Dances With Maoris
River Queen Sucks Ass
At the end of Vincent Ward's latest movie, we see Samantha Morton standing on the shore ripping pages from her journal and tossing them into the sea. Why oh why couldn't they have taken a hint from this idea and done the same with this movie's screenplay? River Queen ranges from passable to awful, building from a bad start to reach of a point of acceptable quality shortly after the half-way mark and maintaining this until its laughable final climax. I considered leaving on two seperate occasions: the first when I finished the lunch I'd brought with me as the set-up was pathetic and I saw little to stay for, and the second time was when it reached the point of having indulged in one too many natives-on-screen cliches when "voices on the wind" alerted Cliff Curtis to his son's death a mile or so away as if he had somehow used his mana to sense a disturbance in the force. Here is a list of things this movie could have done to not be so sucky:
1. Hire Tony Scott
It has been well documented in the New Zealand media that director Vincent Ward was "removed" from the director's chair at the request of anxious investors due to problems on set and the fact that production was running way over schedule. As far as I'm concerned, they should have removed him earlier. A good place would have been after the opening credits sequence. At times this film is handled with apparent incompetence by those involved, particularly the opening set-up which has to be the single laziest I have ever seen and includes one of those POV stalker-guy shots of a kidnapper watching Morton's character playing with her son; you know, the shot that's been a cliche since the beginning of seventies horror? In addition, Ward's montage sequences are amateurish and achieve nothing, and there is an unforgivable "no shit" moment in which a flashback of Morton with her now-deceased former lover (the father of her child) is played for the 3rd time in the movie to drill in a point regarding what is unfolding between Morton and Cliff Curtis's character which is already as obvious as Ward jumping into frame and shouting an explanation to the audience in case they didn't quite understand the basic human body language involved. Movies like this piss me off to no end. So if Ward's out, bring Tony Scott in. I mean, if the material sucks anyway you may as well make it visually interesting. With Scott at the helm we'd get a 376-different-angle quick-cut montage set to rock music as the waka makes its way up river, rather than the uninspired, lifeless cinematography and over-used pipe-whistle / rattlesnake tail "music" we are instead landed with. What this cliche-ridden movie desperately needed was something fresh, and Tony Scott could make Battleship Potemkin exciting.
2. Replace the Maoris with Wookies
This would have eliminated Temuera Morrison from the cast, and thus we would not have to see his naked ass twice in one minute when he goes for a paddle in the river. Secondly, this movie portrays the Maori at times as having some sort of supernatural-ness to them, a mistake typically made in otherwise "realistic" Hollywood productions when dealing with certain "obscure" foreign cultures, with Temuera Morrison having a recurring dream which tells him what must be done, and with (as I said before) Morrison and Curtis inexplicably feeling the death of Curtis's son. I found this all to be quite shit myself, and Wookies are cool so I'd put them in instead as it worked well in Revenge Of The Sith.
3. Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer
The movie critics at the NZ Herald may have bad taste but they got one thing right in identifying Kiefer Sutherland's accent as being that not of an Irish solider but of a pirate. As this film needed some life, they should have gone either of two ways. 1: Sutherland was therefore obviously hinting that he felt the movie needed a pirate during the filming of his scenes, and as such Vincent Ward should have listened and re-written his role as (if not the whole film about) Captain Sutherland. Captain Sutherland would wear an eyepatch but his good eye would have the sight of an eagle, and he would pierce his enemies right through one side of their throats and out the other with his hook. What's more, if Captain Sutherland was moved up to top billing and made the lead character he could have been chasing after Maori gold, setting up for some good old-fashioned swashbuckling fun, adding some much needed swordplay which director Tony Scott would no doubt shoot and edit awesomely. The other way they could have gone was this: if Kiefer Sutherland happens to be a method actor and starts plundering the crew's supplies between takes in the character of Captain Sutherland, they should have just allowed him to do what he does best and play Jack Bauer. Jack would have gotten Samantha Morton's kid back AND saved the world within 24 hours. If they really want to stick with that cultural identification theme maybe Bauer could join the Wookies, then together they could battle Irish droids in a scene set to rock music and featuring 1,684 cuts per minute. Now THAT'S a movie! Tony Scott should have skipped Domino and just made that. Plus then Mickey Rourke would have had an opening in his schedule (as he would no longer be doing Domino for those who need a Vincent Ward-esqe OBVIOUS clarification) and he could have appeared as Bauer's arch-nemesis. I'm so pitching this to Hollywood.
4. Feed The Movie To Vincent Ward
Okay, so if none of those options were available they should have just accepted defeat and tossed the script in the trash. But now that the thing's been made and all of those above scenarios are written in hindsight, they could at least take every print they've made, cook it, stir it in a pot, and feed every disgusting mouthful to Vincent Ward with the condition being that he isn't allowed to make another movie until he finishes the cauldron of River Queen stew. That way he'll think twice about wasting $20million that could have been spent on 5 Saw sequels or else used to buy drugs for the poor who not only need them more than the rest of us due to the need to escape from the complete and utter hopelessness of their worthless lives, but who otherwise have to steal to afford their fix. Hollywood investors just never think about needy homeless junkies, and the creation of River Queen has sadly had a harmful impact on both crime rates and cases of depression in poor socio-economic regions.
OVERALL
Skip River Queen. Watch Munich instead. Munich kicks ass. Spielberg is back to the Catch Me If You Can / Minority Report form of 2002 (in quality, not in style) and its amazing to think he only began shooting the thing around August LAST YEAR. 4 months before release! Damn him and his efficient awesomeness. So yeah, River Queen gets a D or 1/5, while Munich gets an A- or 4.5/5. I may elaborate on the latter at some other point in time, but not yet as I feel I need a second viewing to better articulate why I was so impressed.
