So what do these two movie genres have in common, enough to get them smooshed together by producers Ron Howard, Brian Grazer and (exec) Steven Spielberg and director Jon Favreau, with stars Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford and others in the peculiar, sometimes exciting, sometimes silly but sort of watchable Cowboys & Aliens?

Quite a lot, as a matter of fact. In fact, in the early pre-1920s-’30s days of magazine science fiction, when the magazines had titles like Astounding and Amazing, many sci-fi stories were ridiculed as “space operas” — a play on “horse operas,“ slang for cheap pulp Westerns. They were damned for what was considered recycled clichéd westerns plots simply transplanted to a clichéd sci-fi backdrop.

That isn’t exactly what Cowboys & Aliens is. In fact, it’s a fragmentary science fiction plot — in the alien invasion mode — translated onto a Western backdrop, with a lot of typical Western characters. The thing of it is: In this movie, the Western parts mostly work and the science fiction parts mostly don’t. If you cut out all the science fiction scenes from Cowboys & Aliens and switched the ending around to keep some more conventional villains in play, you’d have a better movie. What you have here instead, is a ridiculous notion that becomes a ridiculous movie, one which wastes a good cast and some fine Matthew Libatique cinematography, by trying to shove War of the Worlds into The Searchers and then down our throats — ending up with a show that’s good where it should be amusingly bad, and bad whenever it tries to “save” the good (Western) scenes with flashy sci-fi stuff.

The source for Cowboys & Aliens is a graphic novel by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg, about extraterrestrials invading the West. In the movie, it’s 1873, and they’re looking for gold, and occasionally killing some people who get on their way. It’s a comic I haven’t read and that was apparently largely jettisoned anyway. Favreau and the producers and writers (seven of them, always a bad sign) turn what’s left of Rosenberg’s novel into a major movie with mega-stars (Craig and Ford) and mega-effects (space ships attack an Old West town).

　
The movie starts out well, in a pseudo-Sergio Leone, pseudo-John Ford vein. Just as in Eastwood’s specialty for Leone, we get some tense, stylized scenes of Craig as the lone gunslinger, Jake Lonergan, who’s suffering from amnesia, sporting a weird wrist shackle and who dispatched three baddies with little effort and then wanders into the town of Absolution, and getting mixed up in a standoff between the local cattle baron Woodrow Dolarhyde (Ford) and the upright sheriff John Taggart (Keith Carradine) over the ranch king’s worthless son Percy (Paul Dano) — before the aliens in their space-whatevers swoop in like Hitchcock’s Birds, wreak their havoc and then fly off with Percy and others.

Some critics have praised that scene, but I thought it was ridiculous. For me, almost every scene without the space aliens worked well, at least passably — and almost every scene with the space invaders was out to lunch. As in Iron Man 2, Favreau seems to be trying to make another movie that hits the bell and uses all the elements like Iron Man, and if he wasn’t saddled with those aliens, he might have made it.

 But imagine Stagecoach, with flying saucers swooping down during the chase on the Salt Flats and pulling up all the passengers, including Tommy Mitchell and Duke Wayne, into the sky. Imagine Once Upon a Time in the West with the railroad workers constructing a space missile instead of train tracks, and, at the end, Charley Bronson taking off for Mars. Imagine The Wild Bunch with Holden, Borgnine, Johnson and Oates heading toward a showdown against twenty robots (with Mexican accents), a Godzilla and a huge ray gun. Imagine The Searchers ending in a huge battle not between the Comanches and the Cavalry, but between cowboys, Indians, a cattle baron and his gang, and the man with no name (or Lonergan) all riding against huge smelly aliens from outer space on flying machines.

 

SPOILER ALERT
Oh, I forgot. You’ll see that last one, if you go to Cowboys & Aliens.
END OF SPOILER

If you ditched all the sci-fi, and it should be ditched, there’s enough left in Cowboys and Aliens to make an okay ’70s-style Western. Harrison Ford’s Dolarhyde is a good, grizzled old villain, and he should have stayed a villain. Craig is good at the Clint stuff, and the rest of the movie’s bunch includes, commendably, Olivia Wilde as a sort-of-semi-Swedish love interest named Ella Swenson, Sam Rockwell as the likeably vulnerable bartender Doc, Clancy Brown doing a Sam Elliott as shaggy Reverend Meacham, Adam Beach as Percy‘s Native American pal Nat Colorado, Raoul Trujillo as prickly warrior Black Knife, and, seemingly borrowing a page from Walter Hill‘s The Long Riders, the talented Taylors (Buck, Matthew and Cooper) playing the nefarious Claibornes (Wes, Luke and Mose). There’s also a wonderful, eerie scene with an overturned riverboat, in the middle of the desert — an oddity that’s never explained and that’s much scarier than any scene with the aliens.

