Stardust

dir: Matthew Vaughn
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It’s been a while since a fairy tale has dared to aim itself at anything apart from the audience of infants and drooling dateless wonders. Neil Gaiman wrote the book this modern fable is based on, and that’s almost enough to pique my interest.

Not that adaptations of his works have translated that well to the big screen. Mirrormask missed the mark somewhat, and Neverwhere should have stayed there. But he is still a remarkable writer whose spin on old ideas often yields surprising and amazing results. Adaptations of great stuff like American Gods and Sandman have long been threatened, and will eventually reveal his genius to wider audiences.

Until then…

Still, Stardust feels awfully generic and little of it is new. There’s a skill in that, insofar as people want the familiar sometimes, just so they can see how the familiar can be played out in a different fashion. That explains the popularity of sports, as far as I can work out, since it’s the same shit all over again, week in week out, season after pointless season.

But this is fantasy cinema, aimed at kids and adults alike. The kids because they don’t care about logic or sense, and they compel their parents to buy a lot of merchandising, and the adults because no-life nerds living in basements fixate on fantasy films as if they’re nipple slips from celebrities, and will buy every prop and official piece of merchandise and eBay paraphernalia that their disposable incomes will allow for.

The closest parallel made by the mostest people seems to be that this is as close to The Princess Bride that we’re going to get any time soon. That’s a bold and lofty statement, but I guess it only carries water if you actually like The Princess Bride.

Well, I’ve watched The Princess Bride, and I do love The Princess Bride, and to paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, you sir, are no Princess Bride. Stardust is still entertaining, marginally, but it’s a bit of fluff to be soon forgotten. It felt off a lot of the time, but I suspect I won’t mind as much if I ever bother to see it again.

About the only remarkable element this ostensive fairy tale flick possesses is that it contains gay friendly programming beyond fairies or sprinkles of stardust or any other party favours you might expect in something aimed at kids. Not that there’s anything wrong with it. The implied homosexuality of Captain Jack Sparrow is now made obvious in an actual gay sky pirate in the form of Captain Shakespeare, perilously played by Robert De Niro, of all people. He hides his secret nature from his vicious crew, who would likely kill him if they found out, in order to fulfil his father’s wishes. Or so he thinks.

How’s that for progressive and enlightened, for this day and age, eh?

Of course, they don’t go so far as to actually allow him to have a relationship with another man, or to hit on the main character, because then you’ve got a whole other kettle of gay fish to deal with. The classic pro-gay/homophobic dynamic in action.

Kinda pointless, if you ask me. But you didn’t, so, let’s continue with another review you never asked for either, dear reader.

Coexisting simultaneously with the ‘real’ world is a magical realm known as, I dunno, Stormhold or Stormwall or Wallstorm, or some such crap. An enterprising young chap decides to cross the barrier between the worlds, it appears only so he can get laid.

Nine months later, a baby is dropped on the doorstep of the intrepid human in the English town of Wall. The baby grows up to be Tristan (Charlie Cox), a strapping young lad with a very poncy name. It’s not his fault, when you consider the mystical nature of his parentage.

Tristan loves a superficial scrag called Victoria (Sienna Miller), who sets him a virtually impossible task, because despite being flattered by his devotion, he is but a poor shop boy. As they watch a falling star, she pledges to marry him if he brings it to her.

Of course, she doesn’t believe it’s doable, since she clearly knows a lot about astronomy, and about how fallings stars are really just meteorites that generally burn up in the atmosphere. She’s a freaking genius, so she must know.

Naturally Tristan sets off to find the star, but only after checking out some shit his mother left in the basket with him when she abandoned him like the foundling-a-ding that he is. One of the items is a Babylon candle, which is not a reference to a Rastafarian joint made with pesticide-infused dope. It teleports the user to wherever they’re thinking of, but it burns out pretty fast.

