Movie Nation

“Happily,” Tommy Lee Jones says, “I bear no resemblance to Douglas MacArthur at all.”

And if you’re going to portray the World War II general nicknamed “American Caesar” by some historians, in the movie “Emperor,” that’s a liberating thing.
“That job is done by the corncob pipe and the aviator sunglasses. And the hat, with LOTS of gold on it.”

Most people not remember or even know “who the man was, Americans being ignorant of their own history,” Jones says. And it’s been difficult even for historians to get under the skin of the “real” General of the Army, victor in the Pacific, head of the occupation of Japan and the man who conceived the daring Inchon landings that turned the tide in the Korean War.

“The only recordings of his spoken voice are speeches, on public occasions, before large numbers of people,” Jones says. “Very controlled, very impressive because he knew he needed to impress.”

Even though both MacArthur and Jones were born in Texas, that was no help, because “MacArthur was born on an Army base,” so no Texas accent Jones could build on. The voice “was very formal, oratorical. Pretentious, patrician, also. The accent seems narcissistic, too. There aren’t any candid photographs of him, either. Very much in control of his image.”

The MacArthur that Jones delivers in “Emperor” is off the cuff, cagey and salty – a career soldier who swears and imperiously sets his own foreign policy, brushing off Washington, working out whether or not to prosecute Emperor Hirohito for war crimes. In the film he gives the job to a trusted aide, General Bonner Fellers (Matthew Fox), a real historical figure with a Hollywood-invented romantic past with a Japanese woman.

“It’s a love story, East meeting West told in personal terms, with all this history as a backdrop,” Jones explains.

Jones, fresh off the Oscar nomination for playing another historical figure, Congressman Thaddeus Stevens in “Lincoln,” happily took on playing MacArthur for that love story in “Emperor” because “if you realize what MacArthur did and why, you have a better understanding of both countries, and the better side of both countries.”

At 66, hasn’t aged out of the “rascally” label film scholar David Thomson slapped on him in his “Biographical Dictionary of Film.” But in recent years, he’s made his living off the irascible persona he carved out of his Oscar-winning character in “The Fugitive” and “U.S. Marshals,” so much so that when cameras pan to him not laughing in the audience at Golden Globes, and to him cracking up when Oscar host Seth MacFarlane began the Oscars telecast with, “And the quest to make Tommy Lee Jones laugh begins now.”

His crusty side – notorious in interviews – only appears when asking about the movie he’s about to direct and co-star in with Meryl Streep, Hillary Swank and Tim Blake Nelson. “The Homesman,” which will film in April in New Mexico, is set in the 19^th century, a quest tale about a pioneer woman and a mining “claim jumper” who escort a trio of insane women from Nebraska to Iowa. Whatever you do, don’t call it a “Western.”

“This stupid label — ‘Western’ — it’s hard to get around that,” he grouses. “There are a lot of people, who, once they teach themselves to pronounce that word ‘Western,’ think they understand the movies.” A master of that film idiom, with “Lonesome Dove,” “The Missing,” “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada” and “The Good Old Boys” under his hat, Jones objects to the way the label “Western” limits the story, both for possible film financiers and for moviegoers. He’s got enough to fret over, co-writing and directing the film, without labels.

“The undependability of the weather is the biggest thing you deal with when you film something like this,” he says. “We want to snow on the day we need it to snow. And that’s not going to happen. Whoever’s in control of the weather doesn’t pay much attention to me and my requests about that. We have all these period sets to build, pretty far apart, in Northeastern New Mexico.

“I don’t think we’re behind, but I know for sure we’re not ahead.”

(Roger Moore’s review of “Emperor” is here.)

Apparently. Still trying to get my mind around him showing up in a new “Star Wars” trilogy, and then this comes up. He’ll sort of do a version of the grizzled vet of the airwaves he played in “Morning Glory.

Hirohito sat on the Chrysanthemum Throne and ruled Japan through wars with China and World War II. But at the end of the war, there were two emperors in Tokyo. Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, ruled Japan like a potentate, overseeing reforms that turned the country away from fascistic feudalism into a modern economic superpower.

“Emperor” is about both men, about MacArthur deciding whether or not to prosecute Hirohito as a war monger and war criminal. Was the “God King” merely a passive observer to his country’s militarism and crimes against humanity? Or did he sign off on it?

Tommy Lee Jones gives us a saltier version of MacArthur than the image-conscious general ever let on to. His Mac is cagey, guarded, cunning enough to want to cover himself but brave and savvy enough to know that strutting with “a show of absolute fearlessness” is what will impress the Japanese upon his arrival.

With a tiny contingent of troops, he struts onto Japanese soil and watches the armed lines of soldiers turn their back as his motorcade passes.

“They avert their gaze for the Emperor, too,” an aide explains.

“I know,” MacArthur puffs.

We will be “liberators, not conquerors.” But what to do about Hirohito?

He puts an aide, General Bonner Fellers (Matthew Fox) on the case. Fellers spent time in Japan before the war. He doesn’t tell anyone, but the great love of his life was Japanese. In between questioning Hirohito’s staff and politicians (the Emperor himself cannot be approached), Fellers puts out feelers to find this woman (Eriko Hatsune, glimpsed in flashback) amidst the ruins of a gutted, starving Japan.

Fellers is given ten days to decide whether or not to arrest the emperor. He must round up other suspects before they can commit suicide.

To its credit, the script (Vera Blasi and David Klass, based on a Shiro Okamoto book) plays up the uncertainty of the times, the pragmatism of MacArthur and the ambiguity of the Emperor’s guilt. But the love story plays like a clumsy distraction. The film soft peddles both the perceived communist threat that both MacArthur and Fellers were working to thwart, and the real Fellers’ anti-communist zealotry, which had him joining the far right fringe group The John Birch Society after his military service ended.