Offhand, I can only think of two previous attempts to make science fiction Westerns (though Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans sometimes looks like science fiction). And that’s the 1935 Gene Autry serial The Phantom Empire, and the 1966 Z-movie, Jesse James Meets Frankenstein‘s Daughter, starring John Lupton. Both those pictures rank high among the most foolish movies ever made — even though Phantom Empire is at least entertainingly foolish. “J.J. Meets F.D.” is just trashily foolish, and Cowboys & Aliens, by comparison is high-budget, super-slick foolishness.

Anyway: Cowboys & Aliens. Give me a break. Demographics be damned. A good Western will eventually draw big, and it doesn’t damn well need monsters. All it needs is the right audience.

Extras: Commentary and conversations with Jon Favreau; “Making of” Documentary; My scenes. 

 Mr. Popper’s Penguins (Also Blu-ray) (Two Stars)

U.S.: Mark Waters, 2011 (20th Century Fox)

Well anyway, it’s not the penguins’ fault.

Six of them — six handsome, lively and seemingly fearless emperor penguins — have been cast in the title roles of the new Jim Carrey movie, Mr. Popper’s Penguins. There, they share a refrigerated sound stage with the rubbery-faced, rubbery-limbed, comic dynamo Carrey (as Mr. Popper), and with the attractive and unflappable Carla Gugino (as Popper’s ex-wife Amanda) and, albeit on different stages, with that Grande Dame of Wit and Whimsy, Angela Lansbury, as Mrs. Van Gundy, about whom more later.

Mr. Popper’s Penguins seems at first like a good bet for a good movie family comedy. It’s based on a famous children‘s book, created toward the end of the last Depression, by a husband-and-wife writing team, Richard and Florence Atwater. (About whom more later.) A tale of a lovable family and 12 lovable penguins, it’s a book that’s never been out of print since its first publication in 1938.

As for the sextet of penguins hired to help make a show of this kid’s classic, they do everything you could reasonably ask a penguin to do for a Hollywood movie, and still keep shreds of their penguin dignity — including sliding on their bellies down the circular ramp of the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, during a crowded party-gala, with Mrs. Van Gundy looking perturbed, and with a frantic Popper racing to stop them.

It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. Despite Carrey, despite Lansbury, despite that blue-ribbon Newberry Award winning material, despite shiny, despite that whole cast (which also includes Clark Gregg, Philip Baker Hall, Jeffrey Tambor, and Dominic Chianese), and despite those great, game little penguins, Mr. Popper is still pretty much a glossy botch.

The culprits may be the usual suspects these days: the writers, namely, Sean Enders & John Morris (of Sex Drive) and Jared Stern (The Princess and the Frog). One might also single out for blame director Mark Waters (of Mean Girls, Ghosts of Girlfriends and Freaky Friday), because he keeps the movie so cold and slick, when it’s obvious that this movie needs an unabashed, all-out, shameless lovability, a quality that eludes everybody here, except at times the penguins.

The book is reportedly about a lovable but poor small town housepainter named Tommy Potter who is fascinated with world explorations, and whose correspondence with a Byrd-like admiral in Antarctica results in the gift to Tommy and his family of a penguin. Soon that penguin is joined by a female from a nearby zoo, then eventually ten baby penguins. All kinds of amusing penguin antics and domestic difficulties ensue.

Sounds cute. You can imagine Charlie Chaplin, in one of his great two-reelers, palling around with a lot of penguins and getting lots of laughs. (I mention Charlie because one of the movie’s running gags is that Popper’s penguins love to catch Chaplin comedies on TV.)

But, as mentioned, warmth, a prime ingredient of the book, is almost totally absent in the picture, though people keep trying to flag it down. In the movie that Waters and his writers have come up with, Tommy Potter (Carrey) is reconceived and played as an obnoxious, selfish, fairly rich but initially unlovable, wildly mugging corporate trouble-shooter, living in a pricey high-rise Manhattan apartment building, and (deservedly) separated from his wife Amanda (Gugino) and his kids Janie and Billy (Madeline Carroll of Flipped, and Maxwell Perry Cotton).

