Neville
Frightening Fanatic of Horrible Cinema
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Posts: 3050
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« on: April 29, 2005, 06:04:06 AM » |
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I don't know if this one has been released yet on the states. It's been on my country for some months in DVD, though, and since I finally managed to read some of the french comics it is based on, I think it is a good moment to speak about it.
Blueberry is a long series of comic books by Jean-Michel Charlier and Jean Giraud that narrate the exploits of Mike Blueberry, an american army liutenant during the late 1860s. While the main series focus on conflicts with indian tribes after the Civil War, some spin-offs show him many years later or during his youth. So far I've only read the first 5-6 albums of the main series, and I'm surprised how diffrent they are from the movie. Blueberry's adventures involve native american tribes and renegade sudist soldiers, which are given a quite modern treatment, but as for the rest, they also have the naivety and enthusiasm of, say, a lone ranger episode. I'm told the comic gets darker and more revisionist in newer albums, but I still have to see it myself. The drawings by Jean Giraud are fantastic, combining something of the old classical western iconography (uniforms, weapons, interiors) with settings and colours that sometimes recall european westerns instead.
The movie is f**king weird. I'm sorry but I have no other way to say it. It features a plot borrowed from some later albums, which show an older Blueberry as the sheriff of Palomino, your standard western village. The main subplots involve a secret mine found deep into indian territory and a stranger that has an score to settle with Blueberry.
But then the execution deliberately blurs the whole picture. Director Jan Kounen has an interest in shamanism and allucinetic drugs, so he re-draws the whole scenario as a sort of LSD-driven oddysey. Let's say that what Kubrick did to sci-fi in the final act of "2001" is what Kounen tries to do with western here. The problem is that Kounen, who is a mediocre director at his best, doesn't have the talent or the personality Kubrick had to pull such a risky business off. Moreover, if Kounen had been more humble, he would have tried to do both a western of sorts and a lisergic oddysey, thus trying to reconcile both visions.
But Kounen only seems to feel contempt for western and adventure. The result, depending on how you like this kind of experiments, is a hit or miss film. Kounen wastes a decent cast, a wondeful production design and a gorgeous cinematography in a self-indulgent two-hour LSD ride. He doesn't care about characters or plot, or staging decent action, and actprs are left helpless to do whatever they can with their roles: Vincent Cassel and Michael Madsen behave as if they were in a revisionist western and are both quite good. Juliette Lewis tries to decide if her character is a strong woman or a damisel in distress, without going completely for any of the two versions of her character. Geoffrey Lewis, on the other hand, plays his character as if he was many of the one-dimensional villains that populated the original comic, and almost succeeds, but the camera doesn't focus enough on him anyway.
So you get the picture, right? You won't find action, drama or adventure here, something even the worse revisionist westerns had. Otherwise, if you want to learn how LSD and westerns mix, that is, badly, this is your movie.
Has anybody else seen it?
Post Edited (04-29-05 06:55)
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