2011 Awards, Emily Style

Hey, not every movie can be awards chloroform like The Artist or Hugo. Some need a little help, even if they already have Mickey Rourke's badass headgear Nicholas Cage's non-accent-in-a-period-film to help them out. Hence, head over to the Gentlemen's Blog to Midnite Cinema for my very own version of the Emily Oscars. There will be clowns, there will be brazen bulls, there will even be Muppets, but sadly there will never, never ever never, be enough dinosaurs.

Go figure out what I mean.

Astoundingly Horrible Non-Horror! The Nutcracker In 3D

It's rare that I find myself speechless about a film's complete lack of quality, because when you’ve seen both Feeders 1 AND 2, few aberrations of cinema can ever seem worse.

Which calls to mind what might happen if a ballet company knocked on Uwe Boll’s door for donations just after he drank too much Heineken while watching Julie Taymor’s Titus and finding $90 million under his sofa cushion, then went to his fridge to get another bottle, caught a glance of the wacky Albert Einstein magnet that he keeps on the door to hold up a calendar, realized it was December, and said “Hey! I can use my NINETY MILLION DOLLARS to make a live action, 3D, CGI-heavy interpretation of The Nutcracker starring John Turturro as a Nazi rat!”

Substitute Tango & Cash director (!!!) Andrey Konchalovskiy in the Boll role and huzzah! You have The Nutcracker: The Untold Story (cue Lifetime logo) or as it was dismally sold to theaters last Christmas, The Nutcracker In 3D.

Quick Plot:  Mary (Elle Fanning in the kind of role that will eventually be referenced in the ‘bombs before the Oscar’ magazine writeups of the future) is an imaginative child growing up in 1920s Vienna with distant parents and a toy-breaking brother. When Uncle Albert Einstein arrives to—

What? Why are you looking at me like that? You’ve never listened to The Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies while wrapping presents and thought to yourself, “You know what this song is REALLY about? The Theory of Relativity, THAT’S it. If only the guy who wrote Jesus Christ Superstar would think up lyrics to that ubiquitous Christmas tune that better explained Einstein’s science. And if only Nathan Lane would don a powdered wig and invoke the kind of European accent slaughtered by high school seniors performing Tevye in a community theater production of Fiddler On the Roof. Only then would we really hear Tchaikovsky’s genius.”

Then boy oh boy dear readers, are you in luck! Perhaps because Lane didn’t want to soil his Broadway success by having The Producers be the worst film on his resume, he does his best impression of the Microsoft Word Einstein help avatar, occasionally addressing the camera because…well, nobody else seemed to be listening?

Getting back to the Nutcracker story you think you know, Uncle Albert Einstein gives Mary the gift of a magical dollhouse, chimpanzee doll, Jamaican drummer, and a clown I have to assume inspired the look of The Last Circus. 

Oh oh oh, and dare I forget the titular nutcracker, who proceeds to come to life and take on a hybrid marionette/CGI persona voiced by a British munchkin/Moaning Myrtle and baring a more than passing resemblance to the titular foe of Pinocchio’s Revenge and/or a Canadian South Park character.

But dig this! Albie has a nickname for the nutcracker and it’s—you know it—N.C.

NOT M.C.

Yo.

As Mary sleeps, she dreams of a magical CGI universe where NC comes to life while rat bat thingies watch and fly away on jet packs (go with it) to report their findings to the ruler of this alternate world, The Rat King, played by John Turturo as what might happen if Adolph Hitler impregnated a J-pop star while watching Labyrinth. He’s also afraid of the sun and thus insists on burning children’s toys all day long so that its rays are blocked by the smoke of the innocent.

But…but…didn’t the toys come to life? Aren’t a lot of them actually people? Or chimpanzees? Or Jamaican drummer boys?

Yeah, ‘bout that…

So this is an image from the Rat Kingdom:

Yup.  Because in case you didn’t know, not only is The Nutcracker actually about the theory of relativity, but it’s also a metaphor for the Holocaust.

The Rat King decorates his austere palace with blown-up photos of interracial children screaming. I’m just going to let that thought sit there for a moment.

Got it?

Because emulating Hitler isn’t enough for a villain, The Rat King gets a toe-tapping performance set to music not from The Nutcracker. According to the 60 minute long making-of extra on the DVD, this was actually composed by Tchaikovsky, but used for something that had nothing to do with The Nutcracker. According to Tim Rice, Tchaikovsky was the best collaborator he’s ever worked with because he’s dead, and could therefore not complain.

Somewhere in Russia, a zombie is rising, and it ain’t waxified Lenin.

