Al Pacino was once asked in a Playboy interview what actress he’d most like to work with. His answer: “Julie Christie, because she’s the most poetic actress.”
“Poetic” is the best possible word to describe Julie Christie. If every great actor embodies an essential paradox, Christie’s is that she’s both tigress-direct and fawn-subtle, often at the same time — the cross section of haiku and a sonnet. You find yourself watching in wonder to unravel the quiet but sometimes ferocious mystery of her performances, from her shallow social climber in John Schlesinger’s 1965 “Darling” to her shrewd but ferally tender madam in Robert Altman‘s 1971 “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” to her fragile Gertrude in Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 “Hamlet.” Many of her characters are, on the surface, crisp, forthright, almost businesslike, but there’s always a soft layer of vulnerability beneath her fine-boned beauty. She’s naked even when fully clothed.
Christie was born in India in 1941, where her father ran a tea plantation. She went to school in England and Europe, eventually enrolling in the Central School of Music and Drama in London in 1957. As a young professional actress, she did stage work and had a regular role in a British TV series, “A for Andromeda,” in the early ’60s. In 1963 she appeared in Schlesinger’s drab working-class comedy-drama “Billy Liar,” and although it wasn’t her film debut, she grabbed the attention of movie audiences and critics.
The story of a young man, played by Tom Courtenay, who retreats into a fantasy world to escape his unglamorous life, “Billy Liar” is leaden and vaguely smug; we’re made to feel beaten down by the monotony of Courtenay’s life, so that by the movie’s disheartening conclusion, we’re well primed for self-congratulation: “You see, we knew nothing would work out right in the end.”
But Christie, as the vibrant young woman who represents the last shred of real-life hope for Courtenay, brightens the movie whenever she appears. Her character has no depth or resonance, but she’s pure light. As the sunny, fearless girl who appears seemingly out of nowhere to tempt Courtenay to freedom and fun — freedom and fun that he has difficulty allowing himself, at least in real life — she’s like a vision of everything the ’60s were, at their best, to become. It’s supposed to be tragic that Courtenay can’t partake of them, or of her. But when he and Christie part at the movie’s end, you barely feel sorry for him. Her smile, dazzling at the age of 22, scotches the final effect of the movie: We’re left thinking, How could the boy be such a schmuck to let her go?
Christie was flying high by 1965, appearing in two major films: Schlesinger’s “Darling” (for which she would win an Academy Award) and David Lean’s “Doctor Zhivago,” in which she played Lara, the tragic heroine.
But “tragic heroine” isn’t quite the right phrase for what Christie does in that picture. The term implies histrionics, or at least some sort of submerged melodrama. Christie carries the core of the movie’s sorrow — and that means the sorrow of revolutionary Russia, as well as her own — not just in her hopelessly blue eyes, but in the set of her jaw. She’s stalwart, brave, reliable beyond compare, and still, she suffers. What Christie doesn’t do is turn the performance into an exercise in masochism. Before she even played one, she proved she had the heart and soul of a Thomas Hardy heroine — a woman who was made to bear sadness but retain her inner dignity at all costs.
But before Christie would tackle Hardy, she put an entirely different sort of woman on the screen: shallow, clever, earth-quakingly gorgeous and determined to be a star regardless of the emotional cost to herself and those around her. In “Darling” Christie played Diana Scott, a fashion model who hooks up with a brainy TV journalist (Dirk Bogarde) only to end up ditching him for a cold, dashing figure who can introduce her to more of the “right” people (Laurence Harvey).
The story is supposed to be a morality tale, a snapshot of swinging ’60s greed and corruption, but Schlesinger layers on so much heavy-handed irony that it’s really more of a cartoon. I’m not sure what the movie looked like to audiences in 1965, but in 2001, it’s all too easy to watch it and decree with a shiver that, yes, those ’60s people were all too dreadful. There’s something more than vaguely distasteful about the way “Darling” cooingly reassures us it’s better to be conventional, “normal,” because you’re more likely to end up a moral human being that way. It’s numbingly facile — no deeper than an air kiss.
The thing that’s amazing about “Darling” is the way Christie takes a chalky caricature and turns her into a human being. She unintentionally undermines the movie: While you’re supposed to be tsk-tsking over her behavior, you see that the same gears that drive her manipulativeness also throw off blazingly intelligent sparks. Christie swaddles Diana’s matchstick frailty in heartlessness, but she knows it’s a transparent cloak. As Pete Townshend sang not long after, in a song that had nothing to do with Christie but everything to do with the hypocrisy that “Darling” tried so hard to expose, “I can see right through your plastic mac.” In “Darling,” Christie, the most honest of actresses, doesn’t even bother to do up the buttons.
