Not much sun in my story.

Jane Got a Gun

(2016)

(SPOILERS) Movies with the turbulent production history of Jane Got a Gun invariably end up flopping, as often as not because the studio involved, having lost all faith, dumps them. Director Lynne Ramsay dropped out over control issues, Michael Fassbender had already dropped out over Lynne Ramsay issues, Joel Edgerton flipped from bad guy to good guy, Jude Law, Bradley Cooper and finally Ewan McGregor were cast as the villain, and competent journeyman Gavin O’Connor took over the reins. Natalie Portman remained just where she was, though, as did the title, rather suggesting a revenger this is not, at least tonally.

When O’Connor came on board, Edgerton and Anthony Tambakis (the upcoming Bad Boys for Life) rewrote Brian Duffield’s screenplay. One wonders at its state in the first place, as there’s little here that is strikingly different or remarkable. If you’ve seen the likes of 3:10 to Yuma and Open Range (to name a couple of examples from just this century), you’ll recognise the long, slow build-up to the climactic shootout, and the bad guys wanting to get the good guys (or gals) is about as traditional as it comes. What Jane Got a Gun, obviously from the title, boasted was a female lead, although this doesn’t have the pop rewiring or sensibility of Bad Girls or The Quick and the Dead.

Portman’s Jane fails to becomes a shit-hot markswoman, employing Edgerton’s ex-Dan Frost to provided gunslinging skills when hubby Noah Emmerich falls foul of the dread Bishop gang (led by McGregor’s John Bishop) and lies mortally imperilled. What follows, during the planning for the inevitable, is a sometimes-ungainly flashback structure detailing how it was that Jane and Dan became estranged and how she finished up where she is. While scenes involving her encounter with the Bishops, and in particular a sequence where Emmerich bursts in on a brothel, are effective, those with Dan mostly aren’t, including a particular fetid hot air balloon sequence.

The main upside to the flashbacks is McGregor’s remarkably strong performance. With a Tom Selleck moustache and his grin firmly curtailed, along with a decent stab at an accent (an area where he generally falters), he makes for a convincingly steely rotter, and is ably assisted by Boyd Holbrook as his slightly m-m-mad younger brother.

En route to a well-staged climax are several altercations and classic (or clichéd, depending on your tastes) exchanges (“Pain you to take a life like that?” asks Jane; “Pain me a lot more to let him do it to me” replies Dan – if it was Clint in this exchange, it would have carried better), and O’Connor seems to have more affinity for the desert environs, even given his short-notice attachment to the project, than for earlier fully-fledged vehicles (the likes of Miracle, Pride and Glory and Warrior are competent but unremarkable movies).

Jane’s cathartic encounter with Bishop is a little on the pedestrian side, but you knew it was heading that way; the cop out regarding the presumed dead daughter is a really quite terrible cheat, though, suggestive of a slew of studio-mandated changes; the truncated running time too may be indicative of scenes ending up on the cutting room floor. Nevertheless, Jane Got a Gun doesn’t deserve to have been roundly ignored the way it was. It’s a serviceable little western, well-performed all round and delivering where it counts.

Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.

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Marriage Story (2019)
(SPOILERS) I don’t tend to fall heavily for Noah Baumbach fare. He’s undoubtedly a distinctive voice – even if his collaborations with Wes Anderson are the least of that director’s efforts – but his devotion to an exclusive, rarefied New York bubble becomes ever more off-putting with each new project. And ever more identifiable as being a lesser chronicler of the city’s privileged quirks than his now disinherited forbear Woody Allen, who at his peak mastered a balancing act between the insightful, hilarious and self-effacing. Marriage Story finds Baumbach going yet again where Woody went before, this time brushing up against the director’s Ingmar Bergman fixation.

You're not only wrong. You're wrong at the top of your voice.

Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)
I’ve seen comments suggesting that John Sturges’ thriller hasn’t aged well, which I find rather mystifying. Sure, some of the characterisations border on the cardboard, but the director imbues the story with a taut, economical backbone.

My name is Dr. King Schultz, this is my valet, Django, and these are our horses, Fritz, and Tony.

