This Rigid Position: Judge Dredd Burnt by the Sun Crumb

review by Rob Gonsalves

DIRECTOR
Danny Cannon

SCREENWRITERS
William Wisher
Steven E. de Souza
based on characters created by
Alan Grant
John Wagner
Carlos Ezquerra

PRODUCERS
Charles M. Lippincott
Beau E.L. Marks

CINEMATOGRAPHER
Adrian Biddle

MUSIC
Alan Silvestri

EDITORS
Jeremy Gibbs
Harry Keramidas
Alex Mackie

CAST

Sylvester Stallone (Judge Dredd)
Diane Lane (Judge Hershey)
Armand Assante (Rico)
Rob Schneider (Fergie)
Max von Sydow (Chief Justice Fargo)
Jürgen Prochnow (Judge Griffin)
Joanna Miles (McGruder)
Joan Chen (Ilsa)
Balthazar Getty (Olmeyer)

MPAA rating: R
Running time: 96m
U.S. release: June 30, 1995
Video availability: VHS - DVD

DIRECTOR
Nikita Mikhalkov

SCREENWRITERS
Rustam Ibragimbekov
Nikita Mikhalkov

PRODUCERS
Nikita Mikhalkov
Michel Seydoux

CINEMATOGRAPHER
Vilen Kalyuta

MUSIC
Eduard Artemyev

EDITOR
Enzo Meniconi

CAST

Oleg Menshikov (Dimitri)
Nikita Mikhalkov (Kotov)
Ingeborga Dapkunaite (Marusia)
Nadezhda Mikhalkova (Nadya)
André Oumansky (Philippe)
Vyacheslav Tikhonov (Vsevolod)
Svetlana Kryuchkova (Mokhava)

MPAA rating: R
Running time: 152m
U.S. release: April 21, 1995
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Official website

"Eat recycled food," suggests a hallway robot in Judge Dredd. That could be the movie's tag-line: Everything in it comes almost full-blown from the foreheads of Blade Runner, RoboCop, The Terminator, and Batman. But this is tasty recycled food, and Sylvester Stallone -- as Judge Joseph Dredd, the cream of the neofascist police force patrolling the chaotic blocks of Mega-City One -- gives a new performance. He does his scowling Rambo routine and tosses off the usual cheesy one-liners, but he shows flashes of amusement at what he's doing. In futuristic head-slammers like this and Demolition Man, Stallone is the comedian he failed to be in his early-'90s comedy attempts. Those were light comedies; these, I guess, are heavy-metal comedies. Dredd is every anal-retentive principal or gym teacher you ever laughed at behind their backs, and Stallone understands that the only way to play him is absolutely straight. Dredd almost never even sits down; in his phallic, gleaming helmet and mammoth epaulets, he's a walking erection, forever alert to the smallest transgressions.

Judge Dredd is junk, but it's fun junk with a decent pedigree. The British comic book it takes off from (written mainly by Alan Grant and John Wagner) was conceived as the reductio ad absurdum of the rock-ribbed heroes who usually shoulder their way through comics. Dredd is a superhero gloss on R. Crumb's character Whiteman, who said, "I must maintain this rigid position or all is lost." The comic's tongue-in-cheek irreverence makes it into the movie fairly intact, largely because director Danny Cannon is a Dredd devotee. Judge Dredd doesn't make the mistake of suggesting that things will get so bad in the future that we'll need "protectors" like Dredd. On the contrary, as the movie goes on you begin to feel that things are that bad because of cops like Dredd. Religiously devoted to the law, Dredd sentences people to five years for minor offenses. It's the nightmare flip side of the enforced sunshine world of Demolition Man: If you live in Mega-City One, you can't not break some law.

Cannon and the writers (William Wisher and Steven E. de Souza) soon give Dredd a taste of his own medicine. A newscaster and his wife are murdered, and Dredd is framed for the crime. Despite the legal maneuvers of Dredd's partner, the more compassionate Judge Hershey (Diane Lane), Dredd is sentenced to life imprisonment in Aspen. The bitter, psychotic ex-Judge Rico (Armand Assante) is behind the frame-up: He wants Dredd out of the way so he can clone a master race of Judges from his own DNA. Casually blowing holes in people or gloating over his huge robotic bodyguard, Assante gives an icy-eyed Christopher Walken performance; he's enjoyable, but he should concentrate on being Assante. (Those who recall that he played Stallone's brother in 1978's Paradise Alley may be amused by the plot twist here.)

This is only Danny Cannon's second feature (his debut was last year's The Young Americans, a morose Harvey Keitel vehicle that drove straight to video), but he doesn't seem intimidated by the scale, the sets, the budget, or the star. Working with ace cinematographer Adrian Biddle (who shot Thelma & Louise), Cannon gives Judge Dredd a pleasant big-movie look: hefty but not overdeliberate. He knows how to stage action so that we can see who's who and what's where -- this appears to be a dying art this summer. And he understands Dredd's stoic appeal. This frowning fascist who grunts "I am the law" begs to be goofed on, and Cannon provides a good foil in Rob Schneider, as a harmless petty criminal who runs afoul of Dredd and later teams up with him. Schneider, who never seemed to move past his Copy Guy during his Saturday Night Live gig, may have found his niche as action-movie comic relief. Bug-eyed and shrimpy, he skitters alongside the granite hero and never shuts up. His lines aren't always fresh, but he's consistently funny.

