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A Million Ways to Die in the West ★★★★★
The answer most definitely is not writing, directing should probably watch “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey” to learn more about black holes. I’d like to write and starring in a meta-western so gut-busting it makes THIS PAGE Blazing Saddles YOUR look like Unforgiven.SCAN Ignore the reviews. SCAN THIS PAGE that Seth MacFarlane is a human black hole sucking WITH LAYAR WITH LAYAR This is genius. TEXT all the talent from the universe, but I’m not sure that’s HERE a sheep farmer who SEE PAGE SEE PAGE 5 MacFarlane plays can’t5 believe how how black holes work. Here are a few things I do know about the disproportionately gifted actor, animator, comedian, much life sucks in Arizona circa 1882, and around whom inwriter, producer, director, humanitarian, singer, pianist and creasingly absurd and surreal things happen for 116 inspired minutes. He’s essentially a fellow with 21st-century sensibilicomposer: ties marooned in the old West, a time and place MacFarlane clearly believes has been romanticized by Hollywood to the • “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey” wouldn’t exist without point of lunacy. MacFarlane. Honest. It was his idea, and he put his own That’s the film’s brilliant twist. It’s not just another genre money into it. spoof, but a laceratingly honest look at how appallingly dull, • Since 2008, he’s been the highest-paid television writer dumb and dangerous frontier existence was. A Million Ways in the world. to Die in the West isn’t about bad guys so much as bad hy• He turned pro when he was 9, publishing a weekly comic giene, schools, medical care, living conditions, fashion and strip in his hometown paper. entertainment options, the last being virtually limited to • He studied under Frank Sinatra’s vocal coach and has things you can do in a saloon/whorehouse. sung at Carnegie Hall. And a lot of entertaining things are done there. Sarah Sil• His directorial debut, Ted, is the highest-grossing original verman is worth the price of admission by herself. Of course, R-rated comedy of all time. she’s never by herself, since she plays a prostitute who’ll do • He’s widely recognized for his work on behalf of gay anything for a nickel but insists that she and her meek geek rights. • On 9/11, he was scheduled to return to LA from Boston on BF (Giovanni Ribisi) save themselves for marriage. She’s never been dirtier or more hilarious. the plane that flew into the North Tower, but missed his Also stellar are Gilbert Gottfried as a Lincoln impersonflight because of a hangover. ator, Neil Patrick Harris as the proprietor of a swank bou• All of the above notwithstanding, Seth MacFarlane is an tique specializing in preposterous mustache-care products, atheist. and Charlize Theron as a stranger who hits it off with our Clearly, the question is what can’t this guy do? You may hero and offers to teach him how to shoot. A Million Ways is that rare picture that’s even better than answer, “Host the 85th Academy Awards without stirring up controversy.” That’s a bad thing? Oh, and he was nominated its ads hope to convince you it is, a wildly singular creation from a wildly singular artist. The dialogue will have you for a Best Original Song Oscar that year.
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blowing Pepsi out your nose, while the cinematography and score will flash you back to Technicolor oaters of the ’50s. On top of a bar fight that’s an instant classic and the finest poop-in-the-street scene since Bridesmaids, the film has a million unhinged gags, almost all of which hit their mark. MacFarlane gives us old cowpoke tropes viewed through a lucent new lens. A spectacularly naughty place to visit where no one in their right mind would want to live, the West has never been this wild. RI C K KI S O N AK
REVIEWS
Maleficent ★★
H
ollywood execs used to say a female protagonist couldn’t carry a big movie. Then came The Hunger Games and the Twilight series and Alice in Wonderland and Frozen. Maleficent, essentially a film about a middle-aged woman’s regrets and her cheekbones, grossed nearly $170 million worldwide last weekend. It’s nice to see the tide turn, but it would be nicer to see it turn with a good movie. In Frozen, Disney reinvigorated an old story with clever new surprises. Maleficent returns to the lazy, lucrative pattern the studio set with Alice (Linda Woolverton scripted both films) and Oz the Great and Powerful: Take a familiar tale of wonder, reshape it to make it more like modern fantasies, fill the screen with visual splendor and rely on charismatic lead actors to do the rest. Maleficent director Robert Stromberg, who was the production designer on both Oz and Alice, does his part by making its fairy-tale world look like a cross between Maxfield Parrish on acid and a classic silent film. Everything in this Sleeping Beauty update pivots around Angelina Jolie’s goodfairy-turned-bad and her iconic face — always otherworldly, here uncannily enhanced with facial prosthetics. Mightier than her human adversaries, and apparently the only natural or supernatural creature in her world with half a brain, Maleficent eclipses the other characters to the extent of sucking the intrigue right out of the film. We meet the title character as a winged orphan growing up in a fairyland called the Moors that adjoins a human kingdom. These Moors look more like swampy woodlands, and Maleficent seems more beneficent than not, but what’s in a name? Anyhow, Maleficent grows into hers after her childhood friend, the human boy Stefan, reappears years later as a conniving courtier (Sharlto Copley) who betrays and mutilates her. When Stefan becomes king and spawns a royal
HOW THE WEST WAS WEIRD Frontier life may have been no joke, but in MacFarlane’s hands, it’s good for a million laughs.
MALAR PRIVILEGE No, not even Angelina Jolie has these cheekbones in real life.
daughter, Maleficent has the perfect gift for her christening: a neat little curse involving puberty, sleep and spinning wheels. Hoping to avert Princess Aurora’s destiny, Stefan inexplicably entrusts her to three pixies (Lesley Manville, Imelda Staunton and Juno Temple) who are portrayed as incompetent half-wits. Hence the task of keeping Aurora alive to
Sweet Sixteen falls to a remorseful Maleficent, who eventually starts feeling maternal toward the girl (Elle Fanning) she used as a scapegoat for her wrath. It’s not a bad scenario for a feminist fairy-tale reimagining: the “evil” fairy godmother as mentor. But to make the two women’s bond meaningful, the script needs to give Aurora vigor and self-determination. Instead, like everyone else in the film, she remains a passive instrument of Maleficent’s schemes. Fanning avoids cartoon sickly sweetness, but she has little to work with; Copley’s character is similarly underwritten and anything but a worthy adversary. (The District 9 star does over-the-top performances and fade-into-the-wallpaper performances; this is among the latter.) Maybe it’s assumed these days, when you put Jolie in a film, that she’s going to make everyone else into set dressing. But with nobody to play against except her own bad self, even Maleficent is more of a striking objet d’art than a character. Wearing the iconic horns and cowl from Disney’s 1959 Sleeping Beauty, with luminous skin and eyes that were apparently based on a goat’s, Jolie often appears silhouetted in shadows that evoke the black and white of silent-screen queens. She’s like Norma Desmond without the good dialogue. Alice and Oz appealed to audiences hungry for more busy marvels in the Harry Potter vein. But the action scenes in Maleficent feel perfunctory: Like Ridley Scott’s Legend, it’s likely to be remembered longer for its look than anything else. I know that I, for one, will be having nightmares about Jolie’s prosthetic cheekbones — they’re like caterpillars stuck under her skin! — for a while. MARGO T HARRI S O N