The listless movie adaptation of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen has the sweat stains of wasted energy; it's dreary, yet frantic. The film is inspired by Alan Moore's comics of the same name, an imaginative and grisly take on Victorian heroes.
Convened to battle a world-threatening evil, the league is a group of tough, forgotten or ignored British loners brought together at the behest of the queen to stop this encroaching danger. In the director Stephen Norrington's film, it's a plot engineered by a villain known as the Fantom to sink Venice, and, yes, eventually conquer the world.
To foil this plot, the British Secret Service agent Sanderson Reed (Tom Goodman-Hill), working under the auspices of the agency head M (Richard Roxburgh), is determined to bring the league of misfit adventurers together. The first summoned is Allan Quatermain (Sean Connery), the legendary hunter and explorer who, though well past his prime, is still capable of some world-beating moves himself.
PHOTO COURTESY OF FOX MOVIES
Quatermain serves as president of these immortals, a number that eventually includes the pirate Captain Nemo (Neseeruddin Shah) and an invisible man, Rodney Skinner (Tony Curran, using his voice wickedly well). As the plot thickens, others link up, like Mina Harker (Peta Wilson), a victim of Dracula who now uses blood-sucking prowess for good. She helps, um, seduce to the cause the dandyish Dorian Gray (Stuart Townsend), whose portrait makes him invulnerable in addition to being impervious to aging -- a witty turn that Oscar Wilde apparently had no interest in. The noble, rambunctious and innocent Tom Sawyer (Shane West), now an adult operative for the US Secret Service, tosses his Stetson in.
Eventually the league tracks down its final inductee, Mr. Hyde (Jason Flemyng), who stalks the streets of Paris after fleeing London. Wearing him down until he becomes the docile Dr. Jekyll, the league members browbeat him into joining. Aboard Captain Nemo's magnificent blade of a submarine, the Nautilus, the team sets out on its mission to find the Fantom and end his perfidy. Between bouts of bickering and possible treachery, the league must try to combat the Fantom's futuristic inventions -- like tanks and flame-throwers -- with valor, daring and some of Nemo's own engineering marvels.
The film's screenplay by James Dale Robinson -- who toiled in comic books for some time himself -- takes pains to get the spirit of Moore's tale right. It's a formidable task, bringing the comics' dank, coruscating vision to the screen, an abiding interest of the producer Don Murphy. Murphy was also responsible for a previous Moore adaptation, From Hell, featuring another Victorian misfit, Jack the Ripper. Moore's melancholic and apocalyptic stories have a dour, murderous humor drizzling through the depressive clouds. No one in comics is his equal at conjuring the end of the world, and in his stories -- from The Watchmen and V for Vendetta through League -- the world is awash in brutality and ugliness, deserving of doom. Moore's pleasure comes in serving up Old Testament balance.
The league of his comics falls into two piles. One group consists of victims, like the haunted, doddering Quatermain, who battles an opium habit and fears that he's too old to do much good, and Mina, whose past with vampires is only alluded to (and who leads the group with her cool British common sense and an implied death wish stemming from her reputation as a fallen woman). Or else, they're sly, amoral psychopaths, like the invisible man, who's introduced raping young women at a girls' school, and Hyde, a calculating man-beast who remembers every slight done to him or his alter ego. The vengeance he finally takes on the invisible man is horrific, a fate that will never make it from the page to the screen. No one is going to follow that story to the letter in making a big-budget action movie.
Norrington and Robinson show glimmers of faith in Moore's vision -- that paranoia, suspicion and resentment as well as other major character flaws are more a part of the league's bond than fighting for queen and country. There's a visual tribute, too: the long, dark hair and beard on the Fantom make this bad guy look like photos of the lanky, vaguely frightening Moore. The addition of Dorian Gray, who doesn't appear in the comics, and a joke about Captain Nemo's first mate are in keeping with Moore's pillaging of British public-domain figures with a tattered history. (Not all are public-domain. The movie's see-through hero has to be called an invisible man, or risk a battle not even Quatermain could win: a copyright lawsuit.)
But Moore's League is a meditation on ambiguity, something large-scale-action spectacles have shied away from since The Empire Strikes Back, which came so long ago it now actually feels like a legend from Victorian England. Norrington's movie, which opens nationwide today, suffers from its own anxieties -- a dread of being too literate, if not too literary. That's an unintentionally hilarious failing, given the material's leaning on bookish figures -- in their way, the Marvel comics of their time. It's hard not to notice the connection between Hyde and the Hulk, and how much more impressive the visual effects are in rendering Jekyll's brutish alter ago than Bruce Banner's big green side. (It's here that Norrington's background as a conceptual artist presents itself.)
Connery's choice to portray Quatermain as unflaggingly stalwart displays a lack of nuance, killing off any hint of subtext. The closest he comes to fallibility is a weary cantankerousness that registers more like hostility than weakness. The crushing obviousness he exerts amounts to a misunderstanding of his power and his presence: he was also an executive producer.
Obviously, Tom Sawyer was added as a nod to young American audiences, and West is likably reckless.
Despite the intentions to be reverent, Norrington, who did a ruthlessly elegant job directing Blade, is bound and gagged by the need of League to be quick and glib. Somehow, you sense that Fox would be happier calling this picture The Justice League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. As it stands, the movie is neither gentle nor extraordinary. Gentlemen may be a better movie than other Connery fantasy-action films like The Avengers, but then again a glass of muddy water looks good to someone just coming in from the desert.
Cheng Ching-hsiang (鄭青祥) turned a small triangle of concrete jammed between two old shops into a cool little bar called 9dimension. In front of the shop, a steampunk-like structure was welded by himself to serve as a booth where he prepares cocktails. “Yancheng used to be just old people,” he says, “but now young people are coming and creating the New Yancheng.” Around the corner, Yu Hsiu-jao (饒毓琇), opened Tiny Cafe. True to its name, it is the size of a cupboard and serves cold-brewed coffee. “Small shops are so special and have personality,” she says, “people come to Yancheng to find such treasures.” She
Late last month Philippines Foreign Affairs Secretary Theresa Lazaro told the Philippine Senate that the nation has sufficient funds to evacuate the nearly 170,000 Filipino residents in Taiwan, 84 percent of whom are migrant workers, in the event of war. Agencies have been exploring evacuation scenarios since early this year, she said. She also observed that since the Philippines has only limited ships, the government is consulting security agencies for alternatives. Filipinos are a distant third in overall migrant worker population. Indonesia has over 248,000 workers, followed by roughly 240,000 Vietnamese. It should be noted that there are another 170,000
In July of 1995, a group of local DJs began posting an event flyer around Taipei. It was cheaply photocopied and nearly all in English, with a hand-drawn map on the back and, on the front, a big red hand print alongside one prominent line of text, “Finally… THE PARTY.” The map led to a remote floodplain in Taipei County (now New Taipei City) just across the Tamsui River from Taipei. The organizers got permission from no one. They just drove up in a blue Taiwanese pickup truck, set up a generator, two speakers, two turntables and a mixer. They
Hannah Liao (廖宸萱) recalls the harassment she experienced on dating apps, an experience that left her frightened and disgusted. “I’ve tried some voice-based dating apps,” the 30-year-old says. “Right away, some guys would say things like, ‘Wanna talk dirty?’ or ‘Wanna suck my d**k?’” she says. Liao’s story is not unique. Ministry of Health and Welfare statistics show a more than 50 percent rise in sexual assault cases related to online encounters over the past five years. In 2023 alone, women comprised 7,698 of the 9,413 reported victims. Faced with a dating landscape that can feel more predatory than promising, many in
RSS