The Beatles fight off an Army of Zombies;
Across the Universe v Resident Evil: Extinction
The natural enemy of Art is popularity, but nothing says Art can’t be popular. Good Art appeals to a wide swath of humanity, because it touches something specific to each of us, but each of us are, nonetheless, touched. Good film, like good music, is Art. Which is why, when good music is wedded to film, on the off chance that it could be something great, we take notice. When the music is the freaken’ Beatles, you get in line.
ACROSS THE UNIVERSE (dir. Julie Taymor) uses the music of the Beatles to tell the story of a young brit, JUDE (Jim Sturgess), as he adventures through the American Sixties Revolution. The plot is solid; there’s more to it then that, but like a musical, it trusts you’re not there for the plot. And it’s right. The opinions start beyond that and are strong on both sides – “mixed reviews”, I suppose, is the term. I’m here to say I understand those reviews; I’m also here to say I saw this on its opening weekend and didn’t regret a single second of my 131 minutes.
Jude and his best friend MAX (Joe Anderson) are amazing. Jim Sturgess is a young Ewan McGregor, and Joe Anderson is the spitting image of Kurt Cobain. When they’re together, the screen lights up. Their friends SADIE (Dana Fuchs) and JOJO (Martin Luther McCoy) are consistently great musicians. Imagine Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix breaking up on stage, now imagine they’re singing “Oh! Darling”. Two of the three cameo songs are good, while one is great. As Martin Luther rolls into NYC for the first time, the opening riff of “Come Together” twangs to life, and who should start singing it but blues legend Joe Cocker, dressed as a bum. It was inspired. Bono playing the Timothy Leary style DR. ROBERTS singing “I am the Walrus” was okay. But while that song was just okay, the style in it kept us interested; Taymor uses a kind of negative hyper color to simulate the psychedelic experience of an intense Acid trip.
It’s the film’s inherent style that keeps it afloat. When the music fails us, or the ho-hum LUCY (Evan Rachel Wood) is singing some broken-heart love song, or the film has decided to spin off on some fantastical tangent, it always offers up a juicy visual style most easily compared to Baz Luhrmann’s MOULIN ROUGE (2001). Each character seems to have a specific visual style to their musical numbers: Tom Anderson trudges through Vietnam with elaborate sets and CG malarkey; Wood exists in soft shadows and romantic lighting; Sadie is always on a stage; and Jim Sturgess… well, Jim Sturgess is style in and of himself.
The theatricality of the film is ultimately its strongest, and weakest, element. The performances and style are pure constructs of Taymor’s background in stage musicals. But this film also, at times, feels like a filmed stage show, something Moulin Rouge was able to shake off. At many points you think to yourself, ‘Gosh, this would be great on stage, but film could be so much more’. While Baz Luhrman’s stage shows are rich with depth, Taymor’s film feels sparse. The majority of the real world musical numbers are amazing, as are the live shows from Jojo and Sadie. And while the rest is super stylish, you can’t help but feel that there could be more.
I’d like to end with a small shout out to their rendition of “Strawberry Fields Forever”, which juxtaposed Sturgess, painting the pain of his broken heart, to Max in Vietnam, watching his company get ambushed. With the red of the paint playing against the small red exit wounds, it was one of the few numbers to really make a play at subtlety. It wasn’t that the others were bad, but they had the directness of a blunt musical number. We’re at the movies here people, the movies; lets class it up a bit.
The point of this column is the ongoing push and pull relationship between Trash and Art in the cinema. Artistic cinema is Film, what then makes cinema Trash? What element is it that makes a film worthless? To that end, how could I only review a movie I went into expecting great things from. So I saw RESIDENT EVIL: EXTINCTION (writer Paul W.S. Anderson [note the ‘W.S.’; he’s not who you’re thinking of). First off, before you tell me to dismount my ‘oh so high’ horse, hear me out; I love zombies; Westerns are amazing; the Apocalypse makes a great set piece; and Milla Jovovich’s career has proven that she is, categorically, unstoppable. Leeloo Dallis MultiPass, indeed. Everyone besides Ms. Jovovich, which includes the lovely Ali Larter’s CLAIRE, act as if they where told by the director to do their best to phone it in. The zombies are pure sweetness, and Jovovich’s ALICE is… well, I love her. More then I love Jim Sturgess and Joe Anderson, I may add, though not by much. She makes a firestorm… with her mind. Deal with that.
But ultimately, it took me 700 words to say my piece about ACROSS THE UNIVERSE, and I just hit you with every thought I had about RESIDENT EVIL. It blends its horror elements with its action beats well, something that few films of the genre can do, and it functioned as a decent MAD MAX-esc road movie. It’s certainly not worth nothing. It’s not an offensive picture. It’s just candy fluff, easily consumable and delicious. Personally, I don’t think candy fluff is a bad thing to indulge in.
Contact Collin at collinke@usc.edu
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