At the end of Vincent Ward's latest movie, we see Samantha Morton standing on the shore ripping pages from her journal and tossing them into the sea. Why oh why couldn't they have taken a hint from this idea and done the same with this movie's screenplay? River Queen ranges from passable to awful, building from a bad start to reach of a point of acceptable quality shortly after the half-way mark and maintaining this until its laughable final climax. I considered leaving on two seperate occasions: the first when I finished the lunch I'd brought with me as the set-up was pathetic and I saw little to stay for, and the second time was when it reached the point of having indulged in one too many natives-on-screen cliches when "voices on the wind" alerted Cliff Curtis to his son's death a mile or so away as if he had somehow used his mana to sense a disturbance in the force. Here is a list of things this movie could have done to not be so sucky:
1. Hire Tony Scott
It has been well documented in the New Zealand media that director Vincent Ward was "removed" from the director's chair at the request of anxious investors due to problems on set and the fact that production was running way over schedule. As far as I'm concerned, they should have removed him earlier. A good place would have been after the opening credits sequence. At times this film is handled with apparent incompetence by those involved, particularly the opening set-up which has to be the single laziest I have ever seen and includes one of those POV stalker-guy shots of a kidnapper watching Morton's character playing with her son; you know, the shot that's been a cliche since the beginning of seventies horror? In addition, Ward's montage sequences are amateurish and achieve nothing, and there is an unforgivable "no shit" moment in which a flashback of Morton with her now-deceased former lover (the father of her child) is played for the 3rd time in the movie to drill in a point regarding what is unfolding between Morton and Cliff Curtis's character which is already as obvious as Ward jumping into frame and shouting an explanation to the audience in case they didn't quite understand the basic human body language involved. Movies like this piss me off to no end. So if Ward's out, bring Tony Scott in. I mean, if the material sucks anyway you may as well make it visually interesting. With Scott at the helm we'd get a 376-different-angle quick-cut montage set to rock music as the waka makes its way up river, rather than the uninspired, lifeless cinematography and over-used pipe-whistle / rattlesnake tail "music" we are instead landed with. What this cliche-ridden movie desperately needed was something fresh, and Tony Scott could make Battleship Potemkin exciting.
2. Replace the Maoris with Wookies
This would have eliminated Temuera Morrison from the cast, and thus we would not have to see his naked ass twice in one minute when he goes for a paddle in the river. Secondly, this movie portrays the Maori at times as having some sort of supernatural-ness to them, a mistake typically made in otherwise "realistic" Hollywood productions when dealing with certain "obscure" foreign cultures, with Temuera Morrison having a recurring dream which tells him what must be done, and with (as I said before) Morrison and Curtis inexplicably feeling the death of Curtis's son. I found this all to be quite shit myself, and Wookies are cool so I'd put them in instead as it worked well in Revenge Of The Sith.
3. Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer
The movie critics at the NZ Herald may have bad taste but they got one thing right in identifying Kiefer Sutherland's accent as being that not of an Irish solider but of a pirate. As this film needed some life, they should have gone either of two ways. 1: Sutherland was therefore obviously hinting that he felt the movie needed a pirate during the filming of his scenes, and as such Vincent Ward should have listened and re-written his role as (if not the whole film about) Captain Sutherland. Captain Sutherland would wear an eyepatch but his good eye would have the sight of an eagle, and he would pierce his enemies right through one side of their throats and out the other with his hook. What's more, if Captain Sutherland was moved up to top billing and made the lead character he could have been chasing after Maori gold, setting up for some good old-fashioned swashbuckling fun, adding some much needed swordplay which director Tony Scott would no doubt shoot and edit awesomely. The other way they could have gone was this: if Kiefer Sutherland happens to be a method actor and starts plundering the crew's supplies between takes in the character of Captain Sutherland, they should have just allowed him to do what he does best and play Jack Bauer. Jack would have gotten Samantha Morton's kid back AND saved the world within 24 hours. If they really want to stick with that cultural identification theme maybe Bauer could join the Wookies, then together they could battle Irish droids in a scene set to rock music and featuring 1,684 cuts per minute. Now THAT'S a movie! Tony Scott should have skipped Domino and just made that. Plus then Mickey Rourke would have had an opening in his schedule (as he would no longer be doing Domino for those who need a Vincent Ward-esqe OBVIOUS clarification) and he could have appeared as Bauer's arch-nemesis. I'm so pitching this to Hollywood.
4. Feed The Movie To Vincent Ward
Okay, so if none of those options were available they should have just accepted defeat and tossed the script in the trash. But now that the thing's been made and all of those above scenarios are written in hindsight, they could at least take every print they've made, cook it, stir it in a pot, and feed every disgusting mouthful to Vincent Ward with the condition being that he isn't allowed to make another movie until he finishes the cauldron of River Queen stew. That way he'll think twice about wasting $20million that could have been spent on 5 Saw sequels or else used to buy drugs for the poor who not only need them more than the rest of us due to the need to escape from the complete and utter hopelessness of their worthless lives, but who otherwise have to steal to afford their fix. Hollywood investors just never think about needy homeless junkies, and the creation of River Queen has sadly had a harmful impact on both crime rates and cases of depression in poor socio-economic regions.
OVERALL
Skip River Queen. Watch Munich instead. Munich kicks ass. Spielberg is back to the Catch Me If You Can / Minority Report form of 2002 (in quality, not in style) and its amazing to think he only began shooting the thing around August LAST YEAR. 4 months before release! Damn him and his efficient awesomeness. So yeah, River Queen gets a D or 1/5, while Munich gets an A- or 4.5/5. I may elaborate on the latter at some other point in time, but not yet as I feel I need a second viewing to better articulate why I was so impressed.
posted by Steve @ 5:38 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home