When “Darling” became a hit, both in the U.K. and stateside, Christie, even more so than most movie stars, began to represent more than just the parts she chose and the way she played them. She represented the spirit and style of her era, but not in a way that was forgotten in a month or two. Even today, Christie still stands as the actress of the ’60s, the way Clara Bow was the “It” girl of the ’20s. It had not only to do with her talent, nor even with the fact that she was English. (To be English in the ’60s was coolness itself.) She seemed to speak a language of her own, a language her contemporaries instantly understood, in the way she carried herself and the way she dressed. “What Julie Christie wears has more real impact on fashion than all the clothes of the ten Best-Dressed women combined,” Time magazine decreed in 1967, and for once, Time was right. Captured in fashion photos from the era, Christie paints even the most ridiculous clothes with dignity. In pictures from the late ’60s, she’s the model of droopy elegance in haute-hippie garb. Just a few years earlier, in a mid-’60s fashion shot by David Bailey, we’d seen her looking serious and gorgeous in a dress of shimmery paillettes, their silliness offsetting her sun-kissed gravity.
From the mid-’60s to the mid-’70s, Christie was a major presence in popular movies. In 1967 she played that Hardy heroine for real in Schlesinger’s “Far From the Madding Crowd,” a picture that captured the bleak beauty of Hardy perfectly. As Bathsheba Everdene, a plucky, self-sufficient landowner who becomes enmeshed in the love of three different men, Christie again balances that graciously composed façade with an innocence that’s buried deep; she shows a kind of cautious openness to the world around her. What makes her Bathsheba so moving is that no matter how many trials she faces, she never seems to be on the verge of cracking. Instead, she lets you see, with little more than the flicker of an eyelid or a reserved smile, how painful it is to persevere, and to bend. An extraordinary cast joined Christie, including Terence Stamp and Alan Bates, but the movie was rejected by the same audiences that loved the supposedly with-it quality of “Darling.” “Far From the Madding Crowd” is a picture that has never quite received its due; it ranks among Schlesinger’s best work, as well as Christie’s.
Christie racked up an astonishing number of movie credits through the late ’70s, among them François Truffaut’s “Fahrenheit 451″ (1966), Richard Lester‘s “Petulia” (1968), Nicolas Roeg’s “Don’t Look Now” (1973) and Warren Beatty and Buck Henry’s “Heaven Can Wait” (1978). She has worked fairly steadily since then, although she hasn’t always been in the spotlight. Notoriously guarded about her private life, she’s the kind of actress who resurfaces now and then in a terrific performance, and you ask yourself where on earth she’s been. In 1997 she appeared opposite Nick Nolte in Alan Rudolph’s “Afterglow,” for which she earned an Academy Award nomination. In 1996, she played an aging but still incontrovertibly sensual Gertrude in Branagh’s “Hamlet”; it was one of the most remarkable performances of her career.
But my two favorite Christie performances, four years apart, seem like spiritual counterparts to each other. They also, as it happens, feature the same costar, Warren Beatty, with whom Christie was romantically involved in the early ’70s.
It seemed that once Beatty and Christie — who reteamed for a third time in 1978′s “Heaven Can Wait” — locked in to each other’s natural rhythms, as lovers do, there was no turning back. They’re one of the most natural, effortless movie pairings ever. In both Altman’s “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” and Hal Ashby’s 1975 “Shampoo,” Christie is the tougher one, the woman who faces up to everything that her male partner just can’t. In “McCabe,” she’s Constance Miller, a brothel madam who sweeps into Presbyterian Church, the frontier town run by John McCabe (Beatty), ready to get down to business. There’s something lustful, but not sensual, about the way she sits down at the town cafe and orders up “four eggs fried, stew and strong tea.” It’s the equivalent of a Wild West power lunch. She eats it like a man or, more specifically, like a convict, shoveling the chow into her gob with one hand as she hunches protectively over the plate. McCabe watches, enchanted and a little abashed. He has fallen in love.
On the other hand, the only time Mrs. Miller succumbs to sensuality is when she sets herself adrift on opium: Her eyes soften, and their gaze reaches out as if to embrace an imaginary lover. She’s much less yielding with the shambling, stuttering, heartbreakingly decent McCabe, who becomes her lover. He pays for the privilege, of course. She wouldn’t have it any other way.
