Aquaman (2018)

Aquaman (2018): Aquaman created by Mort Weisinger and Paul Norris; written by David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick, Will Beall, Geoff Johns, and James Wan; directed by James Wan; starring Jason Momoa (Arthur Curry/ Aquaman), Amber Heard (Mera), Willem Dafoe (Vulko), Nicole Kidman (Atlanna), Temuera Morrison (Tom Curry), Patrick Wilson (Orm), Dolph Lundgren (Nereus), Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (Black Manta), and Julie Andrews (Voice of Karathen):

Maybe nothing epitomizes better the odd, endearing, Frankensteinian assemblage that is Aquaman then the use of Julie Andrews to voice a giant sea monster and Dolph Lundgren to play a slightly pink-haired Atlantean King. The people behind Aquaman seemed to decide to throw in a wide variety of genres and tones in an effort to please everyone. As Aquaman approaches $1 billion in world-wide box office, the approach seems to have worked.

It's a weirdly likable movie with sudden shifts in genre and tone that recall DC Comics blockbusters of earlier times, especially Superman: The Movie (1978) and Batman (1989). In one bewildering 15-minute sequence, Aquaman riffs on Raiders of the Lost Ark,  The Da Vinci Code, the Jason Bourne movies, and the Roger Moore James Bond movies before doing a quick 'head in a toilet' gag and then jumping to Lovecraftian monsters before emerging in, well, Jurassic Park.

It works because while Jason Momoa is an, ahem, limited actor, he's a likable screen presence whom the movie allows to be likable (contrast this with Henry Cavill's dour Superman in Man of Steel). It also works because director James Wan, known primarily for horror movies that include Saw and The Conjuring, seems comfortable with a superhero movie that is visually more Lord of the Rings meets Avatar than Iron Man or The Dark Knight.

Vast undersea armies, weird creatures, and one really big creature (voiced by Julie Andrews!) don't need to look entirely 'real' for the CGI to work. Instead, they're colourful and strange and drawn in many cases from the comic art of people like Esteban Marato in the 1980 DC miniseries The Atlantis Chronicles. It's overlong and overstuffed and many of the 'comic' bits fall pretty flat, especially when they rely on Momoa's ability to deliver a line. 

Aquaman also has prestige actors in supporting roles, recalling Superman (1978) and those Irwin Allen disaster movies of the 1970's. One can imagine a movie poster with little boxes with actor's faces running along the bottom -- Nicole Kidman as "Atlanna", Willem DaFoe as "Vulko", and Julie Andrews as "Karathen." So much CGI work is done to de-age Kidman and DaFoe for flashback sequences that they almost qualify as visual effects.

Nonetheless, it's actually fun and weird and worth looking at -- easily the most 'comic-booky' of all of these attempts to create a DC Cinematic Universe to rival Marvel's, and all the more welcome for that sense of weird superhero mayhem and earnestness. Recommended.

The Dream Quest of Unknown Kubrick

Eyes Wide Shut: adapted by Stanley Kubrick and Frederic Raphael from the novel Dream Story (1926) by Arthur Schnitzler; directed by Stanley Kubrick; starring Tom Cruise (Dr. William Harford), Nicole Kidman (Alice Harford), Sydney Pollack (Victor Ziegler), and Todd Field (Nick Nightingale) (1999): Stanley Kubrick's last film had an infamously long shooting schedule, one which some people view as being the deciding factor in the break-up of stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Kubrick handed in the final cut and then died less than a week later. Yikes!

Some critics at the time seemed to become more confused by the events of a movie based on a Freudian dream-journey of a novella than could really be explained. So I'll explain it. Kubrick was generally viewed as being a cool, emotionless film-maker constantly striving for some form of cinematic objectivity. He wasn't, but he was viewed this way by the critical hive-mind. Had the dreamily subterranean sub-conscious David Lynch released the exact same film, reviews would have been much different: we expect a mind-fuck from David Lynch. We expect the inexplicable and the subjective.

In the case of Eyes Wide Shut, the viewer's detective story could be summed up as a quest to understand what events in the film objectively 'happen' and what events are components of the Tom Cruise character's internal, dream-like, occasionally nightmarish voyage of self-discovery. And the answers to that quest I'll leave to you, the viewer. If answers are even needed. You could just strap in and feel the G's.

In many ways, this is Kubrick's most enjoyably absurd movie since Dr. Strangelove, if you let it be. Cruise's quest may take him into the bipolar dream realms of Eros and Thanatos, but Kubrick et al. offer mounting absurdities at every turn. An opener of the gateway named Nightingale. A comically sinister Eastern European provider of masquerade costumes and his nymphomaniac daughter. The much-maligned, endlessly loopy Secret Order of Rich Sex Perverts and their comically portentous sex games.

The comic parts curdle to nightmare, of course, with the various threads of Cruise's journey ending in rejection, illness, humiliation, death, and the contemplation of the abject, naked, dead body of what was earlier a sexualized object . The voyager into the dream world must be shocked back to the land of the real. And with the events set at Christmas, one can note, among other things, the importance of A Christmas Carol to understanding the proceedings. Though Dickens never gave us this much full-frontal nudity.

Kubrick's choice of then-reigning Hollywood Power Couple Cruise and Kidman makes perfect sense, as he wanted a pair who could play superficially pretty, seemingly bland people who would soon be revealed to contain hidden depths. I think they're both very good, especially Cruise, who gets to play a character who is both exactly his cinematic type on the surface, and a regret-plagued mess under the surface.

The supporting players are also fine, with the occasional wooden performances tending to be linked to characters who are there as adjuncts to Cruise's journey and not essential, emotional encounters. I wouldn't recommend watching it in one sitting. It's long, and there's a lot to think about. Highly recommended.