Instead of getting the penguins from an admiral, Popper is willed the six by his late explorer father (who was mostly absent during Tommy’s boyhood). And Tommy decides to keep and care for his dad’s gift — mostly without paid help, except one housekeeper who skedaddles, in a building that has a “no-pets“ rule — after Billy mistakes the penguins for his birthday present.

Tommy, who has been portrayed as growing up into something of a jerk, refrigerates his apartment, bribes the doorman and, I guess, tries to fool everybody. An alternative — say, getting another place, like a loft with a refrigerated locker — never seems to occur to him. Or anybody else.

Not content with those odd decisions, the writers have added job problems: The prize huckster of his corporation, Popper is given the assignment of talking imperious but sweet old Mrs. Van Gundy (Lansbury, trapped in drivel) into selling to his exploitive company the storied Tavern on the Green restaurant in Central Park, which they intend to tear down.

 Of course, there’s romance too. And not just among the penguins. Mr. P. is also bent on winning back his gorgeous wife Amanda (Gugino), and his adorable kids. So, as the writers loot and paw every gimmick they can glom out of the modern rom-com kit. All kinds of would-be amusing penguin scenes supposedly ensue, including penguin-poop gags and sneak-the-penguins-in-and-out gags, all loonily improbable and none very amusing. Whenever all else fails, the penguins, led by a leader called Captain, slide on their bellies somewhere.

 Carrey was cheated. I’d much rather see him as a lovable small town dad, trying to cope with double the number of penguins, than see him ensnared in these ridiculous Manhattan high-life high jinks. This movie would obviously work better if it were done more as the Atwaters wrote it.

 A digression: the story about the Atwaters I hinted at. Richard Atwater, an ex-Chicago academic, wrote the book, couldn’t sell it and suffered a coronary which left him speechless and unable to write. His wife and ex-student Florence then rewrote parts of the book, sold it, and saw it reap fantastic success.

 That’s a touching yarn. I’m sure the book that came from it had heart, which the movie definitely doesn’t, not even in the last scene between Carrey and Lansbury, programmed for sniffles. Was it a good idea to hire Anders and Morris, the writing team behind the horny-guys comedies Sex Drive, Hot Tub Time Machine and She’s Out of My League to try to script a heart-warming kids-and-animals family movie comedy like Popper? Even with Stern to help them warm hearts?

If you’re a fan of the original book, I have some advice. Go read the book again. If you don’t know the book and don’t read much, I have more advice. Find a better movie. (It won’t be hard.) The penguins though may deserve another shot, maybe in a sequel, in another movie where Popper retires, leaves the city and settles down with his family in a small town to be a poor but lovable house-painter, with six, and then twelve, emperor penguins on his hands.

Extras: Commentary with Mark Waters and others; Featurettes; Gag Reel; Story Sampler; Penguin Pandemonium; Trailer.

Kuroneko (Three and a Half Stars)

Japan: Kaneto Shindo, 1968 (Criterion Collection)

The first scene of Kaneto Shindo’s classic horror movie Kuroneko (Black Cat) is tremendous, devastating. Two women, Yone (played by Nobuko Otowa, Shindo’s wife and frequent star) and her young daughter-in-law Shige  (Kiwako Taichi) have been left alone and vulnerable on their farm, after son and husband Hachi (Kichiemon Nakamura) is recruited/abducted to be a soldier in the wars of the Sengoku (15th-17th century) period. Suddenly, out of the nearby woods, a sweaty sullen group of wandering samurai appear, descending on the women’s farm like the marauding bandits in Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, robbing the farm, stealing its food, raping and killing the women and burning down their house. The two gentle ladies, ravaged and murdered, lie piteosuly in the smoking ruins of their former home, as if staring up at the sky, while the samurai move on to other adventures. Next to them is their pet, a black cat.