Mrs. Miller wears the pants in this tale, and disguised as a sweeping skirt, they’re that much more threatening. Her jaw line — that superb jaw line — is like a ship’s anchor; her hair is aquiver with tiny ringlets, as if hooked up to their own private energy source. She’s the kind of woman even a tough man would steer clear of, which is what makes her moments of tenderness with McCabe so lovely.
At one point McCabe comes to her quarters, distraught and trying to hide it, muttering something about how he’s never been so close to a woman before. You can practically see Mrs. Miller’s own guarded vulnerability welling up inside her, and she’s less able to bear that than she is McCabe’s weakness. Her eyes soften just barely as she cajoles him into bed: “Hey — why don’t you just get under the covers, huh?”
Mrs. Miller knows McCabe better than he knows himself, but she knows herself best of all. That’s why the film’s final image is so haunting, and so troubling: After McCabe’s death, we see Miller propped up and floating into an opium dream, a slight smile playing across her lips. She doesn’t know he’s dead, but their separation is final nonetheless. He’s gone, and he’s taken her with him, figuratively speaking; she’s never coming back. It’s as if her heart, brittle by nature, has broken into two clean pieces, cracked at the hinge like a busted locket. She’s as surprised as anybody that it could have happened.
Christie’s character in “Shampoo,” high-class gold digger Jackie, is in many ways softer than Mrs. Miller. Mrs. Miller has worked so hard at cultivating a tough shell that she’s forgotten how to be tender; Jackie yearns to be soft toward the man she loves, Beatty’s philandering hairdresser George, her ex-boyfriend, but her sense of self-preservation demands that she harden herself toward him.
Christie’s performance in “Shampoo” is one of the most mournfully luminous things ever put on film. Her vulnerability courses through the movie like a barely audible heartbeat, even when, or especially when, she’s trying to treat George indifferently. Her beauty is so cool in “Shampoo” — her hair is a subtle ash blond sweep (no garish Tiffany-gold tresses for her), and there are times when her lips curl into a crocodile smile that’s almost predatory.
But when she and George fall into a discussion of his restless habits, and he tells her bluntly, “I don’t fuck anybody for money, I do it for fun,” you have to watch Christie’s face carefully for the crestfallen look that flickers across it. Suddenly, it’s gone, replaced by her usual crisp composure.
Christie is the sort of actress who reveals more of herself in what she hides than she does in any broad gesture or expression. In one of her most remarkable moments in “Shampoo,” we don’t even see her face. But we can read it even so. She and George, inching toward a reconciliation, find themselves alone in a darkened bathhouse at a swinging party. He has confessed to her, in words that we desperately want to believe, that she’s the only one he loves, that he can’t imagine growing old with anyone else. We see her drinking the words in cautiously, as if she doesn’t dare let herself believe them.
Not long after, just as she and George have begun making love, his current girlfriend walks in on them. George leaps up to run after her, leaving Jackie behind in the dark.
She isn’t, of course, in total darkness. She sits up, and we see her from behind, a naked back that’s less like a body part than a lithe sliver of light. But it’s a piece of light we can read like a book, a sensual curve in the darkness. With her back to the world, Christie betrays a wealth of feeling that we perhaps couldn’t bear to look at in her face. The curve of her spine speaks of resignation, and one last, major disappointment in love. You could call it artful composition on the cameraman’s part, and without a doubt that contributes to the effect. But Christie, like all great actors, understands the truth that bodies tell. There’s inexplicable sadness in the curve of her back, and flexibility, too. But for that moment, she’s simply the woman who’s been left behind. Her back is a rune that spells goodbye.
This is the hardest piece I’ve ever had to write for Salon: my last.
When Joyce Millman — at the time just an acquaintance, but more than that a pop-music and television critic I’d long admired — contacted me sometime in early 1996 about the possibility of writing for a new publication she and a bunch of other San Francisco Examiner exiles were starting, I was intrigued. Until I found out the publication was online only. At the time, I was a full-time magazine copy editor by day and a freelance writer by night: If it wasn’t in print, it wasn’t real.