Did I mention how this showstopping number ends? I’ll give you three guesses:

A) Fireworks and synchronized Esther Williams-esque pool choreography

B) A beheading of the Jamaican drummer doll, followed by a head toss

C) The reveal of the Rat King keeping a pet shark in a tank, and then the reveal of why he does: so that he can drop a giant light fixture in said tank and electrocute his pet shark to death.

If you guessed A, then I assume you hit on something in a deleted scene. B happens, just not at that moment. But as you probably knew, the answer is C. I just want to remind you that option C meant that John Turturro has a pet shark in a Nutcracker movie and seemingly the only reason for his pet shark is so that he can kill it in song.

I know you think I’m lying or at the very least, embellishing what occurred in the 108 minutes of Nutcracker  In 3D, but I would never do that to you (especially during Santa season). This was apparently a 20+ year passion project for director Konchalovskiy and it kind of shows…just not in a good way. In 20 years, a man can amass a lot of ideas. He doesn’t have to then use all of them with no restraint whatsoever, save for the one decision made to NOT give the SS uniform clad rats German accents. Sure, their Brooklynese was probably more demanded by the speech limitations of prosthetic mouthguards, but still…it’s something.

Lessons Learned

Albert Einstein has a theory about everything. Ya, and iz called RELATIVITY (cue cymbal clap)

All dolls are alive. Right, that’s not a scary thought at all…

Chimpanzees get FURIOUS if you call them monkeys

The Awkward Shimmy rivaled The Charleston for popular dances of the 1920s

Stray Observation

Anyone remember Brown-Eyed Jenkin’s creepy human face-on-CGI rat in Stuart Gordon’s first Masters of Horror episode? I think that was reused here. In a children’s film.

Court Ruling

A judge found Nutcracker 3D guilty on the following counts:

Wasting the charms of Richard E. Grant

Assigning inane lyrics to classical music that never required lyrics, then having a Tony-award winning performer sing the lyrics with an accent so thick that the DVD requires subtitles to understand just how nonsensical the lyrics actually are

Soiling the names Mary and Max, which belong to a far better and magical little film called Mary and Max

Rent/Bury/Buy

Remember how having a substitute teacher was one of the most awesome things that could happen on a weekday? Perhaps you played jokes on the poor job hunter, but if you were REALLY lucky, your real teacher had already assigned empty busywork, sometimes in the form of a video.

Maybe schoolteachers got tired of not being appreciated and commissioned Andrey Konchalovskiy to make this film, because the only appropriate situation in which it should be shown is when Mrs. 5^th Grade Teacher, jealous of the adoration received by substitutes, wants to make her class long for the days of algebra problems and Civil War battles. Kids will not like this film. As giddy as its badness made me (and remember, I’m a bad movie addict who can’t help but secretly love this), The Nutcracker In 3D is also weirdly dull, working from the same overly artificial, whimsy-lacking landscape also misused in Stephen Spielberg’s Hook. If a substitute teacher showed it to a classroom, she'd be lucky to make it to the parking lot alive.

In other words, if there are children in your life whom you hate, wrap up this DVD (complete with the sadly earnest documentary special feature) in sandpaper and stick it under the tree, after (of course) you’ve had your dog pee on it. Every little bit helps when you’re recouping a budget that could have been spent rewarding 90 Survivor champions or buying one of the Virgin Islands. Perhaps the production team should have considered that before making a KIDS film featuring this:

At this point, I hope your appetite is sufficiently whetted because in no way can I restrict this movie to this site. Coming up on December 20^th, my good pal T.L. Bugg will be forced to watch and review The Nutcracker 3D for our monthly swap over at The Lightning Bug's Lair. So while I’ll be drinking up Liam Neeson’s sexy widower in Love Actually, Zach will be humming about relativity for the remainder of the month. Apparently, the poor dear made the naughty list.

Killer Klowns From Outer Spain

If like me, you had a decidedly American education when it came to social studies, your knowledge of Spain’s history is probably about as rich as a bag of sodium-free rice cakes. It’s a shame of course, but thankfully, there are some pretty fascinating filmmakers today toying mightily to create surreal metaphors that play as historical(ish) horror movies. Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth is the obvious example, but with The Last Circus, director Alex de la Iglesia creates his own odd--though those three letters don’t really do this tale’s bizarreness any form of justice--spin on Franco and the Spanish Civil War...

or maybe he’s just telling a dramatic love story...

or imagining what Taxi Driver would’ve been like if Travis Bickle were a circus clown (aside from it being renamed ‘Comically Undersized Car Driver,’ of course)

It’s not an easy diagnosis.

Quick Plot: When a peaceful children’s circus clown is dragged into battle and immediately thereafter, hard labor military prison, his son Javier grows up sad...sad CLOWN sad, you might even say. After an ill-fated rescue attempt involving some mighty heavy horse shoes, Javier is orphaned. We revisit him some years later in the 1970s, well after peace is declared and Javier (now played by Carlos Areces) has evolved from an awkwardly skinny teen into an awkwardly chubby boy-child starting his first day of work as, you guessed it, a sad clown.