When he arrives at the star’s crash site, which happens to be way over the other side of the wall in the fairy realm, he discovers something Amazing, something Remarkable, something utterly Gobsmacking: the star is actually a person of some description, virtually identical to a human except for her lack of eyebrows. Yvaine (Claire Danes) and Tristan alternately fall on top of each other due to circumstance, and bicker constantly in that way that only people who eventually fall in love with each other do. I wonder whether Tristan will realise that Yvaine, and not Victoria, is the blonde strumpet for him, before it’s too late?

At the same time, a trio of haggard witches led by the loathsome Lamia (Michelle Pfeiffer) want to capture Yvaine in order to cut out her heart and to grant themselves more power and youth.

At the same time, a dying king (Peter O’Toole) who is somehow responsible for having knocked Yvaine out of the sky, sets a task for his sons and potential heirs to the throne that the one who finds his regal necklace, which Yvaine now has, will be the next king of StromThurmondhole. His sons are a particularly bloodthirsty bunch, none so nasty as Septimus (Mark Strong), who is the most ruthlessly efficient at eliminating the competition and tracking Yvaine down.

At the same time, well, you get the idea. Lots and lots of stuff goes on with precious few answers to the questions the audience really has.

Such as: as far as stars go, as in burning superhot gaseous giants undergoing a constant stream of fission and fusion explosions on the atomic level in order to generate temperatures of tens and hundreds of thousands of degrees and beyond: um, is she anatomically correct? Because if not, really, is there any contest between deciding betwixt an actual woman, flighty as she may be, and a vagina-less human shaped biped? What do stars eat, after all, and, naturally, what kind of ‘dark matter’ do they excrete at the end of the process?

These questions are never answered, and, though she plays a part in proceedings later on, nor is any explanation forthcoming as to why Tristan’s mother (Kate Magowan) is such a slut. Sure, she’s someone more powerful than she seems, kept in thrall by the evil Ditchwater Sal (Melanie Hill) in the back of a wagon, but, really, what kind of example is she setting for the kids when she has sex with Tristan’s father within seconds of meeting him? It will give kids the impression that sex is enjoyable and consequence-free, especially when bastard heroes are the result, and I won’t stand for it.

Abstinence programs for everybody!

The effects, being cheap CGI, are almost a refreshing change from the distracting high quality of other fantasy endeavours. You’re not going to mistake any scene from Stardust for a scene from that fascist masterpiece Lord of the Rings. In that sense the effects are charmingly cheesy. The story is as needlessly complicated as any of these stories deserve to be, but it shouldn’t be too confusing for the average eight-year-old to figure out.

The performances are generally okay across the board, except for De Niro, who can no more play a gay character than John Wayne could and be remotely believable. Michelle Pfeiffer, who I generally loathe, is tremendous as the witch of the piece, bringing a deliciously evil energy to the story. She gets some great lines and great moments, even as she gets uglier every time she uses her powers.

There are odd moments scattered throughout, and a fair few embarrassing ones. Matthew Vaughn is not that crash hot as a director, though Stardust is far superior to his directorial debut Layer Cake, which is one of the most profoundly boring films I’ve ever seen.

My absolute favourite scene involves a sword fight between Tristan and a dead guy, which just looked hilarious. The chorus of murdered brothers, ghosting around the place, also amused me far more than they should have. Pretty much anything else the evil characters did throughout the story kept me entertained. I know it’s wrong to want the bad guys to win, but then some flicks have that effect on you. Like how I wanted the Nazis to win in The Sound of Music.

I’m sure I wasn’t the only one.

But it’s a reasonably pleasant fable told with energy and with verve. The zero to hero storyline is older than time itself, and whilst Charlie Cox in the lead isn’t superb, he’ll do. I don’t know if I managed to suspend disbelief for long enough to ever get into it, but all I’ll say is that it wasn’t too excruciating a manner for me to spend two hours.

7 times out of ten I would have “checked” her out before making my decision, Tristan, out of 10. At least he has a surefire way of knowing when he’s made her “happy”, what with all that glowing and such.

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“A philosopher once asked, "Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at them because we are human?" Pointless, really. “Do the stars gaze back?" Now that's a question” - Stardust.

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