At that point, we didn’t yet know just how old Old Media really was. But the idea of transferring the skills and principles of Old Media onto the Web intrigued me. And even if Salon, as an online-only magazine, wasn’t “real,” the money its founder, David Talbot, was willing to pay its writers, was — the fees weren’t princely, but definitely fair, particularly for a start-up. So I made one tiny leap as a freelancer in 1996 that turned into a bigger one three years later, when I was hired at Salon full-time. My friends at the business magazine, in Boston, where I was working at the time — a job I loved but was ready to leave — urged me to rethink my decision. Salon was a start-up; it wasn’t stable. I might move to New York, where David was assembling an East Coast staff, and it could all fall apart the next day.
It didn’t, and it hasn’t, though no publication — online or in print — has had an easy time of it these past few years. When I was a journalism student in the 1980s, if you had told me that by 2010 it would be nearly impossible for a smart, experienced professional to make a living wage as a journalist or editor, I’d have accepted it only if you’d told me that by that time, we’d also be zooming around in flying cars, like the Jetsons. Journalism, as a profession, is in danger of dying; I’m still waiting for that flying car. And lest you think I’m going to hijack this space for a speech about the death of film criticism, I need to say that, realistically, the world could survive without full-time movie critics. But if dedicated, disciplined, paid journalists disappear, we’re headed for some very dark times.
Over the years Salon has strived to make a place for serious writers, editors and journalists, and it continues to do so. I’m astounded when I stop to think about the number of superb, conscientious editors with whom I’ve had the pleasure to work, and the many, many terrific, challenging writers with whom I’ve been honored to share space. They’ve humbled me and, I hope, made me better. Salon has also, I must note, always made a place for film criticism, even in times when other outlets were scaling back. In granting me this space — and in allowing me the pleasure of working with the kindest, grooviest and most generous colleague imaginable, Andrew O’Hehir — Salon has made me the most fortunate of movie critics, and even as I move on to a new adventure elsewhere on the Web, my gratitude won’t diminish.
What I’ve written so far is largely about me. But here’s where it becomes all about you. People who are paid to write can gas on all they want about the decline of their profession, but even then we sometimes forget that we’re only half of the equation. We’re nothing without readers, and at Salon I’ve found a truly passionate, engaged, challenging audience. You have often inspired me, and I hope I’ve done you justice.
So this is where, with wholly inadequate words, I say thank you: To those who have read me faithfully or even just casually; to those who have written to me personally over the years, widening my world more than you can even imagine; to those who’ve taken the time and care to leave thoughtful, well-reasoned comments instead of just doing the asshole drive-by; to those who have stolen from me (theft is the sincerest form of flattery); and most of all, to those of you who have disagreed with me, often passionately. Because as I’ve said more times than I can count, criticism isn’t about consensus, it’s about engagement. And so bravo, and brava, to you all.
Many of us who fancied ourselves sophisticated in 1981 freely mocked “Clash of the Titans” at the time of its theatrical release: A hokey-looking fantasy that plays fast and loose with Greek mythology, starring a well-oiled Harry Hamlin as brave warrior Perseus and Laurence Olivier as his top-god father, Zeus? No thanks. We were too busy oohing and ahhing over the prim aesthetics of “Chariots of Fire” to fall for anything so obviously fake as a flying white horse.
Since then, many of us have seen the error of our ways, and we now know what little kids who were dazzled by watching “Clash of the Titans” on TV (it was a staple of HBO in the early days) have always known. Directed by Desmond Davis and with stop-motion special effects by the great Ray Harryhausen, the first “Clash of the Titans” is an unself-conscious treasure of fantasy filmmaking. Harryhausen’s creatures — from his feathery-winged Pegasus to his fearsome yet sympathetic sea beast the Kraken — are low-tech by today’s standards. Yet within their specially created universe, they’re wholly alive, not disposable. Their fantastically unreal qualities demand a measure of engagement from the viewer, and it’s that engagement — not the amount of money or time spent on their creation — that gives them life.
Say goodbye to all that with the new 3-D “Clash of the Titans,” in which Sam Worthington’s Perseus struts around importantly in a Utilikilt, Pegasus is something of an afterthought (and is black instead of white), and Zeus and Hades are played by the Tweedledum-and-Tweedledee versions of Olivier, Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes. And unlike the original — which, in a crazy stroke of genius, allowed Shakespearean thespians like Claire Bloom and Maggie Smith, plus Bond babe Ursula Andress, to mix it up as jealous goddesses — the new “Clash of the Titans” is frightfully low on babes. Gemma Arterton and Alexa Davalos — as, respectively, Io and Andromeda, the two beauties who vie for Perseus’ stolid soldier’s heart — are comely enough, but there’s no sensuous glow about them. They’re eye candy, not enchantresses.