At the circus, we’re introduced to the typical carny lot, from Ramiro the elephant keeper to a bickering couple with doggie training issues to a vertically challenged daredevil biker. Most of note is Sergio, the superstar head clown who’s great with kids but terrible with alcohol, particularly when it’s drunk in the presence of his beautiful acrobat wife Natalia.

A love triangle ensues, following the typical light-hearted rom-com tropes of spousal abuse, sad trumpet face smashes and dead baby jokes. For reasons that won’t be spoiled here, Javier is forced to flee the circus and survive naked in a forest ditch on raw deer meat before becoming a servant dog to the man who killed his father.

Got that? Trust me when I say there’s a whole lot of story points that I can’t cover, some of which includes presidential assassination and Kojak strip shows. At a certain point, Javier undergoes a horrifying self-imposed transformation terrifyingly teased by the tragically underachieving American poster art:

Irons and sulfuric acid are involved. So are squirms.

It all leads to a frantic finale set atop a 500 foot high cross, which Wikipedia was kind enough to tell me was The Valley of the Fallen, a controversial monument ordered by Francisco Franco--himself a supporting player in The Last Circus. As Javier chases Natalia, Sergio chases Javier, the police chase Sergio, and some of the beloved circus folk watch while the soundtrack roars...and roars...and roars.

Subtlety ain’t served at this circus.

The Last Circus is, as you might imagine, an odd bit of cinema. If it were a pizza, you might say the circus is a historical metaphor for 20th century Spanish history, the cheese is pure horror movie, sauce composed of a typical love story and toppings an eclectic mix of circus tricks, some terrifying and others hysterical. 

Stay with me on the food thing. I promise it will make sense (maybe). I liken The Last Circus to a pizza not because I’m hungry but more because a pizza is easily defined by its parts. You know what works or doesn’t work on a large cheese pie, be it a burnt crust or the deliciously fresh mozzarella. Each ingredient is a separate entity, unlike soup or stew or even the more fluid Pan’s Labyrinth, where everything mixes more seamlessly. The Last Circus--a film I do quite like--stumbles a tad in its (perhaps inevitable) disjointedness. Javier’s journey covers everything from sweet puppy love literally coated in cotton candy to playing the role of a mute slave serving a military sadist. Were I more familiar with Spanish history, I imagine I’d be able to better analyze the story and probably appreciate Iglesia’s use of cinematic metaphor. Putting that aside, does The Last Circus hold up as a mere film narrative?

Absolutely. Though the chaos reigns with the furor of a Von Trier talking fox, The Last Circus is something special. The opening 1930s clown-on-the-battlefield feels like a piece of absurdist theater set on cinematic fire, while Areces’ rotund sadness lends the center an unusual heart. The love story works because the actors are interesting and the relationships are clearly about more than just love. Javier is sufficiently sympathetic before being transformed into something insanely frightening, although unfortunately, his Falling Down-like rampage doesn’t quite deliver on the horrifying promises it seems to make. It’s forgiven when the film’s funniest scene closes things out. 

So The Last Circus is also funny, something that I believe will prove more evident upon a repeat viewing. It’s scary, simply because civil war and clowns and mutilated faces and fascism are...you know, SCARY. To call The Last Circus a horror film is a compliment to both the movie and genre. It’s not quite as good as I wanted it to be, but it’s something truly different that delivers on a few--if not all--its fronts.

High Points

Much like A Serbian Film, The Last Circus makes absolutely phenomenal use of its sound, both in the brilliantly composed score to the chilling sound effects

As my undying adoration for the Lou Diamond Philips’ classic The First Power proves, I do love me a good horse stomping

Low Points

Considering some of the pretty incredible visuals at play in The Last Circus, we certainly could’ve done with a more imaginative poster design eh?

Lessons Learned

The greatest war tactic of all time might indeed involve unleashing your secret weapon upon the enemy, and by secret weapon, I am of course referring to a clown armed with a machete

Few skills are less dismal than the gunfire aim of mid-20th century Spanish police officers 

Female elephants are, in a word, possessive creatures

There is no mother. No. Mother. Got that?

See/Skip/Wait It Out Impatient Jerk

The Last Circus is not a perfect film, but it’s something truly unique and incredibly confident about being so. There’s a chance a whole lot of viewers will hate it, but even if the major narratives don’t click for you, the visuals and sound might well be enough to keep your senses sated. Sadly I doubt the film will make a stop at most major theaters, but if the circus comes to your town, it’s absolutely worth the trip.