Fox plays the lovelorn soldier blandly, but the whole romance thing appears to be fiction, and historians suggest Fellers’ real mission was to allow Japanese officials to coordinate their lies so that MacArthur would have cover in refusing to prosecute Hirohito.

That suggests a better movie, or at least a more accurate one, was lost in the script stages. But “Emperor” still manages to be a pretty interesting melodrama and a fair, if muddled, accounting of how America helped its hated enemy recover and reform, even if it never quite came to grips with its crimes and role in starting a war.

(The “REAL” Bonner Fellers is examined here.  And Roger Moore’s interview with Tommy Lee Jones is here. )

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violent content, brief strong language and smoking (historical)

Cast: Tommy Lee Jones, Matthew Fox

Credits: Directed by Peter Webber, scripted by Vera Blasi and David Kaas. A Roadside Attractions release.

Running time:1:45

Stanley Kubrick spent the latter part of the 1960s — post “2001,” pre-“Clockwork Orange” — pulling together a movie about Napoleon.

How else do you follow the groundbreaking “2001: A Space Odyssey” — a titanic undertaking that reinvented the genre and how films of the genre were made? Napoleon seemed to match Kubrick’s total-control mania, his epic ambitions, and need to go big or go home.

He never got to make it. It was going to be too long, it was going to cost too much. And the Russian Sergey Bondarchuk’s “Waterloo” was going to win the race to get into theaters.

Now Steven Spielberg, guardian of the Kubrick legacy, since “Eyes Wide Shut” required finishing and “A.I.” wasn’t yet in production when SK died, is putting together plans to turn Kubrick’s work into a mini-series.

Film buffs will want to see it, pay cable will foot the bill and make an event. And nobody will have to fret that such an enterprise would cost more than it could possibly pull in from the box office.

It’s a fascinating precedent. Orson Welles, a far more interesting and humanistic director than the Big K, had many a project that never saw the light of day. Of course, Kubrick the archivist kept his preparations, notes. He had to give up “Napoleon” a couple of times. Welles skittered about, losing whatever preps he’d begun, chunks of unfinished films, etc., as he fled creditors.

“A” is for agonizing, awful and apocalyptic.

“B is for bizarre, brutal and bloody.

“D” is for disturbing, deeply disturbing, “S” for subversive, “T” for twisted and trangressive.

“The ABCs of Death” is an instant midnight movie, a morbid mishmash of styles and filmmaking formats – 26 films, 26 filmmakers from the four corners of the horror globe, all making short films about death.

It’s not for everyone.

A wildly uneven exercise, that perhaps stems from how much bang for his buck a movie maker from Thailand (Banjong Pisanthanakun) can achieve, and how weak the imagination of some American film school alumni can be.

Spanish director Adrián García Bogliano’s “B is for Bigfoot” is an amusing account of a sexually aroused woman warning her boyfriend’s little sister that girls who don’t go to sleep by eight are carried off and eaten by an abominable snowman who now lives in Mexico City. Yes, it has a gory payoff.

Marcel Sarmiento’s “D is for Dogfight” may be the most disturbing (which is saying something), a vivid, ugly slow-motion parable about an underworld where dogs fight homeless men to the death. Until one dog, and one homeless guy, find common ground.

“K is for Klutz” is a laugh-out-loud animated affair about a blond battling, to the death, something she tried and failed to get down the toilet on the first flush. That film’s Danish animator Anders Morgenthaler wasn’t the only one who thought “toilet” when he joined this project. Lee Hardcastle’s comical and crudely made clay animated “T is for Toilet,” about toilet-training a tyke, has a wicked payoff, too.

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You could tell this weekend was going to be a bust at the movies by the scarcity of traffic reading online reviews of “21 and Over” and “Last Exorcism Part II” and “Jack the Giant Slayer.”

That’s how bad buzz manifests itself. Nobody cares to read reviews, nobody’s been tempted by the subject matter, the titles, the casts of these movies to even consider going. When “Hansel & Gretel” was opening, I had the most weekend traffic I’ve ever had. This weekend, the worst ever on this new blogging platform.

“Jack the Giant Slayer” did a respectable $28 million. That’s 3D ticket inflation at work. It’s doing better than “Hansel & Gretel,” but that cost a fraction of “Jack.”

How this movie, without the most expensive cast in the world, with a story that comes from the public domain, cost $195 million is a study in blunders. Did Warners really want to be in the Bryan Singer business that badly that they agreed to or foist this on him?

I was sure, from the laughs generated by the preview audience, that “21 and Over” would find more than $10 million in ticket goers. Surely this “Hangover” style farce is not passe already? It only managed $9.

“The Last Exorcism Part II” is duller than dull, and when I saw it late Thursday, there were only half a dozen of us in the theater. A really HOT horror title will pack a midnight show Thursday night. In Orlando, at least. It barely cleared $8 million.

Omar Sy was the tall, blunt chatterbox who turned the French race-class-disability clash comedy “The Intouchables” into a huge worldwide hit, a big enough hit that Hollywood is now talking about remaking it.

A pretty big figure in French film before the Cesar-winning “Intouchables,” now he’s gotten a big offer from Hollywood, to join the cast of “X-Men, Days of Future Past.”

He’s not alone among the new faces in this franchise prequel/sequel (set in the past and the fictive present). Peter Dinklage is also on board. No word on what they’re playing. Bryan Singer will return to the franchise after the misguided attempt to be Tim Burton by directing “Jack the Giant Slayer.”