Of course, lamenting that the old “Clash” is so much better than the new one will take us only so far. Any remake has to stand on its own merits. That said, “Clash of the Titans” still sucks. The story — the script is by Travis Beacham, Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi — is unruly and unnecessarily complicated: Perseus may be the son of Zeus, but he’s been raised by human parents (played all too briefly in the movie’s early scenes by Pete Postlethwaite and Elizabeth McGovern). When they’re killed by Hades, god of the underworld, he stomps around for a bit, looking angry. Then he decides to lead a mission, with the help of some hotshot soldiers from Argos (the hottest of these is played by Mads Mikkelson; less hot is gangly, confused-looking Nicholas Hoult), to defeat the god who killed his family. Meanwhile, Neeson’s Zeus (clad in a sizzling-white, headache-inducing suit of armor) and Fiennes’ Hades (scowling as he sports the ever-popular bald head with long fringe look) duke it out over something or other. And Perseus and his crew get on with the business of fending off giant scorpions, beheading the serpent-tressed Medusa (a CGI creature modeled from the face and form of fashion model Natalia Vodianova) and, ultimately, sending the Kraken packin’.
The Kraken is big all right, and his design — a small, turtlish head perched on a gargantuan body — owes a debt, as so many modern movie creatures do, to H.R. Giger’s design for “Alien.” But this Kraken is disappointing; there’s no glamour or mystery to him. He’s overscaled and underwhelming, and even in 3-D, he lacks dimension. The director of “Clash of the Titans” is kooky Frenchman Louis Leterrier, and based on some of the intentionally over-the-top pictures he’s made in the past (including the gorgeously melodramatic “Danny the Dog”), he isn’t necessarily a bad choice to breathe new life into an old favorite. But the picture is loaded with dimwitted proving-your-manhood dialogue — “This isn’t your fight!” one of Perseus’ girlies exclaims, to which he responds, with all the expressiveness of a green-plastic army man, “Someone has to take a stand!” — and not even the picture’s aggressive special effects are enough to distract us from it. “Clash of the Titans” was converted to 3-D after it was completed, and I wonder if it wouldn’t be more enjoyable as a straightforward 2-D feature: The use of 3-D renders the action muddier and more indistinct than it might otherwise be, and the movie’s fantasy vistas, of seaside cliffs and rugged desertlike terrain, don’t look particularly distinctive in the retrofitted format.
The fact that some genius at Warner Bros. decided that a 2-D “Clash of the Titans” just wouldn’t be good enough for movie audiences — or, more likely, recognized that the extra dough moviegoers have to fork over for 3-D glasses would dramatically pad the grosses — suggests that Hollywood thinks it’s got us just where it wants us. We want spectacle at the movies, as we always have; we want action and drama and escape.
But what about everything Hollywood, with movies like this “Clash of the Titans,” is failing to give us? The movie is big all right. But where’s the magic? And where, dare I ask, is the eroticism? We barely get a kiss between Worthington and Arterton, not that I particularly wanted one. On the other hand, in the original, we see the spirit of Andromeda (played by Judy Bowker) being carried off in a golden cage by a winged beastie, as her left-behind body sleeps behind a sheer, sparkly curtain. The image is lush, unsettling, dreamily evocative. The new “Clash of the Titans” is supposed to stand for progress, and the promise of huge profits, as we purportedly stand at the forefront of a 3-D revolution. Instead it’s a symbol of everything we’ve lost. But at least it reminds us that our 2-D dreams can’t be so easily replaced.
Movies based on Nicholas Sparks’ novels have gotten a bad name, and unfairly so: As source material they’ve at least helped prolong the life of an endangered movie species, the romantic melodrama. Pictures like “Nights in Rodanthe,” “Dear John” and “The Notebook” may have their flaws, but in cineplexes crowded with carelessly made action pictures and, increasingly, flashy-but-empty 3-D features, they at least cling to some tatters of a movie tradition forged by Douglas Sirk and Max Ophuls.
But not all Sparks adaptations are created equal, and the latest, “The Last Song,” is less equal than most. There are a few decent performances here, most notably that of Greg Kinnear as Steve, a grizzled, beleaguered, divorced dad. But “The Last Song” — which was directed by Julie Ann Robinson, from a screenplay by Sparks and Jeff van Wie — doesn’t even work as passable, tear-loosening melodrama, and the predictable plot mechanics aren’t what make it insufferable. The big problem is Miley Cyrus.
