by Cole Smithey

Gladiator

The title of director Ridley Scott’s latest example of cinema’s computer generated visual possibilities telegraphs the spectacle-over-content aspect of the movie. Gladiator is an unapologetic blood-sport romp that challenges you to blink; lest you miss some hyper-fast blood-splattering from Maximus’s (Russell Crowe - The Insider) vengeful sword. At two and a half hours in length, the movie demands more time from its audience than necessary for a series of modern sport style coliseum battles that escalate the story toward the film’s bloody denouement. With twitches of movies ranging from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to Ben Hur to Death Wish, Gladiator is an uneven $100 million movie that wears out its welcome two-thirds through. But the spectacle of Australian actor Russell Crowe and his crew of fellow gladiators hack their way through various opponents in Scott’s mesmerizing fight sequences before grand-scaled backgrounds has its own obsessive charms.

The director of such milestone films as Alien, Blade Runner, and Thelma and Louise, sets up the story of Roman military general, Maximus, leading thousands of men through fiery victorious battle on a snowy and partially wooded battlefield. The scene is shot on a par with Saving Private Ryan, but 18 centuries ago. In lightening fast blurs, soldiers are clobbered by balls of fire, horses are impaled with arrows and human faces are gashed open with swords in a dark misty blue light. Maximus is a super-human warlord hoping to return to the comfort of his remote placid farm where his wife and son await his return after this last victory for Rome. However his plans are forever dashed when Emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris - Smilla’s Sense of Snow) is murdered by his jealous son, Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix - 8MM), upon offering the crown to Maximus rather then Commodus. Commodus’s immediate arrest of Maximus backfires as the warrior king escapes with his life before being captured and sold slavery as a gladiator for fight promoter/instructor Proximo’s (Oliver Reed - Women In Love) band of fighting slaves.

Gladiator is a visually stunning movie that unintentionally satirizes notions of country, honor, politics, and poor oppressed masses as victims of their own predictable nature as spectator puppets. The only political move that Commodus makes once he takes over as Caesar is to distract Rome’s citizens from its social ills of plague and starvation by bringing bloody death matches to the grand coliseum. Emperor Commodus plays directly to the public’s mob mentality and feeds its bloodlust with gory spectacle. That this effort finally works against Commodus by unpredictable circumstance does nothing to diminish the weight of the film’s example of the power of violent mass public entertainment (de facto: Football, Soccer, or Wrestling) to anesthetize the public mind. Echoes of Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s fascist Italy pop out of Scott’s mocking Super bowl brand of long range overhead "blimp shots" to catch thousands of computer generated masses swarming like flies on Rome’s sticky earth.

The meat of Gladiator lies in the tension drawn between Scott’s striking vistas — complete with impressionist Maxfield Parish styled dream sequences — and Maximus’s double-edged motives of freedom, and revenge. But Scott spikes the punch with too many liquors in an effort to fill out the movie as a member of the epic genre. It’s the movie’s most glaring flaw as epic stories, by definition, span at least two decades of time. Other minor tics, like competing Australian, English, and Irish accents hinder the telling of a simple story. Oliver Reed’s final performance of his erratic yet illustrious acting career (the British actor died from a heart attack during filming) finds the notoriously hard-drinking actor burning brighter at his own finale. Russell Crowe gives a powerfully physical performance weakened by a presumably director sanctioned decision to speak in his native Australian accent. After Crowe’s masterful performance in Michael Mann’s The Insider, the actor emerges here below his own high standard in Gladiator, but still high above the curve.

This movie is another view into Ridley Scott’s time warped dystopic vision of society. Rome looks overpopulated — more Blade Runner than Roman Empire. The skies harbor menace, and seething storms lend a mythological quality to the blood-and-sand action below. It’s not a movie that you will take much from when you leave the cinema, but your eyes will have been tweaked and subtly refocused to imagine impossibly beautiful panoramas. It’s before these newly discovered backgrounds that Scott’s actionfest of retribution takes shape. Blood becomes poisonous mercury, running faster and meaning less.

Center Stage

Dance is an ephemeral, eclectic art form that eludes as much as it mesmerizes most audiences in a typical proscenium setting. Ballet, the dance form and vocabulary that all other dance is built on, remains particularly foreign for all of its acutely demanding technique and gravity defying grace. In Center Stage, screenwriter Carol Heikkinen (The Thing Called Love) generates a hackneyed series of predictable, pedestrian relationships within a group of young dancers auditioning in a yearlong acting workshop to become members of the thinly disguised New York American Ballet Theatre dance company. Heikkinen presents an intimately incestuous environment lurking beneath a modern ballet company to frame a juvenile love triangle between dancers. In so doing, Heikkinen belittles the film’s talented choreographers’ and dancers’ hard work through a soft soap opera story that insults the audience even more.
British director Nicholas Hytner (The Madness of King George, The Crucible) handles his cast of professional dancer-cum-actors in a way that at least supports naturalism from his characters’ naive stereotypes. Jody (Amanda Schull - San Francisco Ballet company member) is a 20 year-old charismatic striving dancer with "the wrong body type" and "bad turn-out." Jody is also a love interest to the ballet company’s motorcycle-riding, male lead dancer, Cooper Nielson (Ethan Stiefel - American Ballet Theatre company member), as well as to her fellow auditioning peer Charlie (Sascha Radetsky - American Ballet Theatre company member). Cooper is a snarky womanizer, as his phenomenal dancing ability would allow, and Charlie is a super sincere boy-next-door type who happens to be a male ballet dancer. As Jody discovers Cooper’s take-no-prisoners approach to love, she also begins to map out a place for herself as a non-traditional dancer beyond the strict limitations of ballet. Schull fits the role perfectly as a porcelain-faced budding prima ballerina in spite of her character’s reputed physical limitations. She has a presence and doll-like charm that melts the scenery and steals focus from the actors around her.
Center Stage is a not a movie directed to the general public. It is specifically geared to dancers as its audience. Dancers will appreciate the dance scenes for their accurateness and for the genre splitting choreography of Broadway choreographer Susan Stroman and New York City Ballet soloist Christopher Wheeldon. The film’s finale dances fuse classical ballet technique and modern dance style into vibrant ensemble pieces that articulate the demands of highly developed ballet technique as executed with modern dance’s signature casual and winking attitude. The dance pieces themselves present a cheesy ten-minute boiled-down version of the film’s entire story that would be far more enjoyable if it could be viewed without prior knowledge of the script. Overly self-important lines like "just dance it like you feel" set the movie up for harsh audience ridicule.
Just as in the film’s poster in which the dancers’ feet take precedence over their faces, so too does the backstage story distract from the dances themselves. It’s highly probable that ballet company members do lead these kind of tawdry soap opera backstage romantic existences and sadly cloistered lives, but that isn’t what dance is, or should be about to an audience. Audiences aren’t allowed backstage for plays or dance performances because it spoils the effect. Center Stage repeatedly loots the art form it proposes to revere by not dramatizing its subject. In so doing the movie gives away something that shouldn’t be handed over. That kind of idea can work perfectly well in a documentary setting, but not in a narrative format.
Plays and dance don’t translate well from the stage to motion pictures. Musical theater died a dog’s death ten years ago but refuses to go away because no one is writing decent plays to fill the venues with anything else. In cinema, teen romance sits as the most abused film genre around. Throwing all of those elements together can only lead to disaster. And with all of that in mind, Center Stage might just be the most entertaining car wreck of a movie available.