Gorky Park (1983): adapted from the Martin Cruz Smith novel by Dennis Potter; directed by Michael Apted; starring William Hurt (Arkady Renko), Lee Marvin (Jack Osborne), Brian Dennehy (William Kirwill), Joanna Pacula (Irina Asanova), Richard Griffiths (Anton), and Ian Bannen (Iamskoy):
A perfectly respectable, big-budget adaptation of Martin Cruz Smith's first novel featuring morose Soviet detective Arkady Renko. William Hurt is physically miscast as Renko, but he does a good job with the pensive, morose part of the character.
The real problem is that as able a writer as adapter Michael Potter is (he of BBC standouts The Singing Detective and Pennies From Heaven, both made into problematic Hollywood adaptations themselves), he has to either jettison the lengthy descriptions of life in the late-Soviet-era Russia of the novel or use a voice-over. And the film-makers clearly decided against a voice-over. And Gorky Park really needed one. Without it, we're either shown stuff that requires context or told stuff in awkward expository sections.
Stripped of Cruz's detailed, pungent descriptions of life in late-1970's Moscow, Gorky Park becomes a generic detective thriller with an underwhelming MacGuffin. That MacGuffin was interesting in the novel; here it seems almost perfunctory, as does the identity of the killer. Yes, you will guess the identity of the killer quite easily because he's the most obvious suspect and because there really aren't any other suspects. Oh, well.
This certainly isn't a bad movie. And you do get to see a young Joanna Pacula's boobies and William Hurt's naked ass, depending on what sort of nudity spins your dial. And Brian Dennehy is so much fun as an American cop that he seems to have wandered in accidentally from the set of another, juicier movie. Lightly recommended.
Citizen X: adapted by Chris Gerolmo from the non-fiction book by Robert Cullen; directed by Chris Gerolmo; starring Stephen Rea (Lt. Viktor Burakov), Donald Sutherland (Colonel Fetisov), Max von Sydow (Dr. Bukhanovsky), Jeffrey DeMunn (Andrei Chikatilo), and Joss Ackland (Bondarchuk) (1995): Solid and somewhat atypical HBO police procedural follows the dogged efforts of a Soviet forensic scientist (Stephen Rea) and his sardonic but surprisingly competent superior officer (Donald Sutherland) as they attempt to track down the (real) Ripper of Rostov, a Soviet serial killer of the 1970's and 1980's who murdered in excess of 50 people, the majority of them teenagers or children.
Citizen X hews fairly close to the truth -- indeed, the major changes come not to the pursuit itself but to the portrayal of the Soviet bureaucracy, heightened here for informational effect as much as dramatic effect. Anyone who's read Martin Cruz Smith's novels of Soviet detective Arkady Renko (Gorky Park being the most famous of those) will recognize the self-defeating levels of the Soviet bureaucratic machine -- and the stubborn investigators who seek justice regardless.
The Ripper's murders stay mostly off-screen and non-sensationalistic. The bureaucratic screw-ups we see aren't only a Soviet problem -- indeed, they'll remind one of many such politically motivated screw-ups in the history of Western police work. Throughout the film, Stephen Rea is perfect as the quiet, stubborn-bordering-on-obsessed lead investigator.
Donald Sutherland supplies a cynical, sarcastic counterpoint to Rea's character, though Sutherland's C.O. reveals hidden, sympathetic depths as the film proceeds. Max von Sydow delights as the only Soviet psychiatrist willing to help profile the Ripper, and Jeffrey DeMunn is chillingly bland and lucky as the Ripper himself. He's the quintessential serial-killer-as-nebbish, and a welcome real-world counterpoint to all our fictional serial-killing supermen and superwomen. Highly recommended.
Harry Brown: written by Gary Young; directed by Daniel Barber; starring Michael Caine (Harry Brown), Emily Mortimer (D.I. Frampton), and David Bradley (Leonard Attwell) (2009): English riff on both Death Wish and Taxi Driver sees Michael Caine as the eponymous retired, emphysemic ex-Marine go on a killing spree to avenge his friend's death at the hands of a bunch of young hooligans.
The movie's brutal and efficient. Ideologically, it's ridiculous. And while it references the Hell out of Taxi Driver, especially in its score, it's really an English Death Wish. There aren't any moral ambiguities here -- the bad guys are terrible and Harry Brown is awesome, lacking only a scene in which he saves a kitten from a tree to make him perfect. So the movie is dishonest in terms of realism but honest if one sees it as a revenge fantasy for retired people who want those punks off their lawn by any means necessary. Recommended.
The Church (La chiesa): written by Nick Alexander, Dario Argento, Fabrizio Bava, Lamberto Bava, Franco Ferrini, Dardano Sacchetti, and Michelle Soavi; directed by Michele Soavi; starring Hugh Quarshie (Father Gus), Tomas Arana (Evan), Feodor Chaliapin (The Bishop), Barbara Cupisti (Lisa), and Asia Argento (Lotte) (1989): So vaguely based on the M.R. James story "The Treasure of Abbot Thomas" that I don't view it as an adaptation, The Church is a highly enjoyable though somewhat disjointed piece of melodramatic, religion-soaked Italian horror.