It wasn’t so long ago that Cyrus, as normal preteen/pop star Hannah Montana, became a megastar among the sparkly purse set. And even though plenty of us may have rolled our eyes at Cyrus and her alter-ego character, there’s only so much criticism you can level at a child performer: Cyrus was a cute enough kid, and the reasons for Hannah Montana’s popularity were understandable. Young singers and actresses are by their nature unformed: It’s OK to be somewhat critical of their abilities, but part of their appeal is the idea that they’re still on their way to becoming something more.
But Cyrus is now 17, playing in the tougher arena of grown-ups, and her performance in “The Last Song” suggests she has two expressions at her disposal: Pouty and scowly. Three, if you count squinty. Cyrus plays grumpy high school graduate Ronnie (Miley Cyrus), who spends the summer at her dad’s beach house in Georgia sulking, grumbling and generally making her poor father’s life miserable. And for this she’ll be rewarded by meeting a nice, hunky blond boy, Will (Liam Hemsworth), who genuinely likes her and also happens to be rich. Conflicts will of course ensue.
When I wrote about “Hannah Montana: The Movie” last year, I couldn’t help noticing Cyrus’ vaguely blowsy quality — she seemed to have bypassed dewy, carefree teenage youth and was instead hurtling toward three-kids-and-a-McMansion matronliness. Still, she could just about pass as a kid, in a movie aimed at a pretty young audience. It seemed prudent to give her the benefit of the doubt.
But the suffering she causes in “The Last Song” is just too much. Cyrus’ speaking voice is deep instead of squeaky, which is usually a plus. But this isn’t a throaty purr we’re talking about; it’s more like a three-packs-a-day growl, and it’s gratingly unpleasant. Her diction is a slurry mess, and she speaks every line with an implicit sneer, as if everything, even the script of the movie she’s starring in, is beneath her consideration. Her expression is perpetually bored and restless, as if the only thing she’s got on her mind is getting back to her walk-in closet to assess her vast kingdom of tank tops. This is a performance with all the elegance of a bitten fingernail.
Maybe I’m expecting too much of Cyrus. But “The Last Song” rests heavily on her alleged appeal, and I can’t remember the last time I came across such a singularly charmless teenage performer. I hesitate to even use the word “actress,” because what Cyrus projects here is an unvarnished haughtiness that’s wholly disconnected from the troubled-but-feisty character she’s supposed to be playing. Even as poor pops Kinnear suffers nobly for the camera, Cyrus barrels through the movie as if she were the only person in it. She’s all ego and no alter, although we should probably be grateful we’re not dealing with a split personality here. Please, one is enough.
Despite the outlandish success of the “Shrek” movies, there’s often a sad, also-ran vibe to DreamWorks’ animated movies. “A Shark’s Tale,” “Bee Movie,” Monsters vs. Aliens”: These movies aren’t terrible, and they’re probably reasonably enjoyable for kids. But they’re also, as the English would say, just a little too keen. With their pop-culture references stacked sky-high, their too-cute yet not cute enough characters, they’re tap-dancing as hard as they can to dazzle us with their wit and sophistication, as if to distract us from noticing that they’re so low on charm.
With “How to Train Your Dragon” — which was directed by Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders and adapted from the book by Cressida Cowell — DreamWorks has managed to loosen the screws, at least a little. The writers — a team including DeBlois, Adam F. Goldberg, Chris Sanders, Peter Tolan — have focused more on the story than on loading it with hyper gags, and as a result the movie is both more relaxed and more focused than, for instance, DreamWorks Animation’s last picture, the cluttered and scattershot “Monsters vs. Aliens.” Hiccup (the voice of Jay Baruchel) is a brainy young Viking lad, living in a Viking village that must always be on the lookout for dangerous dragons. Hiccup’s father, the burly, bushy-bearded Stoick the Vast (Gerard Butler), is a brave dragon hunter, and the expectation is that Hiccup will follow in his footsteps. But Hiccup isn’t very good at slaying dragons. And when, one day, he encounters a wounded beastie who’s easy prey, he just can’t bring himself to do the deed. This is a good thing, because the young dragon — whom he names Toothless — becomes a loyal companion who teaches Hiccup that dragons aren’t to be feared and conquered but understood: There are benefits to sharing the world with them, instead of trying to wipe them from the face of the earth.
