Cowboys & aliens

B

Painfully trying to be comic and cool, like geriatric Harrison Ford.

**********************************************************

There's a great satisfaction to be found in a commercial disaster when it's been engineered by Hollywood honchos high on hubris. As was Cowboys & Aliens.

His self-promotional Wikipedia entry indicates that a Scott Mitchell Rosenberg parlayed a profitable business from comic book rehashes and personnel poaching. His claim to movie business fame was his development of the Men in Black scifi action comedy (a claim IMDb does not appear to credit).

He then, self-reportedly, created the genre-bending concept of a Wild Western town in which a gang of cowboy bandits would be obliged to join forces with a cattle baron's gang, the sheriff's posse and the local Indian tribe to save scores of townsfolk abducted by giant alien bugs whose enormous spaceship is sucking gold out of the hills prior to their eventual destruction of Earth. But there's a hero to unite the anti-ETs: he's an amnesiac escapee from the spaceship and he's taken one of its death ray wrist bracelets.

The resultant screenplay for that indigestible brew of bizarre concepts was written by Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, who'd previously collaborated on TV series, The Island and Legend of Zorro (2005), Mission Impossible 3 (2006), Transformers 1 and 2 (2007/9) and the Star Trek reboot (2009): a track record of entertainment blockbusters to make Hollywood accountants salivate.

Yummy, salivated Steven Spielberg, I'll executive produce this sure-fire sucker! Let's spend about US$160 million. My old pal Harrison Ford can play the old rancher. He's very convincing playing old men a la Henry Fonda. We'll pay that Brit Bond Daniel Craig to be the macho antihero with a blank Eastwood-meets-Bronson face.

Somewhere in the Hollywood witches' brewing room, it was realised that the trademark Spielbergian potion of sentimentality was lacking. So the coven added a refugee woman from another planet, the macho man's dead wife, a boy and a dog, the rancher's whimpering bully boy son (Paul Dano) and loyal Indian sidekick - and a kindly preacher and a scared saloon keeper and his Latina wife. A black? No, even Hollywood witches know not to push their luck too far.

Finally, though, to make sure the film was totally incredible and could be seen painfully trying painfully to be comic and cool, like geriatric Harrison, Jon Favreau was given the director's megaphone and the SFX talents were let loose.

Characterless, constantly clanging with cliches, cant and cringe-worthy dialogue, this cornfield of movie-making managed to gross little more than its ludicrously over-ambitious budget. It's probably one of 2011's biggest net losers. Deservedly.

Meek's cutoff

Why does a critically well-rated and attractively-cast Western from a production team with a classy track record fail to get adequate distribution and promotion? Why did Meek's Cutoff only gross one million US dollars during its limited run in North American art-houses?

The history-based tale of three pioneer families lost on their 19th-century Oregon Trail wagon-ride was edited and directed by Kelly Reichardt, a multi-award-winner for Old Joy (2006) and Wendy and Lucy (2008). Neither was mainstream fun; both were based on short stories by Oregon novelist Jon Raymond, a protege of indie director Todd Haynes. In the first, two friends go camping in the mountains; the next film followed a hassled woman (Michelle Williams) and her beloved dog (played by Reichardt's own pet).

Reichardt, Raymond and Williams pooled their talents again for the 2010 Western, adding Bruce Greenwood in the title role of Stephen Meek, a long-haired bearded mountain man employed as a guide. Besides Williams, as one of the group's three submissive wives, the cast also included Will (The Postman) Patton, Paul (There Will Be Blood) Dano and Shirley (Life During Wartime) Henderson. Haynes was an executive producer.

Chris Blauvelt (who worked on Haynes' I'm Still Here) was the cinematographer, and the production designer, David Doernberg, knew Reichardt from her (and his) first feature (River of Grass, 1994). Their work on the arid locations is a joy to watch, in small doses, and might have looked even grander if directed by a Terence Malick. The actors play reserved, tired, dead-panned 19th-century emigrants lost in a wilderness, lost in a tiring cinematic diorama.

Ron Rondeaux, in his first featured movie role, played "The Indian" captured by the ox-wagon train and forced to lead them to water. He's an experienced stuntman who'd also worked on The Postman. In the film industry, jobs arise more often from who you've worked with than from those you just "know": it's commonsense to employ talents that are tested and trusted.

