Fantastic Mr. Fox

My growing disappointment and frustrations with the slew of juvenile and intelligence-offending trailers were immediately diffused with the first frames of Anderson’s animation. The warm orange sky and simple childish staging of Mr. Fox next to a single tree was all at once amusing, captivating, and calming. And to the benefit of young and old alike, the entire film remains as such.

It should come to no surprise to those savvy to the films of auteur Wes Anderson, his ascribed quirkiness and fondness for a particular color palette remain intact. The little suits and details that exist in the Fox world could have come from the Tenenbaum’s house or from the director’s closet. However, the minutiae of set designs, miniature props, and detailed creations could hardly be contained with a closet of even the most successful director. The film’s visual exuberance and craftily ingenious construction return to an inspired and inspiring state of animation lost on the repetitive computer based child fare audiences yearn for. Aided by twelve frames per second rate, the film captures early animators attempts at fluid motion limited by the then current state of technology. The result is not some quaint attempt at nostalgia nor homage to the early days of film but rather a re-envisioned distancing from the kind of movie audiences are used to.

Praise to Anderson for making a children’s movie not aimed at kids. And praise for making an adult movie not too grown up to be inaccessible. The 87 minutes flow by in what seems like ten and the visual and narrative deliveries provide both complex and simple exposition. Any fears that this be throwaway kiddy fare should be instantly allayed if not simply given the man at helm. And any fears I had the Anderson was selling out and taking the easy road seem trivial and irrelevant.

Still, I cannot help but ask how one directs an animation. And while the concerns and mentions of such questions arising during the production exist, in the wake of the final product they are better left for another day. Fantastic Mr. Fox is full of standard Anderson comedics, detailed and intricate creations, and likable, relatable characters. The complex and carefully executed action readily ignores the rules of logic to great benefit and pays little attention to common sense. And while the rich visuals do wonders for the senses themselves, the fact that all the characters seem to find their place doesn’t leave the film on any sour note.

Lost on the Road

Months and months of anticipation have lead to the Thanksgiving weekend and the release of The Road. The big screen adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel from the director of The Proposition has been on my to-see list since its existence first came to my attention long ago. So imagine my supreme disappointment when no theatre anywhere close to me was showing it. For those not savvy to the name John Hillcoat, then certainly McCarthy would yield some interest given the deserved response to No Country for Old Men. This goes without mentioning Viggo Mortensen, Charlize Theron, and Robert Duvall. What a disgrace to the state of cinema when the screens are crowded with 2012, Couples Retreat, Planet 51, and Twilight. What’s disappointing is that we are not talking about some independent arthouse film with limited audience but a $20-30 million dollar budgeted film with names, visuals, etc.

I don’t know who’s to blame, nor do I really care, I just wish that good movies came out and not bad ones. Add to this that over the weekend I hunted down a copy of the fantastic, flawless, under-appreciated and totally ignored Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Best Buy? Only on Blu-ray. Meijer? Negative. I guess I should not be surprised when hundreds of copies of trash line the shelves consuming much mismanaged space.

Enough complaining, but not really. The studios listen to what the audiences say and the only way they hear us is in sales. Paranormal Activity was demanded by popularity and made its way to wide release. If only we had such decisive voice on everything we saw.

Review: 2012

     There are many varying beliefs that the world will end catastrophically. The Mayans in particular believe that the end of the world starts with a cosmic alignment of the sun with the center of our Galaxy, which happens to be in December of the year 2012. The cosmic alignment will cause the sun to have wild solar flares which will emit neutrinos that will act like microwaves on the planet's inner core, heating up the center of the earth until the crust begins to melt and the tectonic plates shift and cause massive earthquakes and eventually tsunamis, wiping out the inhabitants of the world. The question is: how are we going to survive it?
    That is what Roland Emmerich's newest disaster movie 2012 bases its action on. Several families across the face of the earth must survive the ensuing earthquakes that split the earth and kill billions. Emmerich, a native German, has been making disaster movies for years. Independence Day (1996) was about aliens attempting to destroy the earth, Godzilla (1998) had a giant lizard destroy Manhattan, and The Day After Tomorrow (2004) saw the side effects of pollution cause massive global warming to the point of human destruction. Each movie bears its own set of cheesy families fighting for all of humanity.

The Tsunami pours over the mountains...

     According to Robin Wood and Christian Metz, these families are what the American public wants to see. John Cusack plays Jackson Curtis, a divorced writer still trying to save his family, both literally and in the sense of the ideological family. This ideological family is the two parents (of opposite sex) and two children, one son and one daughter. The family starts out broken, a divorce separates the parents and the children seem more privy to their new dad, Gordon (Thomas McCarthy) who dotes them with cell phones and attention. But, in the end, it is the ideological family that wins out, and the audience cheers when the mom and dad get back together again.

