In the midst of watching all of the recently-released Star Wars films (okay, sure, they’re not quite what they were when I first saw them, but they’re still a lot of fun), Prairie and I took a break on Saturday to wander down the hill to see Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.
In short, it was exactly what I was hoping it would be: check your cynicism at the door and have fun.
Visually, it’s astounding — the stylized noir-ish world is beautiful to watch, and I had quite a few moments of simple geek glee at what I was seeing on screen. From the sepia tone of the entire film to the art-deco stylings of late 30’s New York to the giant marauding robots straight out of old pulp science fiction covers, I’m sure I had a goofy grin on my face from beginning to end.
It looks like Mike Whybark also enjoyed the film, and his comments are well worth reading — as he has a fascination with many of the elements that make up the film already (“…the thirties, aviation technology and pulp fiction, lighter-than-air aviation, the cinema of the thirties…”), he’s a bit more critical of some aspects of the film than I am. He does bring up one thing that I noticed right off, though: the similarity of Gwyneth Paltrow‘s Polly Perkins to Rosalind Russell‘s Hildy Johnson in His Girl Friday, one of my favorite movies of all time — and the fact that Paltrow doesn’t hold a candle to Jennifer Jason Leigh‘s homage to Hildy Johnson in the Cohen Brothers’ Hudsucker Proxy as Amy Archer.
But Gwyneth Paltrow’s Polly Perkins, a reporter, is clearly an homage to Rosalind Russell’s Hildy Johnson from the 1940 His Girl Friday. That’s all to the good. Yet, Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Amy Archer, another Russell homage (from The Hudsucker Proxy) captures the stacatto vocal rythms that are crucial to the thirties mise-en-scene. Alas, Paltrow’s dialog and interplay with Jude Law’s mercenary aviator, while lazily amusing, has nowhere near the verbal power of her character’s forebears.
Not that Paltrow does a bad job at all, I just kept thinking that it could be just that much better, if only…. Nice to know that I wasn’t alone in picking up on that.
Anyway, for me, a wonderful film. Definite keeper once it’s out on DVD, and I’m looking forward to getting to see it again.
“Happy Rave ’95 (full mix)” by Various Artists from the album Happy Rave ’95 (full mix) (1995, 1:10:03).
