PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological* I don't think I consistently watched Nickelodeon's AVATAR during its initial broadcast, so I'm playing catchup here, digesting all the rules of the show's fantasy-realm as well as a decent-sized cast of characters. I'm not sure I'm quite ready to pronounce it "one of the best animated TV shows of all time," but at least it's a contender.
I've read no accounts of the genesis of the series, which takes place in a vaguely Asian world. Since primeval times, there have been four tribes, each of which may spawn individuals who can wield power over one of the four elements: fire, water, earth and air. I've not seen anything quite like this talent outside of superhero comics, but I speculate that the creators might have been drawing on Chinese stories about the discipline of qinggong, which gives practitioners (in fiction at least) the power to manipulate great energies. One hundred years before the main timeline of the show, the Fire Tribe seeks to master all of the other tribes. One legendary individual, the Avatar, was capable of mastering all four elements, but the Avatar disappeared just when the Fire Tribe arose. I'm not sure what keeps the Fire-practitioners from conquering all their neighbors. The siblings Sokka and Katara-- the latter being a Water-bender-- come across a twelve-year-old boy frozen in ice. After they thaw him out, they learn that his name is Aang and that before he was frozen, he was training to master all four of the elemental disciplines, in order to prevent the Fire Tribe from gaining hegemony. But Aang didn't finish his training, and commands only the skill of air-bending. To save the world from the Fire Tribe's dominion, Sokka and Katara join Aang in his quest to master his powers.
AVATAR is a very likeable series, with a highly original concept and a playful sense of how to expand its fantasy-world. The twenty episodes of Season One-- possibly subtitled "water" because Aang takes lessons in water-bending from Katara-- are all good formula-adventures. Because those adventures are so peripatetic, there's not a lot of opportunity to build up support-characters, with the exception of Season One's primary opponent: Zuko, heir apparent to the King of the Fire Tribe. Zuko has a number of parental issues and desperately wants to capture the Avatar to prove himself. Yet in one episode, "The Blue Spirit," Zuko rebels against his father's admiral Zhao and rescues Aang from captivity, for reasons he doesn't entirely comprehend. There's a lot of good camaraderie between the three young heroes and even their mount, the six-legged sky-bison Appa. However, no particular episodes struck me as having deep symbolic complexity. Still, I have hopes for the next two seasons.
PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological* The five-hour mini-series WILD PALMS was adapted from a serial magazine comic from one Bruce Wagner, who also scripted the adaptation of his work for this ABC project. Oliver Stone executive-produced while four separate directors helmed the five episodes. ABC was allegedly seeking an "arty" offering that might pull in some of the high ratings that the 1990-91 TWIN PEAKS had enjoyed before it imploded, and they sprang for an all-star cast: Jim Belushi, Dana Delany, Kim Cattrall, Robert Loggia and Angie Dickinson. These five performers provide the primary ensemble, though there are at least a dozen secondary players, few of whom Wagner makes interesting or relevant to the muddled plot.
In the near-future of 2007 Los Angeles, patent attorney Harry Wyckoff (Belushi) seems to be living a mostly blessed life, with beauteous wife Grace (Delany), two children, and a strong expectation that he's soon going to become a partner at his law firm. He has a weird dream about a rhinoceros at the story's opening-- one of the many hermetic symbols that's barely if at all deciphered-- but on the whole his life is fine. Then, after the fashion of many a film noir protagonist, temptation knocks on his office door, in the form of old girlfriend Paige (Cattrall). Paige has lost track of her grown son and wants Harry to play detective and find the offspring. Harry never really does play Philip Marlowe, though, because Paige is simply roping him in as the witness to a massive cultural conflict seeking dominance of the American culture. Paige is tied to an oppressive faction called "The Fathers," led by Senator Kreutzer (Loggia), who also controls a Scientology-like cult. His main goal-- allegedly not in the original comic-- is that he seeks what one character calls a "techno-shamanistic key to eternity" which will make his dominion possible. Against Kreutzer's power are ranged an equally secret cabal, The Friends. Kruetzer's sister Josie Kruetzer-Ito (Dickinson) is also involved in the Senator's vague scheme, sometimes operating as an enforcer.
