Drum Media reviews, October p2: THE THREE MUSKETEERS, MIDNIGHT IN PARIS, DRIVE

The creative team behind this latest take on The Three Musketeers doesn’t merely take liberties with Alexander Dumas’ text, so much as dig up his rotting corpse and play urine-swordfights over it. It’s the kind of blockbuster spectacle in which everyone involved has together decided ‘Screw It!’; in regards to trivial things like faithfulness to source material, historical accuracy, narrative cohesion… even to the idea of bringing gravity to the sight of celebrities in period dress. All that’s missing is a Justin Bieber song over the end credits. And frankly, it’s a lot of fun for exactly those reasons.

Shown in surprisingly tolerable 3D, the film’s inconsequential plot provides a loose framework for a barrage of lame quips and lots of swashbuckling action scenes, edited frequently in hilarious Matrix-style slo-mo by director Paul ‘Adamantly Not Thomas’ Anderson. The cast play all this silliness admirably straight-faced; Inglorious Basterds’ Oscar-winner Christoph Waltz takes the dubious honour of top acting prizes here, while Orlando Bloom proves infinitely more enjoyable as a Tim Curry-esque slimeball than the bland heartthrob of thePirates of the Caribbean and Lord of the Rings films.

Meanwhile, Anderson generously affords a never-more-lush Milla Jovovich as Milady the kind of kickarsery that she mastered from their Resident Evil movies (try not giggling during the scene where she acrobatically defeats a wire-trapped room). It’s all unmistakably Hollywood hackwork, but it also has a crucial element lacking in so many franchise kickstarts/cash grabs – notably that lumbering latest installment of the Pirates series – and that’s joy. And really, who doesn’t prefer anarchic liberty to slavish fidelity?

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If you’ve ever taken pleasure in imagining your windshield as a cinema-scope frame whilst driving at night (preferably to synth-pop), Drive is the film for you. A largely dialogue-shorn adaptation of James Sallis’ well-regarded novel of the same title, its center is a nameless Hollywood-stunt-driver (Ryan Gosling) who moonlights as a getaway driver for criminals of the LA underworld, and the violent fallout of a job performed seflessly for his neighbour-crush (Carey Mulligan). It’s a film that self-consciously aims for a brand of 80’s retro-chic cool, and improbably succeeds; achieving a kind of purity that reminds you why its clichés and archetypes of choice have endured.

Its director is Danish maverick Nicolas Winding Refn, a talented stylist frequently let down by projects bereft of actual ideas (cf. Bronson and Valhalla Rising). With a potently pared-down template to work from, Drive emerges a textbook example of style-as-substance; the ethereally rendered Los Angeles acting as a romantic dreamscape counterpoint to the cool-headed professionalism and practicality (and eventually brutality) of its protagonist. Refn favors moody languor over the quick-cutting and incoherent spatiality so detrimental to many a modern suspense film, and in Gosling, he has a soulful lead presence whose all-in-the-eyes sense of internal conflict energises the many brooding stretches.

Simultaneously reminiscent of a billion films (from Le Samourai to Punch-Drunk Love to every LA neo-noir of the 70’s and 80’s) yet unmistakably its own unique concoction, Drive is the closest genre filmmaking gets to inducing a narcotic state, and in the process, ensures ‘postmodern’ doesn’t have to be a dirty word.

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Woody Allen’s recent Euro-travelogue instincts come out in full force for Midnight in Paris, in which Owen Wilson joins the long line of actors saddled with the task of Allen-mimicry playing Gil, a Hollywood screenwriter and aspiring novelist holidaying in Paris, with his fiancee Inez (Rachel McAdams). Being a woman in a Woody Allen film, Inez is a gorgeous but unpleasant shrew, written with no redeeming qualities aside from the ability to deliver the occasional Allen-zinger, so Gil strolls the Parisian streets at night while she hangs out with her friends.

The film picks up considerable steam when the clock strikes midnight during Gil’s stroll, and he’s magically transported back to the Paris of the 1920’s, where the bespectacled Wilson is greeted to the likes of the Fitzgeralds, Picasso, Dali, Bunuel, and many others. All are impersonated to perfection, with Corey Stoll’s mercurial take on Hemingway being a particular showstopper. Gil – and by extension, Allen – questions both his talent as a novelist and his nostalgia for a bygone era he was never a part of, and it’s through these historical digressions that the film becomes a very on-the-nose rumination on what it means to look back.

Indeed, the ultimate theme is delivered in a monologue that counts as a spoiler of the ending, which really just shows how filmsy the whole thing is as a narrative. But then, context is everything: I suspect the disproportionate praise for Midnight in Paris has to do with the poignancy of seeing Allen, among the most antiquates of filmmakers, finally delivering a critique of his own nostalgic tendencies (a critique undermined by the sense that the story could be taking place any time in the last 50 years, excoriation of Tea Party republicans nonwithstanding). See it for the featherweight charms, and look elsewhere for true insights.