The picture has a tidy moral, for those who look for such things. It shows, gently enough, that received wisdom should always be questioned, and creatures (or, by extension, people) we might think of as foreign and scary are really much like us. “Everything we know about you guys is wrong,” Hiccup marvels as he comes to learn that Toothless has some very generous food-sharing impulses (he regurgitates a half-eaten fish and nudges it in Hiccup’s direction) and will fall asleep instantly if he’s scratched in a certain way.
“I looked at him, and I saw myself,” Hiccup says of Toothless in a particularly revelatory moment, though I’d hesitate to put too strict a geopolitical reading on “How to Train Your Dragon”: The formerly misunderstood dragons end up as Viking pets — beloved ones, but pets just the same. Beyond its easy-on-the-psyche message, the picture is reasonably pretty to look at. It was designed to be seen in 3-D, which means we often see Hiccup on Toothless’ back, swooping through the air above cloud-laced mountains and through artfully chiseled valleys. In one striking scene the two find themselves part of an air-traffic clog of fellow dragons of all shapes, sizes and varieties, all on their way to a mysterious somewhere.
“How to Train Your Dragon” is low on belabored gags, which makes sitting through it relatively painless (although you’ll have to suspend disbelief enough to reconcile all those Scottish accents tumbling out of Viking mouths — in addition to Butler’s voice, we also hear Craig Ferguson’s). The movie also has a strange, grim twist at the end that’s treated a little too blithely. And it reaffirms a recurring DreamWorks weakness: With one exception, the character design is uninspired. When you’ve seen one scrappy little Viking ragamuffin with a bulbous nose and half-moon smile, you’ve seen them all.
But then there’s Toothless: He may be a dragon, but with his rounded paws and panther-shaped head, there’s also something of the house cat in him — he has the same proportions of civilized dignity and wildness, as well as a tendency to express his affection in offhanded ways. (Remember that regurgitated fish?) Toothless has black Naugahyde skin that makes you want to reach out and touch it; his glowing green eyes are mischievous and appraising but not wholly unfriendly. And he doesn’t speak, which means that Hiccup — and we — must read his expression, the tilt of his ears, the way he swishes his tail, to know what he’s thinking, and even then we can’t be 100 percent sure. Toothless has the one precious ingredient that’s missing from so many of Hollywood’s contemporary animated characters: an air of mystery. For once, instead of spelling everything out for us with constant chatter, DreamWorks has gotten the knack of leaving something unsaid.
It was entirely possible to be a teenage girl in 1975 and have no idea who the Runaways were. But even if you’d never heard them, you wouldn’t have had any trouble understanding what the Runaways were about: This was a bunch of tough-looking Los Angeles girls who may have been brought together by a sleazy, exploitative impresario named Kim Fowley. Nonetheless, their raggedly sensuous sound was a “no” rather than an acquiescent “yes,” the sound of not waiting around for life to happen. They were neither the first nor the last all-girl outfit to refuse to wait around — the Shangri-Las had gotten there before, and Sleater-Kinney would come later, to name just two. But the Runaways’ brash charisma was specific to its era: With their jagged feathered hair and satin jumpsuits, they were girls you wanted to be, less sugar and spice than glamour and sweat.
Floria Sigismondi’s “The Runaways” tells a somewhat fictionalized version of the band’s story. But even though there’s always some rock ‘n’ roll wanker — usually a guy — on hand to volunteer, “I was on the scene, and that’s not how it went down,” the best rock ‘n’ roll movies are less about strict authenticity than about capturing a vibe. And “The Runaways” gets the vibe just right, from its opening shot: As the girl who will become the Runaways’ lead singer, a superfoxy, Bowie-loving 15-year-old sunshine-blonde named Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning), sneaks around with her twin sister, Marie (Riley Keough), to meet up with some boys, a drop of her menstrual blood hits the pavement. Shortly thereafter, the girls change from their schoolgirl knee-socks and wedgie sandals into glittery, neck-breaking platform shoes they’ve “borrowed” from their mom. These are girls who, to borrow a line Paul Westerberg put into a song many years later, are aching to be.