Wagner never resolves most of the mysteries he introduces, and possibly, if he had any notion of translating his comics-concept into something along the lines of TWIN PEAKS, he might've thought explanations counter-intuitive. Comparisons to Philip K. Dick crop up frequently in reviews of WILD PALMS as well, and many Dick novels do place some hapless, clueless protagonist at the center of some vast conspiracy that's never fully explicated. That said, Dick usually finds at least a tenuous reason for the hero to be the focus of conspiratorial attentions. Why do both the Fathers and the Friends want to enlist Harry, a rather mediocre figure, into their grand schemes? These schemes are laid long before Harry dreams of any rhinos, starting with a sort of "changeling myth." Apparently, the son that Harry and Grace raised was never their child; instead, that boy was abducted and replaced by another one, sired by both Kreutzer and Paige. Wagner evokes this "child-stealing" trope several times, but I for one couldn't figure out what was its significance within the grand plan.
I should note that at least one of Kreutzer's motives for suborning the services of Harry is that of jealousy. Though he sires a child with the much younger Paige, Kreutzer is jealous of Paige's more passionate feelings toward Harry, so at least some of his scheme comes down to dicking with a rival. Sister Josie isn't much less weird. She has a thing for her Eli, her former husband, and father to Harry's wife Grace, although Eli is now one of the Friends, and may have organized the resistance to counter both Kreutzer and Josie. But is there something going on between the Kreutzer siblings? One of Josie's earliest scenes with Kreutzer has him half-naked on a massage-bed while she rubs him down with body-lotion. In that scene, Josie complains that she doesn't like her brother's artist-friend Tully because he has too much influence over the Senator. (Tully also becomes one of the Friends at some point.) The very next scene shows the artist (Nick Mancuso) ending a movie-date with his sister Mazie, who makes the strange remark, "Brothers and sisters share the sweetest mysteries." Josie then has Mazie kidnapped and killed. Later Josie and her goons bust into Tully's studio, and while the goons restrain the artist, Josie does an Oedipus on Tully's eyes-- easily the most memorable scene in the serial's disjointed continuity. Belushi handles both the confusion and rage of his hapless protagonist well enough, though his character doesn't get much of a resolution since the final segment just kind of fizzles out. Loggia and Dickinson get the best scenes, and while Loggia played various evildoers in his career, Dickinson's intense villainess-turn is a welcome change. Wagner's script is forever asserting its own cleverness, but many of the mysterioso scenes fall flat. Episodes of TWIN PEAKS also teased the viewer with mysteries that would never be resolved, but under David Lynch's aegis, the episodes looked as good as any of Lynch's cinematic projects. In contrast, the segments of PALMS, regardless of director, all look flat and uninvolving, possibly because the directors didn't know what the story was about, any more than did most viewers. The science-fiction content here is generally low-level, thus falling into the domain of the uncanny. SPOILER-IFIC ADDENDUM: I thought about not revealing the "shocking ending," but decided I would do so to explain why I rated the story's mythicity as "fair." I think what Wagner was clumsily seeking to do was to portray Kreutzer and Josie as the sibling-deities of a new regime, like Zeus and Hera, even though both "gods" are more focused on having relations with "mortals" outside their power-sphere. The big reveal of PALMS' last episode is that Kreutzer is actually Harry's father, as the older man cuckolded the husband of Harry's mother. Apparently for no reason but sadism, Kreutzer later seduced his son's girlfriend and impregnated her, which led to the whole pointless changeling-scenario. Thus Harry and Grace raise the Kreutzer-Paige child "Coty" for the next eleven years, while Kruetzer's minions raise the Harry-Grace offspring "Peter." Given that Josie is both Harry's aunt and Grace's mother, this means that Peter is the product of literal first-cousin incest, while Coty is the result of purely symbolic incest. Yet, though Wagner doesn't really elaborate any themes from all this kid-switching, I have to believe it significant that "real incest kid" Peter remains substantially good, while "symbolic incest kid" Coty acts the part of a "bad seed" until the story's end. Josie abuses her child Grace even more badly than Kreutzer messes with Harry, with the final outcome being Grace's death at her mother's own hands. Josie doesn't interact much with Harry, but I thought her persecution of artist Tully, Kreutzer's "favored son," might carry another symbolic incest-vibe, if only because the actor playing Tully was roughly seventeen years younger than the one playing Josie. I suppose that the details of a botched narrative are only of academic interest, but this trope proves more interesting than any of the pretentious observations that Wagner produced consciously.
PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological* Although the "Rock and Roll Girl" of the title is indubitably Kelly, she, Peg and Bud are equally complicit in contriving a new set of tortures for the Bundy paterfamilias. As in many other episodes, the series of unfortunate events comes about when Al dares to go against his destiny to ceaselessly dispense his hard-earned money to his ungrateful family members. Al declares that he will match, at triple value, any money that the three parasites can manage to earn on their own. The declaration is even stupider given that the matching concept comes from Marcy, which should have been enough to warn him off.
Peg, for her part, starts off poorly, though as usual she manages to transfer the penalties of her failure to Al. Thanks to Bud's talent for scheming, though, he and Kelly come off much better. Bud manages to set Kelly dancing sexily in a music video and he even helps her eliminate some of the competition while scoring with other female performers. Kelly herself even shows a bit of cleverness in getting rid of a rival, though the usual dumb jokes are never in short supply. Al-- who suffers from tunnel vision regarding Kelly's obvious promiscuity-- finds out about the video and charges to the studio, intent on beating down anyone who compromises Kelly's non-existent virtue.
In the BLONDIE comics, punching-bag Dagwood often gets either physically or financially clobbered, but usually not both, at the same time. Not Al, though. The video-makers turn aside Al's wrath by casting him in the video, as a guy who gets blown up in a car, for realsies, when a cute blonde girl presses a plunger. Who's the cute blonde girl? Who else? (And she does it twice, no less.) Thus not only do Bud and Kelly make money that Al is forced to triple, Peg uses the occasion to profit from Al's injury, and she gets in on the bonanza. Then off the three demons go to spend Al's money, leaving Al to suffer yet more torments.
PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*,
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological* Even though I never read more than one or two installments of the popular "Destroyer" men's adventure series, it seems like a natural for big-screen adaptation. Apparently the producers signed lead actor Fred Ward for a three-picture deal on the theory that they could finesse the concept into a Bond-like film franchise. Yet. despite hiring two creative persons who had worked on 007 movies (director Guy "GOLDFINGER" Hamilton, writer Christopher ("SPY WHO LOVED ME"), what they ended up producing looks like a big-budget version of one of those cheesy TV-superhero flicks, like the 1970s CAPTAIN AMERICA telefilms.
For reasons never made clear, a super-secret government agency named CURE needs to draft a new agent to learn the rare martial arts discipline "Sinanju," courtesy of the art's only living teacher, eccentric Korean Chiun (Joel Grey). An agent named Mac decides, also for no stated reason, to draft a cop named Sam into becoming Chiun's new pupil. CURE brings this tutelage about by faking Sam's death, giving him a new face via plastic surgery, and rechristening Sam as "Remo Williams" (Fred Ward). Sam, after expressing some mild confusion over his reinvented life, seems to be totally okay with assuming the new identity and bidding farewell to whatever old life he once possessed.
Roughly an hour is then consumed as the obnoxious Chiun puts Remo through a host of ordeals designed to mold him into the perfect government assassin-- a destiny that Remo also has zero problems with. I'm sure the intent of the many training scenes was meant not just to establish how Remo becomes a physical paragon who can dodge bullets and suchlike, but to build up the sense of an emotional bond between student and teacher. These character-establishing scenes between Ward and Grey are decent, and the best thing in ADVENTURE. But the movie is a total letdown in terms of its villains. I couldn't determine from the Internet the plot of the first DESTROYER novel, so I don't know if that's the template scripter Wood followed. But wherever it came from, it was a terrible idea to give the new hero a fat-cat villain who's running a scam to bilk the US military, and who just has a small collection of thugs working for him. Moreover, despite a "big" scene filmed at the real Statue of Liberty, all of the stunts are pedestrian, like Hamilton's direction. Ward, Grey and Kate Mulgrew (playing a potential love interest for Remo) try hard. But the overall effect is as if ADVENTURE was made by people who never even SAW a Bond movie before, much less that any of them had actually worked on one.
PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*,
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological* Director Don McDougall, whose long list of TV episodes includes some very nice work for shows like RAWHIDE and Classic TREK, probably had to make the best of things when he drew this assignment. He had to take the script for the 1940 MARK OF ZORRO, one of the most sumptuous swashbucklers of the Classical Hollywood era and squish its plot and action down into about 75 minutes. Still, enough of the mythic aspects of the 20th-Century Fox version of Zorro come through that I can give this 1974 MARK a fair rating.
The telefilm's best asset is star Frank Langella in the dual role of Zorro and his foppish civilian ID Diego Vega. The actor had to follow closely in the shoes of Tyrone Power, but I thought he gave both characters as much mojo as anyone could under the circumstances. Ricardo Montalban is in a similar position, playing Esteban, the military power behind the corrupt alcalde's rule, but in some ways he's better off, since his normal acting-style was more florid than that of his predecessor, and thus his Esteban doesn't seem too derivative. The rest of the cast deliver decent perfs, from Gilbert Roland and Yvonne deCarlo as Diego's dad and mom, to Robert Middleton and Louise Sorel as the alcalde and his perhaps unfaithful wife. Anne Archer gets one good scene as the romantic interest Teresa-- the one taking place in the church, where Zorro's pretending to be a priest-- but her character doesn't get nearly as much attention as the Linda Darnell version did. She doesn't even get a final clinch with the hero at the conclusion. Her casting in terms of her age is a bit odd too. In the 1940 film, Gale Sondergaard, then a little over forty, played the aunt of Teresa, and that role was played by Linda Darnell, who was then seventeen. In contrast, Anne Archer was only seven years younger than Louise Sorel. There's an odd remark by Middleton's character about how some figure akin to Zorro may have been observed in "The Pyrenees" of Spain, which was perhaps meant to address where Diego got the idea of Zorro. Possibly this remark was in the 1940 film too, but I'm not inspired to find out.
PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*,
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological* ZORRO IN THE COURT OF SPAIN starts rather slowly but soon shapes up into a decent little swashbuckler. Most of the movie's alternate titles seem to emphasize the titular masked hero swashing his buckles in Spain, so I've no idea why the English dub I saw claims that the action all takes place in "Lusitania," which in recent centuries usually connoted Portugal. All the names involved in the court-intrigue are almost certainly fictional, so the change wasn't made to offset political connotations.
As with some of the other "Euro-Zorros" around this time, being set in Europe raises the stakes from the more modest adventures of the California-based Fox. A new grand duke, brother of the previous and deceased duke, has challenged the widowed duchess for the throne of Lusitania. The duchess has gone into hiding with her allies, but for some reason she's separated from her small daughter, and one of those allies takes the little girl to Lusitania Capital (I'll call it) to hide her from the enemy in a monastery/orphanage. The Duke either lives in the Capital or close to it, doing various tyrannical things with the help of his main henchman Captain Miguel (Alberto Lupo), so this choice of locations doesn't seem like the swiftest idea. In due time the Duke and Miguel will get their hands on the kid in order to force the duchess to abdicate. In addition, evil Miguel has been pestering Marquise di Villa Verde to let him marry beauteous Bianca (Nadia Marlowa), despite the fact that Bianca is betrothed to marry the Marquise's son Riccardo (George Ardisson), also Bianca's cousin. Riccardo comes to the Capital just in time for all these events, having been to Mexico for training as a young cavalier (one of two major flippings of the usual Zorro-script).
