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‘The Golden Compass’

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By Cole Smithey

The hullabaloo surrounding any “anti-religious” theme to Philip Pullman’s 1995 “His Dark Materials” trilogy (the title is taken from Milton’s “Paradise Lost”) takes a distant backseat to screenwriter/director Chris Weitz’s spotty film adaptation that never locates a through line to the convoluted narrative. Newcomer Dakota Blue Richards plays Lyra Belacqua, a 12-year-old orphan raised at Oxford College, under the supervision of her uncle Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig), a scientist and explorer intent on traveling to the Arctic Circle to examine golden dust that connects mystical worlds. Coincidentally, a Nazi-like group called the Magisterium (a reference to the Roman Catholic teaching authority) has been kidnapping children and spiriting them off to a compound in the Arctic to separate the youth from their daemons (souls) which manifest as alter ego pets that can change species, at least until the child’s personality becomes fixed. Belacqua is inexplicably and secretly given the last Golden Compass (also called an Alethiometer), a device that ascertains the underlying truth to any question asked of it. With no idea of how to use the compass, she is an easy mark for one slinky and cunning Mrs. Coulter (Nicole Kidman) to abscond with the rebellious girl and her furry daemon (voiced by Freddie Highmore) in order to steal the compass for the Magisterium’s use. Unmotivated chase scenes and erratically violent fight sequences punctuate the story’s time warp setting that seems to fall somewhere between World War I and II.

When Belacqua escapes Mrs. Coulter’s diabolical clutches, she is befriended by a group of gypsies called “gyptians.” Whether Romanian or Egyptian refugees, the name causes confusion and consternation whenever it’s used. Serafina (Eva Green) is a friendly “witch,” although she seems like more of a fairy that periodically visits Belacqua to help her on her journey. Sam Elliott pulls his trademark cowboy duty as Lee Scorseby, a balloon aviator who points our hero toward a polar bear named Iorek (voiced by Ian McKellen) ostensibly to protect her. However, Iorek serves mainly to grind a personal axe against the North’s polar bear king Ragnar (Ian McShane) in a brutal fight sequence that ends in a particularly violent and shocking fashion.

The CGI daemons (cartoon monkey, rat, rabbit and cat) are strictly second-rate in a movie inevitably about war at a time when most audiences are battle-fatigued from the world’s tumultuous state of affairs. None of the characters attract anywhere near the level of empathy that accompanied those of “The Chronicles of Narnia,” much less the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. However entertaining the literary source material for “The Golden Compass” might be, we never get a sense of how the quirky clockwork device is used to secure and protect the ideal of “free will” that Pullman posits as the highest value for his protagonists. One perceived effect of the war in Iraq could be that there are no decent movies to take the little ones to this holiday season, except for the dumbed-down approach of “Alvin and the Chipmunks.” “The Golden Compass” is designed to open the way for sequels to follow, but judging from the poor quality of the first bloated installment it hardly seems an endeavor worth pursuing. CV

‘Awake’

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This sublimely awful suspense thriller is especially enjoyable for the wildly varied collection of talent taking one for the team. Hayden Christensen goes slumming as Clayton Bereseford Jr., a young mogul in business with his mother Lilith (Lena Olin) with whom he shares a too-close-for-comfort relationship. Unbeknownst to mommy, Christensen is engaged to marry their company assistant Samantha (Jessica Alba) before he goes under the knife for a heart transplant, to be performed by his best friend and surgeon Jack Harper (Terrence Howard). Alba blinks like a deer in the headlights as Bereseford undergoes the transplant completely awake as the result of a slipshod anesthesiologist. Periodic suspense gives way to a guffaw-inducing conspiracy climax that puts a punch line on the overlong joke.

In spite of four malpractice cases pending against Dr. Harper, Bereseford insists on using the suave doctor because he saved his life in the recent past. Harper and Bereseford take time out of their days to fish in Manhattan’s East River like some modern day Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. It’s a hokey touch of plotting that writer/director Joby Harold sticks in as if daring audiences to laugh at the ridiculousness of the idea. Harold ups the ante when he shows the two men walking into the hospital where Harper works with fishing rods in hand.

But it’s a Halloween party scene that clinches the filmmaker’s “Rocky Horror” aspirations. Without warning Bereseford appears dressed as a four-star military general and for a moment we’re stunned at the idea that the young character might actually have been a general. The realization that he’s wearing such a vulgar costume makes sense when he sits down for a private discussion with his mother, who wears a nun’s habit for her disguise. The set-up and subtext are all the more hilarious for the filmmaker’s deadpan composition that looks like he tore a frame from Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut.” The problem is that only the audience seems to be in on the humor.