From there, Sigismondi — who also wrote the screenplay, partly adapted from Currie’s candid and entertaining memoir “Neon Angel” — traces the band’s rise and inevitable implosion, including a scene in which the young Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart) totes her guitar to see the school music teacher (played by Robert Romanus, Damone in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”). After unsuccessfully trying to get her to strum a few chords of “On Top of Old Smokey,” he informs her that girls don’t play electric guitar, and you can imagine how well that goes over. Jett, obviously, persists, but the members of the band — including lead guitarist Lita Ford (Scout Taylor-Compton) and Sandy West (Stella Maeve); a fifth character named Robin (Alia Shawkat) was invented for the movie, as a way around legal restrictions surrounding the portrayal of the band’s real-life bassist, Jackie Fox — find their way to one another only with the help of skeezeball genius Fowley. As Michael Shannon plays him — almost too well — Fowley is a greasy, lizardlike operator whose single facial expression is a half-sneer, half-scowl. He rules the band by abuse: He calls the girls his “dogs” and sends them out on grueling tours without giving them enough money for food, let alone paying them an actual wage.
But even though Sigismondi doesn’t exactly gloss over Fowley’s creepitude — and even though it goes without saying that in real life, the Runaways made far too little money off their brief but blazing run, which included a deal with Mercury Records — she recognizes that focusing too much on Fowley’s exploitation of the girls would turn the movie into his story instead of theirs, focusing on their victimhood rather than their triumph. “The Runaways” is, as you’d expect, a portrait of excess, including lots of sex, drugs and rampaging groupies. But its bigger focus is on the transformative powers of rock ‘n’ roll. When Fowley strides up to Cherie in a L.A. club and croons, “I like your style,” he’s picking up on the exact out-of-sight radio signal she’s striving to send: Cherie looks great in her satiny outfit and homemade shag haircut, but it’s her attitude — her half-bored, half-expectant pout — that pushes the look into the stratosphere. Fanning’s Cherie has a “don’t mess with me” aura, but with a great deal of softness around the edges. Sigismondi is extremely conscious of the line between dewy teenage innocence and the hard-edged, used-up look that can take its place seemingly overnight.
Sigismondi — who has directed music videos for the White Stripes and Marilyn Manson — elides some parts of the band’s story and compresses others, but she keeps deft control of the picture’s overall tone: She doesn’t downplay young Cherie’s suffering, caused partly by family problems and partly by just growing up too fast, but she doesn’t waste time playing junior shrink, either. Benoît Debie’s cinematography is L.A.-tawdry when it needs to be and exuberantly glossy when the story calls for it. It is also, in places, beautifully moody and tender, particularly in the affectionate sex scene between Currie and Jett. In her book, Currie writes very simply, and with great protectiveness, about her relationship with Jett: “It ran deep, and at times she was the only one that kept me sane … How do I explain about a person that was my best friend, someone I would confide in like a sister, someone who to me became a strong, sexual attraction? Well, it’s easy … I can leave it by saying that I had moments with a friend that quake me to this day.” In the film, there’s no explicit seduction scene, not even a muted one: Sigismondi instead shows Jett and Currie almost literally drifting toward each other, bathed in low light. The sequence is brushed with tenderness and a druggy, blissed-out eroticism. Sigismondi doesn’t infantilize her subjects by making it look as if they’re merely cuddling, like coy schoolgirls. And the fact that Currie is wearing roller skates makes the moment even more touching: They’re one last vestige of little-girl innocence.
My hunch is that a lot of viewers who have watched Fanning grow up in the movies — many, but probably not all, of them men — are going to feel uncomfortable seeing her in a role that eroticizes her so frankly. But I think that discomfort speaks to the noisy shout of freedom that the Runaways sounded themselves: At what point is a little girl allowed to be not just a young woman, but her own person? Someday she’s going to demand the keys to the car, and not just literally.
That unspoken restlessness is everywhere in “The Runaways,” in the way Stewart captures Jett’s slightly hunched, long-legged stride, and in the way Fanning’s Cherie takes the stage during a show in Japan, wearing a creamy satin bustier and stockings, to sing the band’s jailbait-heartbreaker anthem “Cherry Bomb.” As the real Cherie Currie did, Fanning (who does her own singing in the film) wraps the microphone cord around her leg, only to unwrap it and whip it around again, a snake-charmer routine that’s also an obvious challenge: You think you want this, but can you handle it? That challenge isn’t just a sexual come-on: It’s a basic question about how to move forward the business of living. Teenagers aren’t ready for life, which is exactly why they want to jump in and get on with things. “The Runaways” is all about taking that leap — and being OK with the bruises after the inevitable fall.
Sam Worthington in "Clash of the Titans."(Credit: Jay Maidment) 
Miley Cyrus in "The Last Song." 
Hiccup and Toothless the dragon 
Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning star in The Runaways, a Sundance Films production. 