Apparently, Riccardo and his factotum Paquito got some advance intel on the troubles in Lusitania, because as soon as he arrives, he's already got the whole Zorro idea thought out. He immediately plays the part of the jaded aristocrat with no interest in local politics, so as to allay any suspicions from Captain Miguel and his sister Isabella, who oddly is currently married to the Marquise. The father of Riccardo and Isabella have no interpersonal relations, though, so this may be a change made by a translator. Some Zorro-stories give the main heroine an interfering aunt, which may be where Isabella comes from, but she only has one scene relevant to the narrative and totally disappears from the latter part of the movie. Anyway, Riccardo's louche act alienates both his father and Bianca, but it works to allow the hero to listen in on the plots of his enemies and work to counter them as-- Zorro!
The fight-scenes are passable and Ardisson makes an okay masked avenger, even though he gets more mileage out of the Riccardo role. But the most interesting change is that although the heroine goes through the usual process of rejecting Riccardo while going gaga over his costumed identity, this time Zorro marries the heroine in his non-costumed identity. No rationale is presented, though possibly Riccardo does this to block Miguel from forcing Bianca to marry him. Riccardo, knowing that Bianca doesn't love his false identity, refrains from making her share his marriage-bed. But of course, once he rescues the little girl from the evildoers and gives the duchess the chance to oust the evil Duke, Zorro can unmask and the two enjoy connubial bliss. The villains are not very stylish this time, but the romance is much better developed than in the majority of B-Zorros.
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MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical* Though I thought SPLIT SECOND was a decent formula flick, I can see why a lot of reviewers bagged on it. The title is generic and means nothing, at most reminding people of a lot of inferior Rutger Hauer vehicles. The original script was intended to pit two buddy-cops against a supernatural serial killer in modern Los Angeles, but because this idea resembled another movie in production, the setting was changed to London in the near future. And in the first 20 minutes, Hauer's character Harley Stone is given a background suspiciously similar to that of Sam Spade in Hammett's classic MALTESE FALCON.
That said, scripter Gary Scott Thompson adds a lot of colorful details that make up for this bit of literary pilfering. I suppose the main reason the action changed from LA to London was that SECOND became a US-Great Britain co-production, meaning that most of the cast is British, aside from Hauer, Kim Cattrall and Michael J. Pollard (the latter in a bit part). But it's fun to see Hauer channeling Dirty Harry in a British setting and chafing at being teamed with a British college-boy cop rather than an America one. In addition, Thompson's near-future London is full of watery streets, thanks to the results of global warming, and this adds some extra visual interest without requiring any major changes to the London architecture. Further, Thompson gives his version of Dirty Harry more human touches. He gets exhausted from running around chasing a maniacal serial killer and simply falls asleep if he's not had enough coffee. When the serial killer gets away after having bloodily slain a female victim, Stone actually puts his coat over the body of the slain woman, just as an act of simple decency. In scenes between Stone and his romantic interest Michele (Cattrall), there's no reference to their guilt over committing infidelity with one another before Michele's husband (and Stone's former partner) was slain by the serial killer. Nevertheless, Stone feverishly pursues the killer as if seeking to expiate past sins, and it's no coincidence that the aggrieved cop shares a psychic link with his "shadow-self." And though Thompson cleaves closely to the trope of "mismatched partners," he at least gives collegiate cop Dick Durkin (Neil Duncan) some funny lines.
The movie's weakest concept is its villain/monster. The original idea was apparently that of a sorcerer who killed victims and stole their hearts for a sacrificial ritual. For whatever reason, the serial killer became what appears to be an alien creature, physically similar to The Alien but hunting victims to collect their hearts, like The Predator. The creature has SF-aspects, like copying the DNA strands of its victims and storing them in its own body for unknown reasons. However, Thompson keeps a lot of the occult lore in the story, which doesn't match up with the ET stuff. But SECOND is predominantly an action-opus, and the two directors manage to keep things blowing up real good. Thompson's more famous for his writing-contributions to the FAST AND THE FURIOUS franchise, but I liked this quirky B-film more than any of those entries.
