Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004)

The Hindenburg III glides silently above the streets of Manhattan. I kid you not. It docks at the Empire State Building. A nervous passenger has a package sent on ahead of him. Then the passenger vanishes, and a name is scratched off a list. Meanwhile, over at the Tribune, ace reporter Polly Perkins (Gwynneth Paltrow) gets a cryptic message to meet someone at Radio City Music Hall. She goes and meets an aged scientist who's terrified for his life. He will say only one name - Totenkoff. Before Polly can find out any more, New York is attacked by a horde of giant, flying robots. An immediate call goes out to Sky Captain, aka Joe Sullivan (Jude Law), who flies to the rescue in his own P-40 Flying Tiger. After dispatching several of the behemoths, he flies off to his secret base, where Polly is waiting for him. Seems they once had the thing going on that ended badly. As they are hashing out old times, the base is attacked by bat-shaped aircraft that flap their wings. Joe and Polly fly after them, shoot down several and finally escape by diving into the ocean in Joe's plane which promptly turns into a submarine. By the time they get back to Joe's base, the place has been destroyed and Joe's loyal side kick, Dex (Giovanni Ribisi), has been kidnapped. Polly and Joe, following clues left by Dex, fly to Nepal where they find Shangri La, then head out over the ocean in search of Totenkoff's secret base. When they get there, they find that Totenkoff (the very late Laurence Olivier) has been a very naughty boy indeed, and now the entire world is in danger. Folks, I repeat, I am not making this stuff up. Somebody else already did that for us. And they put it all into a movie called Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

Written and directed by Kerry Conran, Sky Captain is a loving homage to all of the movie serials of the 1930s and 40s - like Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon and The Undersea Kingdom - complete with mad scientists, robotic villains, secret bases, rocket ships and ray guns. The film was shot almost entirely against a blue screen background - only the actors were real, and the scenery and props were all added later digitally. This allowed Conran to create the New York that he wanted to, set in 1939, yet in some strange alternate universe, where the Nazis never came into power and where supersonic aircraft and ray guns were invented. It is a happy, mythical reality that begs us to forget the realities of history as we knew it and come along to a better place. The sub-title the World of Tomorrow is taken from the 1939-40 New York World's Fair, as do the Trylon and Persiphere that they find deep in the Himalayas. In Conran's hands, the World of Tomorrow envisioned in 1939 actually existed and much of the world of then never materialized. Would that it had been the case. The sepia tone of the film lends it an air of nostalgia, and the dim lighting and deep shadows bring to mind the lighting techniques of film noir. Unfortunately, it also lends the film a cartoon-like quality that takes away from its magical realism. Probably the film's most memorable performance is by the late Laurence Olivier. Conran took archival footage of Olivier and digitally manipulated it to speak the words he had in his script. In some sense, we truly are in the world of tomorrow if we can get dead actors to keep right on performing years after their demise.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is not going to be to everyone's liking. It's just too fantastical for some people, who apparently have a difficult time suspending their disbelief long enough to enjoy a good adventure yarn. The acting is a bit formal and stiff, much as it was in those old 30s and 40s serials, but after a while you really don't notice too much. Probably the most difficult part of the film to buy is Joe's airplane, which has the ability to fly at near supersonic speeds over unimaginable distances and, as an added bonus, turn itself into a submarine when needed. My favorite World-of-Tomorrow gadget - if you will - was the giant, hovering aircraft carrier. I've seen something similar in old Mechanix Illustrated magazines from that period. They dreamed of it then. Conran's dreaming of it still. We can too, thanks to his movie.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is rated PG-13, and it is available in sepia-toned color.

Rebecca (1940)

Imagine a movie in which the main character is never once named, in which the title character never once steps on screen, yet in which the title character's presence permeates every scene. That film is Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca. It's a ghost story, of sorts, but only because Rebecca is dead, and everyone else in the film is haunted by her memory. It's not a good memory. Not for most, anyway. Meet Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier). Wealthy, educated, cultured, from good old English stock. He's visiting the south of France, a lovely place. He's also about to kill himself. Kind of reminds one of "Richard Cory." Anyway, a young woman (Joan Fontaine) stops him from leaping from a cliff. He's rude to her. Later he apologizes. They spend time together. She starts to fall in love with him, even though she knows he's way above her social standing. He asks her to marry him in an off-handed way and she accepts. Don't you just love whirlwind romances. Everything is roses until Maxim takes his new bride back to his ancestral pile of bricks and mortar, Mandalay. It's a creepy, shadowy, Gothic travesty with vast rooms and soaring ceilings. It's haunted too. The maid, Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson), keeps the ghost of Rebecca alive. Rebecca's name is repeated over and over through the film, like a mantra. "Those belonged to Rebecca...Rebecca always wrote her letters in here...That's Rebecca's room...Tell me about Rebecca...." Often she's referred to as Mrs. de Winter, even though it's obvious that there's now a new Mrs. de Winter, and - Oh, look! - she's standing right here. The new Mrs. de Winter is overwhelmed by the house, by Mrs. Danvers, by Rebecca.

Mrs. de Winter wants to put on a ball at the house. Mrs. Danvers tricks her into wearing the same costume Rebecca wore at her last ball before she drowned in a boating accident. Maxim is furious when he sees her. She runs into Rebecca's room, which Mrs. Danvers has kept exactly the way it was before Rebecca's death. The room is a shrine. Mrs. Danvers tries to get Mrs. de Winter to take her own life. She almost does it too. But a flare fired out at sea breaks the spell. A ship has hit the rocks. All hands rush to the beach. Mrs. Danvers learns that divers, sent down to examine the hull of the stricken ship, have discovered Rebecca's sail boat. Rebecca's still in it. Maxim then tells his new wife the story of his previous wife, how she cuckolded him with just about everyone she could find. One night, in her private cottage, she told him she was pregnant and that the child wasn't his. She laughed at him. He struck her. She fell. She didn't get up. He put her body in the sail boat, went out to sea and scuttled it. Now there has to be an inquest, and all of it will come to light. Enter Jack Favell (George Sanders). He's Rebecca's favorite cousin. He's a car salesman who's getting tired of selling cars he can't afford to own. He'd like to move up in the world. From the things he says to the new Mrs. de Winter, you get the feeling that he and Rebecca were a little closer than cousins. More like kissing cousins. Favell makes threats. He has information about the accident. He'll tell, unless.... Well, you can guess.

Rebecca is a fascinating movie for many reasons. Adapted from the novel by Daphne de Maurier, the film explores female sexuality at a time before such things were discussed in polite society. Mrs. Danvers says, "Love was a game to [Rebecca]." Love, here, is a Hollywood euphemism for sex. It is hinted, though never stated, that Rebecca was having a lot of it with a lot of people, including Favell. Maybe even Mrs. Danvers. She's obsessed with the memory of Rebecca. She touches her belongings with gentle hands, like a lover's caress. Lesbianism - like homosexuality - was never shown back in the day. It was only inferred. Rebecca infers a lot. The movie was filmed in glorious black and white on the same stretch of California coastline where The Ghost and Mrs. Muir was filmed six years later. It's a gorgeously haunting area, perfectly suited to ghost stories. This is one of the best you'll ever see, although you won't ever see the ghost. And you won't ever learn Mrs. de Winter's real name. Cuz, in the end, the film keeps its secrets to itself.

Rebecca is rated G.