Years later, the wars are still raging, with the local samurai bands under the heel of the evil and tyrranical Lord Raiko Minamoto (Kei Sato). But Minamoto’s men are being plagued by a local outbreak of serial killings, all seemingly commitetd by two lovely women who lure the samurai at night to their mysterious home, give them geisha-like hospitality and leave them dead in the morning. These women may be vengeful ghosts and Minamoto orders a fierce samurai named Gintoki to find them and destroy them. But Gintoki, after he allows Shige to take him back to her strage home one night, notices that the ladies’ elegant mansion, appearing as if by magic, is on the site of the ruins of his old farm, that the two women who “live” there are his mother Yone and his beloved wife Shige, and that the creature who prowls the rooms is their black cat. Whom will he honor: his Lord or the women he loves?

The great Akira Kurosawa (the sensei) admired samurai, some of whom were among his own ancestors. But writer-director Kaneto Shindo, one of the most prolific of all the major post-war Japanese cineastes, was, by contrast, the son of poor people in the provinces. He identified with the farmers, the victims.  A one time scriptwriter for Kenji Mizoguchi and Kon Ichikawa, he was anti-militarist, and , as we can see here, anti-samurai (at least bad samurai).

 This movie, shot in beautiful blacks and whites and haunting images by cinematographer Kiyomi Kuroda, is one of the great Japanese horror films, on a par with the spectral wonders of Masaki Kobayashi’s Kwaidan, Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House and  Shindo’s own Onibaba. Truly distuirbing and unsettling, it also points the way to the wildly popular Japanese horror movies of the 2000s, like the Ringu and Ju-on series.

There is a dark poerty in Shindo’s imagery(which was certainly influenced by Shindo’s mentor, Mizoguchi and Mizoguchi’s ghostly 1953 masterpiece Ugetsu. But there’s a bloody savagery and an impudent spookiness as well. And thanks to the  political opinions of Shindo, a committed left-winger who was always on the side of the oppressed, Kuroneko is one of the most ferocious and memorable of all Japanese feminist films. (In Japanese, with English subtitles.)

Extras:   An excellent video interview with Kaneto Shindo, in his 80s; Interview with critic Tadao Sato; Trailer; Booklet with essay by Maitland McDonagh and a Joan Mellen interview with Shindo.

Behind the Mask (One Star)

U.S.: Phil Karlson, 1946 (MGM Limited Edition Collection)

“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!”

“The Shadow” was the show and the character that Orson Welles played on radio, to pay the bills: impersonating the maniacally cackling avenger of justice a.k.a. Lamont Cranston to the delight of audiences  who weren’t all that interested in the high-toned literary adaptations of Dickens and Shakespeare and Victor Hugo that Welles, Houseman and the Mercury Theater company mounted so gloriously elsewhere.

I haven’t heard much of the Shadow, even on radio tape sets, so I was looking forward to this movie version of his crime-busting shadowy exploits, especially since it was directed by film noir ace Phil Karlson. But beware! The chortling lawman is here played not be Welles but by an engaging if not too gifted actor  named Kane Richmond. Richmond is a name; he starred in serials like Spy Smasher and Brick Bradford and in Bs like Mars Attacks the World. But here he acts as if the whole movie were a put-on. (Maybe it was.)  He grins his way through a ludicrous script full of blackmail, murder, night clubs, society parties, and newspaper offices where miscreants and crime-fighters are incessantly sneaking in and out of windows.

There’s also a scene where the obnoxious heroine (Barbara Reed) crawls around under  a table and table cloth, looking like a “ghost” in a haunted house comedy, to the befuddlement of a poor fool of  a cop. This is actually the movie’s most memorable moment. 

Yes, I know Karlson directed it — another reason I was looking forward to this show. But any artistic links between this movie and The Phenix City Story, The Brothers Rico, Walking Tall or even  to Karlson’s lackluster Charlie Chan movies (The Shanghai Cobra and Dark Alibi, both starring Sidney Toler and Mantan Moreland) is strictly hallucinatory. This is a genuinely awful movie (though the first five “Decoyish” minutes fool you a little) and I’m being kind by giving it one star.

How did this movie come to be? I wouldn’t disbelieve a theory proposing that Karlson directed most of it dead drunk or passed out on the floor, or that he emerged from a stupor (brought on by his first reading of the script) and immediately passed over all artistic control to Kane Richmond. Also, it may be an evil joke by Orson Welles. Who knows…? You think I’m only kidding and you think it’ll be fun, I know, but you’re wrong. (Made on demand.  Browse www@mgm,com. or order from major web venues.)