a lean 92 minutes with credits, Refn’s film moves at a slow pace and contains vast silences within a harsh landscape. The first twelve minutes contain only a single line of dialogue, and this sparse style remains consistent throughout the running time. Red-hued violence occasionally breaks out, done with no modern stylization, but there are no “action set-pieces.” This is a movie concerned with its tone and texture, telling an oblique story through implication. And for what it attempts to do, it succeeds: this is a transcendent film that creates an authentic sense of what Nordic life in the eleventh century must have felt like. Its taciturn introspection says an enormous amount about early Christian and late Pagan mysticism.

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Vampire Circus (1972)
Directed by Robert Young. Starring Adrienne Corri, Laurence Payne, Anthony Higgins, Thorley Walters, John Moulder-Brown, Lalla Ward, Robin Sachs, Lynne Frederick, Richard Owens, David Prowse, Robert Tayman.

It seems that any time I log into Netflix to manipulate my queue to get physical DVDs, I discover more treasures that I can watch with only a click of the mouse button. Sometimes films unavailable on DVD—or any home video format—for many years. Such as Vampire Circus. (It is available on Blu-Ray, but I don’t have that option.)

Vampire Circus is one of the small treasures of 1970s Hammer Horror, and unfortunately few people on this side of the pond have had the opportunity to see it; the movie has remained incredibly elusive in the U.S. When it was released theatrically in the States, the U.S. distributor de-sanguinized it to a PG rating. Netflix has oddly maintained the PG rating on their page for the film, even though the version they have is uncut and contains the copious amount blood and bare breasts that were the marks of Hammer in its latter days.

Hammer Film Productions knew they were losing the youth audience as the decade started. Their dominance in the Anglo-horror cycle through the late 1950s and the first half of the ‘60s weakened as more graphic and contemporary movies edged in on them, making the Gothic Victorian trappings seem quaint. Hammer also lost a number of its best stars, directors, and technical people, and quality slipped as the ‘70s started. After the excellent Taste the Blood of Dracula, the Dracula series never recovered, and the attempt to reboot the Frankenstein series with The Horror of Frankenstein (on my short list for the worst horror movie the studio ever put out) was a disaster.

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Last week, I discussed my favorite fantasy films of 2010 and realized that, surprisingly, they were overwhelmed by young adult films, and even animated ones. And this isn’t just because I have two young kids, it’s because they’re actually making some of the best films out there for young adults.

Maybe they always have and I just didn’t notice, because I was part of the demographic they were aiming at. But as I approach the age where I’m constitutionally-permitted to run for President, it’s clear that these movies are being made without my thirtysomething self as the intended target … yet somehow they’re resonating very well with me, in ways that the films which are being made for adults don’t seem to.

One film which didn’t make the list was Shrek Forever After, and that was for a simple reason: I hadn’t seen it.

Well, I took care of that late last week … and it certainly needs to be added. I swear, between Shrek Forever After and How to Train Your Dragon, Dreamworks might actually give Pixar a run for their money at the Academy Awards this year. (Although, once again, I must rant: Would it kill Dreamworks to include a digital copy of the film?)

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