Django Unchained (2012)
(MINOR SPOILERS) Since the painful misstep of Grindhouse/Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino has regained the higher ground like never before. Pulp Fiction, his previous commercial and critical peak, has been at very least equalled by the back-to-back hits of Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained. Having been underwhelmed by his post Pulp Fiction efforts (albeit, I admired his technical advances as a director in Kill Bill), I was pleasantly surprised by Inglourious Basterds. It was no work of genius (so not Pulp Fiction) by any means, but there was a gleeful irreverence in its treatment of history and even to the nominal heroic status of its titular protagonists. Tonally, it was a good fit for the director’s “cool” aesthetic. As a purveyor of postmodern pastiche, where the surface level is the subtext, in some ways he was operating at his zenith. Django Unchained is a retreat from that position, the director caught in the tug between his all-important aesthetic pr…

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Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
(1982)
(SPOILERS) I don’t love Star Trek, but I do love Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. That probably isn’t just me, but a common refrain of many a non-devotee of the series. Although, it used to apply to The Voyage Home (the funny one, with the whales, the Star Trek even the target audience for Three Men and a Baby could enjoy). Unfortunately, its high regard has also become the desperate, self-destructive, song-and-verse, be-all-and-end-all of the overlords of the franchise itself, in whichever iteration, it seems. This is understandable to an extent, as Khan is that rare movie sequel made to transcendent effect on almost every level, and one that stands the test of time every bit as well (better, even) as when it was first unveiled.

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The Pleasure Garden (1925)
(SPOILERS) Hitchcock’s first credit as director, and his account of the production difficulties, as related to Francois Truffaut, is by and large more pleasurable than The Pleasure Garden itself. The Italian location shoot in involved the confiscation of undeclared film stock, having to recast a key role and borrowing money from the star when Hitch ran out of the stuff.

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Batman (1989)
(SPOILERS) There’s Jaws, there’s Star Wars, and then there’s Batman in terms of defining the modern blockbuster. Jaws’ success was so profound, it changed the way movies were made and marketed. Batman’s marketing was so profound, it changed the way tentpoles would be perceived: as cash cows. Disney tried to reproduce the effect the following year with Dick Tracy, to markedly less enthusiastic response. None of this places Batman in the company of Jaws as a classic movie sold well, far from it. It just so happened to hit the spot. As Tim Burton put it, it was “more of a cultural phenomenon than a great movie”. It’s difficult to disagree with his verdict that the finished product (for that is what it is) is “mainly boring”.

Now, of course, the Burton bat has been usurped by the Nolan incarnation (and soon the Snyder). They have some things in common. Both take the character seriously and favour a sombre tone, which was much more of shock to the system when Burton did it (even…

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Vampire Academy (2014)
My willingness to give writer Daniel Waters some slack on the grounds of early glories sometimes pays off (Sex and Death 101) and sometimes, as with this messy and indistinct Young Adult adaptation, it doesn’t. If Vampire Academy plods along as a less than innovative smart-mouthed Buffy rip-off that might be because, if you added vampires to Heathers, you would probably get something not so far from the world of Joss Whedon. Unfortunately inspiration is a low ebb throughout, not helped any by tepid direction from Daniel’s sometimes-reliable brother Mark and a couple of hopelessly plankish leads who do their best to dampen down any wit that occasionally attempts to surface.

I can only presume there’s a never-ending pile of Young Adult fiction poised for big screen failure, all of it comprising multi-novel storylines just begging for a moment in the Sun. Every time an adaptation crashes and burns (and the odds are that they will) another one rises, hydra-like, hoping…

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Total Recall (1990)
(SPOILERS) Paul Verhoeven offered his post-mortem on the failures of the remakes of Total Recall (2012) and Robocop (2013) when he suggested “They take these absurd stories and make them too serious”. There may be something in this, but I suspect the kernel of their issues is simply filmmakers without either the smarts or vision, or both, to make something distinctive from the material. No one would have suggested the problem with David Cronenberg’s prospective Total Recall was over-seriousness, yet his version would have been far from a quip-heavy Raiders of the Lost Ark Go to Mars (as he attributes screenwriter Ron Shusset’s take on the material). Indeed, I’d go as far as saying not only the star, but also the director of Total Recall (1990) were miscast, making it something of a miracle it works to the extent it does.

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The Avengers 2.22: Murdersville
Brian Clemens' witty take on village life gone bad is one of the highlights of the fifth season. Inspired by Bad Day at Black Rock, one wonders how much Murdersville's premise of unsettling impulses lurking beneath an idyllic surface were set to influence both Straw Dogs and The Wicker Mana few years later (one could also suggest it premeditates the brand of backwoods horrors soon to be found in American cinema from the likes of Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper).

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Escape from New York (1981)
(SPOILERS) There’s a refreshingly simplicity to John Carpenter’s nightmare vision of 1997. Society and government don’t represent a global pyramid; they’re messy and erratic, and can go deeply, deeply wrong without connivance, subterfuge, engineered rebellions or recourse to reset. There’s also a sense of playfulness here, of self-conscious cynicism regarding the survival prospects for the US, as voiced by Kurt Russell’s riff on Clint Eastwood anti-heroics in the decidedly not dead form of Snake Plissken. But in contrast to Carpenter’s later Big Trouble in Little China (where Russell is merciless to the legend of John Wayne), Escape from New York is underpinned by a relentlessly grim, grounded aesthetic, one that lends texture and substance; it remains one of the most convincing and memorable of dystopian visions.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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