After a wild 12th-century-set prologue that verges on Monty Python and the Holy Grail territory, we move to the late 1980's and a historic church with a very big secret buried beneath it. As this is a horror movie, that secret will be unearthed. There's some attempt at a slow build in the first 45 minutes or so. That build goes on a bit too long and a bit too slowly.
Thankfully, the horror that eventually kicks in is lurid and visually shocking. Michele Soavi is a solid director, and he's working in the traditions of Dario Argento (who helped write) and Mario Bava. Terrible things begin to happen, a couple of them pretty much out of left-field (I'm looking at you, subway train!). All hell's a coming. And the movie shifts its narrative focus in the last third to a totally different protagonist than the first two-thirds. This is strangely liberating, and not something I can recall an American or British horror film ever doing, though I'm sure there are precedents.
Overall, The Church is startling and worthwhile despite the early slowness and what one could charitably describe as somewhat indifferent dubbing in the English-language version. Sometimes it visually quotes medieval woodcuts, sometimes it visually quotes Boris Vallejo paintings. It's that sort of over-heated horror-melodrama. The set design, make-up, and sculpture work are all very impressive and very disturbing. Recommended.
The Guilt Trip: written by Dan Fogelman; directed by Anne Fletcher; starring Seth Rogen (Andrew Brewster), Barbra Streisand (Joyce Brewster), and Brett Cullen (Ben Graw) (2012): Formulaic but well-executed film involves a mother-and-son, cross-country road trip by Barbra Streisand and Seth Rogen. There are some comic surprises and enough drama and funny lines to keep the whole thing merrily rolling along. Recommended.
Superman: Red Son: written by Mark Millar; illustrated by Dave Johnson, Kilian Plunkett, Andrew Robinson and Walden Wong (2003): What if Superman's rocket landed in Stalin's USSR in the 1930's? That's the initial changed premise in this Elseworlds 'What if?' story of a Communist Superman and his crusade to keep everyone on the planet safe, all the time, whether they want him to or not.
It's a much-praised story that riffs an awful lot on a classic Silver-Age Superman 'Imaginary Story' in which Superman, concerned by his failures, exposes himself to a barrage of various types of Kryptonite radiation and ends up splitting into two mono-coloured versions of himself, Superman-Red and Superman-Blue. They're both about 100 times smarter than the original, and thus proceed to eliminate all crime, disease, poverty, and want from Earth in about a week. That was presented as a utopia. What's presented here is also a utopia unless one wants a certain level of freedom.
Superman's powers here are actually greater than pretty much any other version of the character in comic books: he actually can protect everyone on the planet from even relatively small-scale dangers such as car accidents. This causes people to start driving recklessly in great numbers (!!!). Once the Soviet Man of Steel takes over from Stalin, the countries of the world join the Communist Bloc with the exception of the United States. Lex Luthor helps keep the U.S. free while trying to figure out how to stop Superman. Some heroes join Superman (Wonder Woman being the prime example) while others are deployed against him (Green Lantern and Batman).
It's all fairly enjoyable, though I'm not entirely sure why this is praised as much as it is: besides Superman-Red/Superman-Blue, there's a Marvel graphic novel from the 1980's, Emperor Doom, which covers pretty much the same territory in about 1/3 the space, while Alan Moore's Marvelman (aka Miracleman) epic also ends in similar territory, only with much better writing.
Time constraints also forced an art change with the last third of the collected book (the third issue of the three issue miniseries in its original printing). Dave Johnson's work is cleaner and more suited to the narrative, making the change a bit jarring when the art switches to Kilian Plunkett. The twist ending is nice, if a bit gimmicky and telegraphed a bit too much in the closing pages. Lightly recommended.
Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith (1981): Smith's late-Cold-War thriller was a huge success in 1981, soon spawning a big-budget film adaptation starring William Hurt. It involves the efforts of Moscow homicide investigator Arkady Renko to somehow solve a triple homicide that ultimately almost no one -- not the Politburo, his superiors, or the KGB -- wants him to solve.
The novel's greatest strength is its accumulation of detail about the workings of Soviet society at the tail end of the Brehznev era. Regardless of how accurate the novel's details are, they seem accurate through their specificity and consistency and through Smith's wide-ranging depiction of everything from the philosophy of appliance-buying to the average citizen's reliance on vodka.
The middle-aged Renko is a sharply drawn character in the world-weary but noble tradition of hard-boiled detectives, and his outsider-status in his own department almost makes him a private detective rather than a cop. Burdened by family history (his mother committed suicide while his still-living father is an unrepentant former general with Stalinist leanings), Renko nonetheless doggedly pursues the truth in a situation where no one really wants to know the truth.
As a depiction of a decaying totalitarian system, Gorky Park is excellent -- the Soviet bureaucracy is a blighted wonder to behold. But the novel also takes the worst aspects of the United States to task as it winds its labyrinthine way through a conspiracy that's both much more and much less than it appears to be. Highly recommended.
