Dear Cabinet Ghost,
It is plain to see that young people today have shorter attention spans than previous generations. Why, in my youth, I could sit and watch a mud river squish by for two whole days before I needed a lemonade break to regain my focus. These tots today, with their pull-wagons and jars of buttons, can hardly focus on a passing bob thread long enough to knit a ream of sweaters (a good job for a kid at $0.14 a day!).
For this reason, I believe the intended audience of this movie “Stardust” must be children, due to its serial, episodic nature. More a fantastic hodge-podge than a whole organic piece, it still stands the test of quality if not unity. To give you a taste, sir ghost, of the all-over-the-placedness of the film’s plot, I shall deliver my summation in one long sentence:
Eighteen years ago a man crossed a forbidden wall and sired a bastard son with a magical princess not expecting that the child would be delivered to him to raise and would grow into our hero, Tristan (Charlie Cox), who falls in love with a rich girl (Sienna Miller) despite his place as a poor market boy and promises to deliver to her a piece of a fallen star in exchange for her hand in marriage and when he finds the fallen star it turns out to actually be a young lady named Yvaine (Claire Danes) who is being pursued by a powerful witch (Michelle Pfeiffer) and several evil princes so that they can rule the magical kingdom on the forbidden side of said wall, and then Robert Deniro pilots a zeppelin and wears dresses.
After that, it gets a little confusing. Simply put, this film was unable to make the transition from a series of illustrated Olde-English-style stanzas to a feature film without losing some roughness at its seams. It’s a problem which can be easily overlooked, due to the high-form winking performances from its actors, especially Ms. Pfeiffer and Mr. Deniro. Combine the large acting with the spectacle of magic effects and ghosts and sparkling scenery and the whole exercise becomes downright jovial; a celebration of itself. Stardust never coheres, but it boasts enough to win me over regardless.
I admire the craft that it took to turn the hideously old Michelle Pfeiffer into a charming, less-old version of herself. She must have sat in a chair for hours while masons and carpenters stuffed so much skin tone epoxy under her jowls and into the ostrich-feet around her eyes. She should be applauded for taping her body so extensively that there is nary a sign that she possesses breasts at all. Those same makeup artists ought to be applauded for their steadfastness in painting Robert Deniro’s mole a shade darker than Satan’s black mucus.
I don’t under stand why Deniro’s Captain Shakespeare was included in the film, actually. He appears, befriends our star-crossed (har har) heroes, sends them on their way, and becomes quickly irrelevant thereafter. And he dances around in a dress, causing an awkward intervention with his manly crew that bears no significant fruit at all. In a story about a cross-dressing sea captain fighting the forces of evil, this would have been a dynamite turn. In a story about a poor boy becoming a man in a magic kingdom, it’s a flowery distraction.
But what a complaint! The whole movie is distractions! And after all, what else is the point of a fantasy story like this? Am I to expect to extract all the lessons of moral uprightness and success in life from a movie where magic and mundane kingdoms lie side-by-side and the only man protecting the border is too old to fight, run, or reason aptly? If all I ask of Stardust is roughly two hours of winks and grins, then it delivers with elan.
This movie passes muster.
Sincerely,
Dr. Rex Baxter
March 24, 1892
Stardust (Widescreen Edition)