Years after witnessing the death of the revered hero Maximus at the hands of his uncle, Lucius is forced to enter the Colosseum after his home is conquered by the tyrannical Emperors who now lead Rome with an iron fist. With rage in his heart and the future of the Empire at stake, Lucius must look to his past to find strength and honor to return the glory of Rome to its people.
01 Dec Gladiator II (2024)
Reverse Ventriloquism
I am roughly the same age as Scott and Coppola and still producing. I’m going to visit their creations out of loyal admiration as much as anything. But also inspiration, because I am pulled between two extremes they represent.
Coppola is an intellectual intuitive that understands the medium and its worst tendencies. He is able to subvert those so cleverly, we don’t see the subversion at all. He is our anti-Scorcese, an Italian ‘New Hollywood’ director who doesn’t follow the Italian playbook where characters drag the story and environment behind. His characters emerge from forces he shows.
Scott is much like Spielberg, a master baker who intends to empty his shop by noon, serving what people want. Yes, he also is an intuitive and has a reputation for being able to take an idea and produce sometime reasonable.
He produced one of the films that I count essential, important. And I thought the recent ‘Napolean’ had embedded humour in the way it chose to pretend to tell the story, through erotic letters.
Reader, you will be looking for different things from these filmmakers than I will. I will know they are closer to 100 than to 50 when most people are intellectually dead. I will know they are driven by something deep, internal, and important. If they make something that moves me, it could move me in a direction of trying to so something that matters rather than something that people like.
Scott lets me down here, or rather gives me a failure interesting enough to be useful in my life. Filmmaking is a collaborative art. The director takes some elements and collaborators and makes them wholly vehicles for his/her vision. And some other resources and collaborators he has to rely on them to somehow fit in and serve the vision. With Crowe, he had dumb, malleable energy that in every scene could be merged into an environment the two correlated. With Washington, he has someone who thinks he knows better, so Scott has to bend all else to fit.
I have similar constellations; all of us do. Should he have walked away when Denzil asserted his vision? Or should he have used his extraordinary skills to adapt and produce something colourful and commercially apt?
Posted in 2024
Ted’s Evaluation — 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.
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