What matters most is the operating scene where Bereseford finally receives his heart transplant. Some undisclosed treachery gives cause for substitute anesthesiologist Dr. Larry Lupin (Christopher McDonald) to burst into the operating room with a flask sticking out of his pocket. Lupin seems to have walked onto the wrong film set or at least the wrong profession, he never puts rubber gloves on to administer an anesthesia “cocktail” that leaves Bereseford silently screaming for someone to realize that he is awake beneath his paralyzed exterior.

“What the fuck!” Bereseford’s voice-over monologue screams in a state of “anesthetic awareness” as Dr. Harper inserts the breastplate divider that exposes his beating heart. This is high humor when you take into account the simultaneous presence of Alba making nice with Bereseford’s overbearing mother in the hospital waiting room. Bereseford goes outside of his body and walks around looking at his own body on the operating table as a tear leaks from under his taped eyes. He also uses the opportunity to take a tour of the hallways to comprehend the intrigue that put him in this state of excruciating limbo.

No amount of Christensen screaming out in imaginary pain can induce the slightest bit of fear. The feeble attempt at inciting revulsion is an example of how “Awake” is a movie that only works if you go in with the idea that every actor, scene and line of dialogue is to be mocked. “Awake” is Olin’s movie. She dominates every scene, and watching her eat up Alba before spitting out the bones is a delight to relish. Go see “Awake” fully-caffeinated with a bunch of friends willing to yell back at the screen and cheer for Olin whenever she appears. It’s the right way to enjoy such an unintentionally camp piece of crap. CV

‘Love in the Time of Cholera’

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The famed 1985 magical realist novel of Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez gets an ambitious but off-key cinematic adaptation that trips up except in the casting of Javier Bardem as its romantically enthusiastic protagonist. British director Mike Newell (“Four Weddings and a Funeral”) works from a script by Ronald Harwood (“The Pianist”) to tell the epochal story of Florentino Ariza, a young poet living in turn-of-the-century Cartagena, Columbia who falls hopelessly in love with a girl named Fermina (Giovanna Mezzogiorno). Fermina’s protective father (John Leguizamo) facilitates her rushed marriage to Dr. Juvenal Urbino (Benjamin Bratt), a European-educated aristocrat, thereby dooming Ariza to swear a lasting love that waits busily for the doctor’s death in order to reclaim his true love. But when the momentous event finally occurs some 51 years later, Fermina takes torrential offense at Ariza’s vulgar attempt at cashing in on his vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love. “Don’t show your face again for the years of life that are left to you; I hope there are very few of them.” Fermina’s hostile rebuke sets off the film’s flashback progression that eventually makes some sense of its grotesque title.

The current tendency toward magical realist films demonstrates a deeper reach for escapism than common film genres present. Movies like “The Martian Child,” “Lars and the Real Girl,” “Wristcutters: A Love Story,” “Slipstream,” “The Darjeeling Limited,” “Atonement,” and even Todd Haynes ode to Bob Dylan “I’m Not There” all share magical realist themes that go beyond their geographical and cultural context toward a universal element of inexplicable imagination.

It’s not a far reach to conjecture that our current geo-political and ecological predicaments have cornered some filmmakers into searching for unequivocal truths to supplement a reality strained by devastation and doom. A significant element of magical realist texts is the responsibility they put on the reader or viewer to decode the material. “Love in the Time of Cholera” makes its first demand for ciphering via a juxtaposed title that pits a subjective emotional experience against a haunting plague-interject any kind of war against humanity.

Although Ariza and Fermina are in love, the capitalist demand for greed decrees that she must marry a cad who will eventually cheat on her. An important irony lies in Ariza’s incessant substitution of heartbreak that causes him to seek sexual refuge at every opportunity for the 50 years that he waits for Fermina. The assertion that Ariza makes to Fermina’s papa that “There is no greater glory than to die for love” mutates into keeping count of his carnal conquests (well over 600 before he attempts to reunite with Fermina). The fidelity that he swears finds more devotion to his own transcendent stamina.

Mostly, there are bawdy laughs to be had over Ariza’s slapstick sexual connections that occur in alleys, parlors and on boats. The character’s visible need to be loved proves to be a powerful aphrodisiac for attracting female partners, but the filmmakers miss the mark on keeping an suitable tone the way Spike Jonze did with “Being John Malkovich,” a near-perfect example of a magical realist film. The winky-wink casting of actors like Bratt, Leguizamo and Liev Schreiber in secondary roles distracts from the story’s momentum and takes the viewer out of the movie regardless of the quality of their performances.  

The film works best when Ariza exerts his poetic skill to write love poems for inarticulate lovers as a side business. He’s most fulfilled when enticing romantic commitment between others with rhymes that hit you with the full force of Marquez’s inflamed writing style. If you want to get the woof and warp of “Love in the Time of Cholera,” you’ll have to read the book. That said, Bardem’s intoxicating performance is reason enough to see the movie. CV

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