I saw Judge Dredd the day after the slight letdown of Apollo 13. It seems perverse to say that Dredd is the better movie, but I had a better time at it. It isn't trying to be true to history -- it isn't true to anything except a comic book. Danny Cannon gives us our bearings at the start by moving in on the panels of a Dredd comic. The device works better here than it did in The Return of Swamp Thing, whose opening-credit montage of comic-book panels was livelier than the crap that followed. Here, the panels are like the fake (or actual) newsreels that kick off historical dramas: They set up the world and set the tone. And the movie is faithful to the unfussy, straightforward clarity of adventure comics in a way that shames the cluttered Batman Forever, which played like a random bunch of panels glued together out of order. Judge Dredd is simple and mindlessly gratifying, and Sylvester Stallone, finally resigned to being the comic-book jock he's become, achieves an odd paradox. Playing this stiff, constipated hero, he does his most relaxed acting in years.

Burnt by the Sun, which took this year's Oscar for Best Foreign Film, has been blurbed as "exquisite," "lyrical," and many other nice things. Yet the movie I saw was a queasy blend of ebullience and masochism. Set in Russia in 1936, when the Great Revolution was poised on the brink of tragedy, Nikita Mikhalkov's film draws parallels between the potential dissolution of a family and the imminent dissolution of society as Russians knew it. The hero, played by Mikhalkov himself, is a revered revolutionary figure who watches his ideals turn to ash. The political struggle he's devoted to is becoming cruel and paranoid; his beloved wife and daughter are enthralled by the wife's ex-boyfriend, who returns from government service as a skunky informer.

None of this is uninteresting, but Mikhalkov is too insistent a director, an old-world version of Oliver Stone. (Maybe that's why his movie won the Oscar instead of the more deserving Eat Drink Man Woman.) The emotions are overbearing and messy; the motifs (a title song, a fireball, recurring menacing images of water) are overbearing and neat. Some critics enjoy Burnt by the Sun precisely because of its bearish obviousness (Mikhalkov's best-known previous movie, Dark Eyes, was similarly praised), but I found the film bullying in a self-pitying, nostalgic way. (An American film attempting the same excesses would invite airborne tomatoes.) After a while, I began to long for the cool formalism of a Kubrick or a Greenaway; I have an aversion to life-affirming movies that remind me of burly, cologned guys with hearty laughs and firm handshakes.

And I was mildly embarrassed for Mikhalkov, who doesn't seem to know he has written himself an excruciatingly self-aggrandizing role. This lusty, awe-inspiring hero would be a pain even if he weren't played by the director: I mean, the man jumps onto a magnificent black stallion and challenges tanks, for Christ's sake. Mikhalkov's real-life daughter Nadia, who plays his daughter in the movie, is a charming little actress, but my enjoyment of the father-daughter scenes was marred by my skepticism about Mikhalkov's motives. Mikhalkov shows off his limitless, effusive adoration of Nadia in this movie the way he did on Oscar night, when he wore her on his shoulder as a sort of family-values epaulet.

Over and over, Burnt by the Sun makes the same unremarkable point: A comfortable, bourgeois way of life is collapsing into frightening chaos, in the name of a revolution that was supposed to make life even more comfortable. The family bickers and plays soccer and dances and bickers some more, either denying or just plain ignorant of the changes looming on the horizon, and it's all synthetically poignant. Except for the father and daughter, the characters are blurry caricatures of Russian emotionalism and fussiness. That, I think, is why I left the theater wondering why the film hadn't moved me more than it had. Like many another Oscar winner, Burnt by the Sun tries to knock you flat with a one-two combo of shamelessness and good intentions. The material was promising enough. I longed for a movie that wouldn't breathe vodka fumes in my face, that would simply back off and give me room to feel something.

"Girls wouldn't even let me draw them," recalls Robert Crumb of his early cartooning days. "Of course," he can't resist adding, "that all changed when I got famous." Crumb, the brilliant and biting documentary by Terry Zwigoff, is a masterpiece of neutral ambiguity. Crumb, who for three decades has been the unwilling godhead of underground cartoonists, uses his art to name and release the demons of modern life. He uglifies most of his subjects, especially himself, so those who know him only from his shrill, bug-eyed self-portraits may be surprised to meet him here as a presentable, soft-spoken family man. He embodies Flaubert's advice to be dull and bourgeois in one's life so as to be violent and original in one's art. But Crumb's life wasn't always dull. Crumb introduces Robert's brothers -- Maxon, who meditates on a bed of nails, and Charles, a recluse who lives with their mother in a fog of medication. All three brothers were artists, but only Robert found popular recognition, an outlet that allowed him to connect, while Maxon and Charles withdrew into themselves.

Critics who cluck over Robert's unstable brothers -- "There but for the grace of God goes Robert" -- miss the point of Crumb. The fickle finger of fame, which Crumb loathes, may have pointed him away from madness and obscurity. Yet we also see Maxon's and Charles' work, and it's far more striking than Robert's ferocious but relatively rational work; it has the purity of artists isolated from reality. There's immense irony in this. Robert escaped, and he's still miserable: Success has its own agony. We watch him rebuffing a fan who asks for an autograph, or packing up his wife and daughter to move to France because America has become intolerable, or wearily answering the charges of misogyny levelled against his work, and if we listen carefully we may hear Terry Zwigoff saying, There but for the grace of God go Maxon and Charles. Crumb isn't only about the famous Crumb, and the soul of this odd and mesmerizing film is in its glimpses of the brothers Crumb laughing over shared memories of childhood terrors, seeking solace in gallows humor about their own lives.