Two mehs and an old favorite

We've watched a few things in the past couple weeks and I thought I'd cover each of them in brief here because I didn't feel like I really had enough to say about any of them in a longer post.

Starting with the good news, we saw Joel Coen's The Tragedy of Macbeth at the Michigan Theater. Macbeth is probably my favorite work of Shakespeare's, not least because I've performed it twice; once in high school and once with a tiny theater group while I was at Michigan. I was the lead in both cases (which is part of why I did it the second time, since I had the experience.) On top of that, with one half of the famous Coen Brothers manning the helm, I figured it was going to be a worthwhile effort and I wasn't disappointed. Like most modern productions, they cut some lines but still preserved the important moments and elements of the story. Unlike many modern reproductions of The Bard, they stuck to a very minimalist presentation, as if we were watching it on stage and the sets could only accommodate what "real life" allowed for. Filming in black-and-white while keeping a high level of contrast between background and foreground was smart, as the story is very much a contest between the dark and the light, albeit with shades of gray. Frances McDormand was excellent as Lady Macbeth, being cunning and scheming without being comedically so and then recognizing their failure and doom without being melodramatic about it. Denzel Washington made me question his selection early on, because he was carrying the intensity (the same that he used so well in Flight) that one is accustomed to seeing in the later, clearly dropping-to-madness Macbeth. But the role is one of Shakespeare's that is perhaps open to some of the widest interpretation and it's fair to ask whether Macbeth was actually unstable from the opening page and the encouragement of his wife was just the final straw that led him to derangement. In the later scenes, of course, Washington excelled at being the villain who still draws sympathy from the audience for the way fortune turned against him ("Out, out, brief candle!") Alex Hassell was also great as the opportunistic Ross and furthered Coen's presentation of the material as spooky and uncertain throughout. Well worth it, even if you're not really a fan of The Bard.

But then we stayed in roughly the same time period and watched The Last Duel. My dismay at the descent of Ridley Scott from storyteller to spectacle ringmaster has been mentioned here before. He's drawn back the reins a bit in recent years, but the focus of his films is still more about making a visual splash than actually telling a story or making a point. He picks a solid framework this time, based on a book about the duel between Jean Le Carrouges and Jacques Le Gris and retelling it in a style reminiscent of Akira Kurosawa's classic, Rashomon. Given that the latter is perhaps my favorite Kurosawa film, one would think that I'd be the prime audience for this one. But the truth is that the story is essentially a medieval soap opera and the entire scenario lacks the basic question presented by Rashomon, where "truth" is a matter of interpretation and perspective. In Last Duel, there is only one basic truth: Marguerite was raped as the most prominent example of the misogynistic nature of medieval French society. You've seen the basic "truth" of the matter as soon as you get through part one, the tribulations of the vainglorious Le Carrouges being just window dressing to that fact, and then you have to sit through two more versions of it which tell you the same thing. There's a bit of titillation so that people can discover the fact that, yes, society was every bit as oriented around sex and ferocious violence as it is today. And due credit has to be extended for the careful attention paid to individual fighting styles, as the fencing techniques employed in the titular duel were appropriate for the time. But the mass combat was, as usual, subject more to Hollywood tropes than reality and despite Matt Damon doing well as an egotistical knight and Ben Affleck likewise performing well as the contemptuous (and frequently contemptible) Count Pierre d'Alençon, there really isn't a whole lot here that you wouldn't have seen on Days of Our Lives with more misogyny and plate mail and certainly not something that should've lasted two-and-a-half hours.

Similarly, Bob Odenkirk's Nobody is essentially a 5-minute skit stretched out into a 90-minute film. There simply isn't enough story here to turn into a feature film. Maybe it would've been better on something like Black Mirror, except that Nobody was a film where thinking was definitely not required and, in fact, was better if you didn't try. There are so many plot holes and moments where suspension of disbelief isn't just lost but is dropped down a very deep hole, never to be found, that the whole thing becomes an exercise in topping the excess of violence that passes for today's action films and, in fact, attempts to top itself from moment to moment. The inclusion of such regular action stars as a much-heavier Michael Ironside, a much smaller Christopher Lloyd, and a not-actually-seen-until-the-last-10-minutes RZA does nothing for the film, although the latter's inclusion at least provided some much needed moments of levity amidst the barrage of angst and shell casings. That's something that Odenkirk normally would have provided, but this was clearly an attempt to "do something different" as an exception to his usual roles. Unfortunately, it didn't really do anything at all. You'd be missing nothing except the greater desire to see Better Caul Saul finally return.