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rfmcdonaldDespite the best efforts of the TTC to keep us from watching it, I managed to catch Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow Thursday evening, at the SilverCity cinema on Yonge and Eglinton. The theatre--number 8, incidentally--was decent, although the theatre was only half-full. I will, in the future, make sure to get popcorn with real butter, not Becel, since Becel tastes wrong.
The press coverage of Sky Captain has emphasized that it's a revival of pulp science fiction, in the style (visual, narrative, and other) of the 1930s and 1940s. The term "pulp" was originally used to refer to a genre of popular literature aimed at mass consumption; the word came from the poor quality of the paper used. The pulp genre at its height often relied on stereotypes--the girl reporter scouting out secrets, the male technology-aided hero and his subordinate but useful sidekick, the supervillain operating from a remote lair.
The film was a remarkable visual experience. The CGI, to my pleasure, was spectacularly good, failing only and oddly to render believable models of cars. The CGI's effectiveness might be linked to the stunning modernity and modernism of the film's setting, a New York City that's revealed as a city of the future as it was thought to be: a city of Art Deco design, filled with clean-limbed skyscrapers, its population informed my mass media like movies in colour and mass-circulation newspapers of record. Though this New York City is set in New York City, it's set in a different kind of city than the one we're familiar with from history. It isn't simply a matter of it being an alternate history, despite certain anachronisms like the use of radar and casual references to "World War I" in 1939. It's a city where modernity has reached its full and complete culmination, at a time when the technologies of industrial civilization are radically new and produce ruptures comparable to those produced by post-industrial civilization now, when the transition from an agrarian civilization is complete.
The lead actors--Jude Law as "Sky Captain" Joe Sullivan, Gwyneth Paltrow as Polly Perkins, Angelina Jolie as British naval commander Frankie Cook, Giovanni Ribisi as Sullivan's sidekick Dex Dearborn--do they jobs quite competently. Ribisi, I think, was cheated by the hyping of Angelina Jolie, since she barely had as much screen time as Ribisi and her character played a less prominent role in the plot. If the acting was flawed--and I speak particularly, though not exclusively, of Gwyneth Paltrow--it was in the lack of import lying behind some of the performances, in the inability of a sense of the narrative's reality to show itself. Things were just slightly off, and although the vague wrongness of the performances didn't hinder my enjoyment of the plot and might well have been intentional, it's still an issue.
The press coverage of Sky Captain has emphasized that it's a revival of pulp science fiction, in the style (visual, narrative, and other) of the 1930s and 1940s. The term "pulp" was originally used to refer to a genre of popular literature aimed at mass consumption; the word came from the poor quality of the paper used. The pulp genre at its height often relied on stereotypes--the girl reporter scouting out secrets, the male technology-aided hero and his subordinate but useful sidekick, the supervillain operating from a remote lair.
The film was a remarkable visual experience. The CGI, to my pleasure, was spectacularly good, failing only and oddly to render believable models of cars. The CGI's effectiveness might be linked to the stunning modernity and modernism of the film's setting, a New York City that's revealed as a city of the future as it was thought to be: a city of Art Deco design, filled with clean-limbed skyscrapers, its population informed my mass media like movies in colour and mass-circulation newspapers of record. Though this New York City is set in New York City, it's set in a different kind of city than the one we're familiar with from history. It isn't simply a matter of it being an alternate history, despite certain anachronisms like the use of radar and casual references to "World War I" in 1939. It's a city where modernity has reached its full and complete culmination, at a time when the technologies of industrial civilization are radically new and produce ruptures comparable to those produced by post-industrial civilization now, when the transition from an agrarian civilization is complete.
The lead actors--Jude Law as "Sky Captain" Joe Sullivan, Gwyneth Paltrow as Polly Perkins, Angelina Jolie as British naval commander Frankie Cook, Giovanni Ribisi as Sullivan's sidekick Dex Dearborn--do they jobs quite competently. Ribisi, I think, was cheated by the hyping of Angelina Jolie, since she barely had as much screen time as Ribisi and her character played a less prominent role in the plot. If the acting was flawed--and I speak particularly, though not exclusively, of Gwyneth Paltrow--it was in the lack of import lying behind some of the performances, in the inability of a sense of the narrative's reality to show itself. Things were just slightly off, and although the vague wrongness of the performances didn't hinder my enjoyment of the plot and might well have been intentional, it's still an issue.
