The Last Movie You Watched

[Rev. Rye]

This week's Deep Hurting Project Part 1: The Nutcracker: The Untold Story. Okay, fun fact: Andrei Konchalovsky was a prominent Soviet film director, who started his career co-writing Andrei Tarkovsky's first two films, and eventually made a few films in America in the Eighties, including Runaway Train (a film that was originally to be directed by none other than Akira Kurosawa) and Tango and Cash. When the Iron Curtain fell, he returned to Russia, and around this time, he started to craft a passion project, based around E.T.A. Hoffman's classic story and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's iconic music for The Nutcracker. 20 years later, it was released, and, well, let me put it this way: it made the Deep Hurting Project. Do you really think it was any good?

Shit you can tell from the first fiften minutes:

• Well, we're off to a great start when you've got music from near the end of the ballet ("Sugar Plum Fairy") and you score your opening credits to it. I'd put Richie Cusack in there if not for the fact that, well, it is one of the most famous pieces from the musical, more than this: 
  
  
  
• The first actual scene is stranger: It's a shot on what looks a lot like the Rink at Rockefeller Center, except it's clearly not, because it's set in Vienna in the 1920s, and there's a restaurant on the sidelines with waiters that ice-skate (and a damn good illustration of why it's a bad idea when one of them drops a tray and breaks a glass), and then, at the end of the scene, there's a streetcar full of musicians in an orchestra just playing. Dafuq? I know Vienna is a very cultural city, but Dafuq?
  
• Elle Fanning's acting is horrible in this film. She puts about as much effort into screaming her lungs off as she does the most mundane aspects. This is not a good thing, as she doesn't put in any effort into the mundane shit. She's better in other films,  before and after, so I'm inclined to think this was just her knowing she was in a shit film and not giving a shit about not being given anything to deal with.
  
• And what the fuck is Albert Einstein doing in this movie? What thematic connection does Einstein have with The Nutcracker? What is he doing in Vienna when he's clearly supposed to be in Geneva working for the League of Nations at this time (and was never based out of Austria, as far as I can tell), and why is he celebrating Christmas when he's JEWISH? 
  
• Come on, you call the Nutcracker NC? Are you embarrassed that you're doing the Nutcracker? And why does it have this derpy, dead-eyed face? This is our title character and this isn't a horror movie. And it doesn't even crack nuts? 
  
  
  
  
• Nathan Lane gives the first song in the music, and it's simultaneously the most obvious and most left-field thing. On the one hand, it's the most famous song of the ballet, and if you're going to have Albert Einstein sing about anything, it'd be the theory of relativity, even if it is an absurdly neutered concept that children can understand. On the other hand, what the fuck does it have to do with anything?
  
  
  
  
• The kids are named Mary and Max. Go fuck yourself, Konckalovsky. Okay, maybe he wasn't aware that a far better film was being made with similarly-named leads on another hemisphere, but still, you're reminding me of a better movie in the middle of this shit.

Past that point:

• When The Nutcracker NC comes to life, it sounds like Moaning Myrtle (because they're voiced by the same woman, and it's clearly a woman voicing him, making it all the more alarming when he says girls are no good at military strategy) and its mouth moves he's a Canadian from South Park.
  
• Early in the movie, Albert Einstein gives the kids a dollhouse. And then it comes alive (and the size of Elle Fanning). The Residents of the Dollhouse: a John Wayne Gacy-lookalike clown named Tinker, an uncanny CGI monkey named Gielgud, and Jamaican drummer boy who's clearly a girl not even trying to pass for male. I am so not in the mood for a discussion of trans identity. They barely appear in the movie, fortunately. At least for the first hour or so, and then, they're (well, Tinker and the drummer girl, since Gielgud at least does shit) flat enough and have little enough to do that they may a well be part of the furniture.
  
• Why is Elle Fanning's Not-the-Mama Snow Queen wearing a dress that's clearly CGI? And why do they interpolate shit that sounds like it's coming from my synth downstairs into a proper orchestral arrangement befitting Tchaikovsky? And okay, I have to ask, why did Elle Fanning turn into the Nutcracker's size? Or how? They usually explain when shit like this happens. In this movie, nothing.
  
• And why does the maid give so little of a shit when she's destroyed one of her pillows? 
  
• And the other songs aren't better than "Relativity." They're just dime-store Tim Rice lyrics put to wonky arrangements of Tchaikovsky (mostly Nutcracker, but one song is from the second movement of Symphony No. 5. And the finale comes from the instantly recognisable climes of the opening of the first Piano Concerto. If they were going to cannibalise other Tchaikovsky works, could they at least have used "Capriccio Italien" for the climax?
  
• And apparently, she can fly and turn the NC back into a real boy 30 minutes in. Why didn't they use the boy's voice instead of Shirley Henderson's?
  
• THE RAT KING HAS A SKYSCRAPER/DICKSHIP THAT FUNCTIONS AS A TANK THAT POPS OUT OF THE STREETS OF VIENNA.
  
• He's afraid of sunlight, so he has to keep a cloud going. With smoke factories. To burn children's toys. And his minions look like they were in the SS. Way to completely destroy the fun with a Holocaust parallel in the next scene. And, yes, later in the movie, we see children's toys in a pile that looks like shit I've seen in photos of the liberation of Auschwitz, with people dressed in drab colours that can't help but bring Schindler's List to mind.
  
• And why the fuck did he never think of shutting down the factory to defeat the Rat King until Elle Fanning told him to?
  
• And why does the Rat King look like David Bowie in Labyrinth? How the fuck does that match with anything? And he put a shark in a tank just so it can electrocute it with its overhead light? And way to cement the Holocaust connection by having him claim that his empire will last ... a thousand years (and yes, that pause is in the actual movie).
  
• And then the movie decides to stop the plot completely to reveal that the film may or may not be a dream. This happens in the middle of the movie for over ten minutes. And Albert Einstein even decides to break the fourth wall to announce that he's investigating (apparently, his Uncle Albert sense was tingling). And then they confirm it was a dream all along at the end, so what's the point of that? Besides making this remind me of Atlanta Nights, that is.
  
• And Albert Einstein is the paragon of imagination in this world? You know, there are better Austrian artists to fill this role. Stefan Zweig comes to mind, but then again, he's also Jewish, so his presence in a Christmas movie is still a bit inexplicable.
  
• And did he really have to explain that his tale of the pebble was about Josef? That should have been obvious from the context. And he's carried the pebble around this whole time?
  
• Hot damn, Gielgud pulls Elle Fanning into a mirror, and we FINALLY have a proper magic device to explain why any of this shit is supposed to be happening and how it's supposed to be reconciled with real life.
  
• All of a sudden, the Rat King has an actual rat mouth, and it is creepy as fuck.
  
• He sings a song about opposing the slightest glimpse of light in what is clearly a sunny day. And, while trying to figure out which piece he was basing "Ratification" on ("Spanish Dance", BTW), I discovered something. The man credited with the music for the film? It's not Tchaikovsky. It's more heartbreaking: it's Eduard Artemyev. He created some very unique and fascinating scores for Tarkovsky's three middle films, particularly Stalker, a score so haunting I actually name-dropped it in a story I wrote a while back. And he was the one who turned the music of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky into this horseshit. How the mighty have fucking fallen. You know what, I used up the three-videos-per-post limit about 12 minutes into the film. 

In conclusion, fuck this movie with both fists, I'm going to find one of the music threads  to post "Meditation" from Stalker as a cleanser. See you in a few days (possibly even tomorrow) when I subject myself to An Action Star Christmas.