Now, if you read many film blogs – I have virtually none on my roll, for reasons that will shortly be apparent, but I read close to a dozen – you know that one of the “fixes” that Bright Young Cinephiles are striving for is to replace “advocacy criticism,” the sort of thumbs-up/down, 4 stars consumer report fancied by most print media, and this blog, with a deeper appreciation of how films work. Don’t say, “this is better than that,” say, “here is why this film has the effect it does.”
My usual response to this is to growl, “well, obviously someone didn’t see A Good Year,” and then ignore them. But it’s worth at least commenting on it, because it’s symptomatic of something: the Post-Modern approach to pop culture, easily my least favorite intellectual trend of the last decade, in which a film/song/play/book’s “goodness” is totally immaterial; being a cultural artifact is enough to make it “good,” and the job of the consumer/critic is to deal with its cultureness. “Quality is subjective,” these people cry, “one man’s trash is another man’s camp icon – a movie is good because it is enjoyed.”
Bullshit. There may not be objectively “good” art, but there sure as hell is objectively “bad” art. It’s all well and good to claim that movies are most important because of how they reflect the Zeitgeist, but that doesn’t mean that The Da Vinci Code isn’t a sack of crap. It most certainly is a sack of crap, and while I’m sure that somewhere there’s some fifteen-year-old who thinks that it was the best film of the year, his criteria for judging cinema are so infinitely distant from my own that his good opinion is of not the slightest value to me. Nor is mine of value to him. That’s fine: I don’t pretend to be God sending criticism down from on high. I have my opinions, and I express them, and being aware of that does not mean that I have to rescind my judgment that the world is a lesser place because of the existence of Lady in the Water.
And that’s what it comes down to, really: let’s not hurt people’s feelings. Lady in the Water must be grappled with because somewhere somebody liked it. That only really means one thing: that person and I shouldn’t ever discuss Lady in the Water. I am perfectly willing to dismiss it as a totally ineffective movie, and as long as I can provide reasons why that is my opinion – and I think I did – I see no reason why I can’t make jokes about M. Night Shyamalan snorting coke.
Because that’s fun: mocking bad movies is so much fun to write, and fun to read, and it doesn’t work if all films are created equal. Nobody ever once said “I really just hate Mystery Science Theater 3000,”* because we all know that we’re just plain superior to bad films. They’re not suddenly “worthy films” because we can enjoy at them in any way. They’re beneath contempt. They are good only for laughing, and for realising that we are infinitely better & wiser & more moral than, say, Coleman Francis.
(Incidentally, this is all certainly because I am not in my heart of hearts a consumer of pop culture; I am in my heart of hearts a movie craftsman. I’m mostly looking for a coherent & distinct logic behind the technical choices made in a film. And discipline, always discipline).
All this has to do with Eragon how? Because this is a bad film. And I’m not interested in talking about it, frankly. I don’t want to explain why it had poor this or ill-advised that or why the editing wasn’t such-and-such or discuss the history of American filmmaking in Eastern Europe.
Instead, I’m just going to serve up some of the thoughts that came to me while I was watching:
-Callow youth loses his adopted family, learns from an aged tutor that he is a chosen wielder of a sacred force, is chased by a man in black robes, diverts to save a princess, and saves the rebels with the help of an assholish buddy? No idea where they got this plot.
-I think you can tell from each performance what drug the actor needed to get through this horrible exercise in check-cashing: Jeremy Irons (Obi-Wan) is clearly drunk, John Malkovich (the Emperor) appears stoned, Robert Carlyle (Vader) is on a cocktail of many illegal narcotics, but cocaine is obviously one of them, and Rachel Weisz (voice of the dragon/Force) is right pissed that they wouldn’t let her have cigarettes in the recording studio.
-The first two signs of trouble, in the first 75 seconds: it opens with Irons slurring his way through some narration wherein every third word is some idiotic fantasy slang for a simple concept (the Varden = rebel army, for example), and you can just tell that Irons hates every moment of it, and is probably having flashbacks. The second sign is that the first line of actual dialogue, delivered by John Malkovich, is this: “I suffer without my stone.”
-30-year-old Sienna Guillory (Leia) has made the bold choice of making every reaction her teenaged character has to anything, to fake an orgasm.
-Every time a character says the name “Galbatorix” – the Emperor – it takes several seconds and they have to really think about it, kind of like “Gayull…baah…torrrr-icks.”
-The angsty teenage hero Eragon (Ed Speleers, who Can. Not. Act.) actually looks at a sunset to express his angst and desire to be off adventuring. At least there was only one sun.
-Eragon and his cousin are totally screwing.
-The relative killed while LukEragon is away has the bald-faced indecency to be his uncle. If you’re going to steal, why can’t you pretend?
-The score is such a sad thing…it wants to bad to be cheerful and upbeat, and it’s so thin.. You keep wanting to go “da-da da de da-di-da” along with. Don’t though, the people sitting next to you will find it annoying, if they’re at all like the people next to me.
-Stefen Fangmeier is a great name for the director of a dragon picture.
-Hey, I just realised: D-ragon. E-ragon. Christ on a crutch.
-You know, when I was fifteen and thought Tolkien was the best author of all time, I wrote a little fantasy story as well. I didn’t seek publication. And it was way better than Eragon.
-The best part is that just when you’re starting to get bored, something huge and inane will happen to pick you right up, almost always involving Ed Speleers trying to…anything.
-Eragon and his dragon are totally screwing.
-Burst out laughing count: 8.
-Would have laughed if my neighbors weren’t getting pissed: 14.
That was good for my soul.
3/10