As the DVD's 9-minute "making of" featurette is as self-consciously slow, static and prosaically framed as the movie, it can be assumed that Reichardt deliberately set out to make a docudrama without much drama. The conclusion is probably the least conclusive (or satisfying) of any Western ever made outside Russia. The movie's limited run is clearly explicable.

Let the bullets fly

Great film comedies demand at least two screenings. The second is needed to check if one missed a visual joke or cinematic reference while still giggling over and/or trying to fully comprehend an engrossing sight gag, farcical set-piece, non-sequitor or wild slapstick scene. I suspect Let The Bullets Fly may need a third viewing, because it's one of modern China's cleverest send-ups of, and salutations to, a host of film comventions. It's also devilishly complex.

An honest bandit chief has six lieutenants, two of whom are gay and one a virgin. A fake provincial governor pretends to be his own dead counsellor, thus obliging his wife to sleep with the bandit. Both the men gang up to outwit Goose Town's master criminal, who employs a retarded double as his stand-in and lives in one of the southern China's landmark multi-storied Western-style citadels.

Those bare bones of an early 20th Century dimsum Western (that's also a black comedy and morality tale) are fleshed out with visual delights, such as the governor's deluxe railway train being driven along its tracks by a team of white horses; fifty geese and no townsfolk following the heroes to confront the gangster; a dozen gunmen enduring a mass stand-off because they're all wearing the same mask; a gunman accused of eating two jellies cutting open his stomach to prove that he only ate one.

There are quotations from and tributes to a host of other Western films, in both meanings of the term from oaters and Eastwood to Patton and crime noir. Asian films get nods too, from kung fu epics to Kurosawa and Kitano. Very visibly, but not pretentiously, writer-director Wen Jiang clearly had enormous fun adapting a Sichuanese writer's original story and giving himself the role of the honourable bandit. His co-stars clearly shared his gleeful mood, with Ge You (the conniving pseudo-governor) and Chow Yun-fat (the evil grinning gangster and his idiot double) twisting their cheeks and laughing maniacally while still portraying credible dramatic personae.

The supporting cast is excellent too, and it's tempting to rave about another commercial success from the multi-talented Jiang (including In the Heat of the Sun, Devils on the Doorstep, and The Sun Also Rises as writer-director, Red Sorghum, Black Snow and The Soong Sisters for acting). Shrewdly issuing his movie in Sichuanese as well as Putonghua, he produced an all-time box-office triumph in China in 2010 (grossing more than US$100 million).

Movie industry insiders usually preferring art-house fare, the only Asian Films award it won was for costume design (Hong Kong designer and director William Chang). The grand big-screen cinematography wasn't even nominated, but veteran Zhao Fei, who's worked with top Chinese New Wave directors (and three times with Woody Allen) doesn't need recognition.

Most admirably, a Chinese movie seen by millions can also be seen as a quilt of sly anti-governmental anti-sloganese humanity that slipped past Beijing's censors.

This is another movie whose top rating may be reviewed downward after a second viewing, when unalloyed admiration for its audacity and flair have mellowed. I hope not.

Broken Trail

With 16 Emmy nominations, Broken Trail, the AMC (US cable) network's first feature movie production, was way ahead of regular network products in the 2006 American TV season. It won for dramatic miniseries, male actor (Robert Duvall) and supporting actor (Thomas Haden Church).

Its director, Walter Hill, was experienced in Westerns and handsomely orchestrated more than three hours of lushly coloured cinematography of dramatic landscapes (mostly in Canada's Calgary), racing herds of wild horses, grisly gunfights (with brothel-serving evil henchmen), offbeat human interest stories (slave-trade Chinese girls), low-key romance (Duvall with Greta Scacchi as a prostitute widow), and inter-generational conflict (Duvall, a ranch-seeking uncle, bonding with Haden Church's footloose ranch-hand).

Writer Alan Geoffrion had worked as an assistant for Duvall on a 2003 Western (Kevin Costner's Open Range), but has no other IMDb credit. That's surprising as his debut work is a realistic portrait of America's West, warts and all including branding, mud, human trafficking and fast justice. The women's marital ambitions make sense in their harsh environment, where the men's bashfulness (and formalistic politeness to everyone, even foes) seems oddly but genuinely gallant.

Maybe there are too many cuts to shots of technicolor sunsets, flying horse manes and long grass, and perhaps the screenplay employs an over-sweet veil of decency for its odd couplings. They would explain why Hill and Geoffrion were both Emmy nominees but lost out to Prime Suspect: The Final Act.