The Curtis family's first plane flies through two falling buildings.

 

     Another, not so prominently featured part of the American Dominant Ideology theory is the male dominance in the film. Of course, the scientists who discover that the world will end in three years are all males, and they bring the information to male politicians who see to it that they are saved. Also, when John Cusack's family is in an airplane flying to China with a family from Russia, Gordon (who is forced to pilot the massive cargo plane on just two flying lessons) comes to the cargo hold to ask the two men to come look at the issues they will be facing. In essence, it is the men who will protect and save the women, and who willingly give their lives to save their families.
     Robin Wood's Ideological film theory claims that the American public believes in the Rosebud syndrome (as from Citizen Kane, 1941). The Russian family flying with the Curtis family are billionaires, having payed billions to be saved. But clearly, money cannot buy you happiness. The Russian family seems broken, money having bought the father's new girlfriend, who isn't the brightest. The sons are two brats ready to cut down their American family counterparts.

Yellowstone explodes.

     Lastly, the ideological theory calls for a resolution of current pressing issues. Our current pressing issue is the ticking timeclock the Mayan calandar layed out for us. Only three years away, December of 2012 is an oddly pressing issue for many people today, and they're all wondering what we're going to do to survive it. 2012 offers that wildly outrageous solution for us. The billionaire Russian family has recently paid billions of dollars to get tickets onto an ark. The bigtime male politician to whom the scientists brought the information of the end of the world, have used the money from the tickets to build seven enormous arks (like from Noah's Ark in the bible) to store the people when the tsunamis come and flood the planet. Thus, only the rich can survive... but, being human is to care for each other, so they open the gates to the arks to let in all those who are in the vicinity, including the workers who helped build the ships.
     The movie cost $200 million to make, most of that money going to the immense amounts of CG (I swear that 85% of the film was CG). Although the film has already earned that money back and then-some (although 75% of its gross so far has been from foreign box offices), it really has nothing to offer its audience outside the satisfaction of the dominant ideology. The Movie was shot on a Panasonic HD camera, probably since most of it was going to be going through the computer to be CGed up, making the whole movie seem a lot more fake to me. HD cameras just aren't good enough yet for me to enjoy watching a 2 hour and 40 minute movie recorded in it.

Escaping from the ensuing disaster... a sight seen more than once.

     The movie really lasted too long, and there were so many cheesy moments I wanted to gag. I found myself throwing my hands up in the air at every syntagma (plot point), angry either with the poor CG (or at least its overuse) or with the poor design of the story, or with a decision the characters made, or with some outrageous moment, or something else, OR SOME OTHER STUPID THING! Really, there is no need to see this movie, unless you want to know just how much CG one can actually fit into a "Live Action" film... It gets me real excited for Avatar!

Review: The Men Who Star At Goats

If it wasn't funny enough to see Ewan McGregor deny any recognition of the word Jedi, George Clooney's performance as a dead serious real-life Jedi really got me laughing. Directed by Grant Heslov (who starred in Good Night, and Good Luck and Leatherheads) and written by Peter Straughan (How to Lose Friends and Alienate People), The Men Who Stare at Goats is a comedy about a secret military operation that honed the superpowers within select new army personnel. The real story, however, revolves around Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) as a journalist searching for a good story. After his wife leaves him for one of his co-workers, Wilton realizes his life isn't what it could be. He thus heads to Iraq to prove his manliness where he finds Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), a name that came up earlier when he was interviewing a man about "remote viewing." Cassady claims to be heading into Iraq on a mission and Wilton comes along to find himself and a good story.
The film is uniquely crafted, jumping through time to tell important facts and stories that relate to the unfolding story of Bob Wilton. There were plenty of comical moments, and overall the story wasn't too shoddy. I did enjoy several moments where Cassady's powers were hinted at being real. Unfortunately, many of the comical moments relied heavily on the use of physical pain and physical comedy to achieve laughter. While it did manage to cause laughter in the audience around me, and often in me myslef, in my opinon, the movie shouldn't have relied so heavily on it. In general, the movie was no better than many of the ludicrous comedies coming out in recent years, relying on stupidity rather than wit to achieve its humorousness.
It is based on the book by Jon Ronson and had its wide released on November 6, 2009.

Upcoming Feature: Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightening Thief

If it wasn't obvious from the fact that it shares the same director, and the fact that the name is very similar, Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The lightening Thief appears to be, from first glance, a movie as similar to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone as it can get. Christopher Columbus' style is emanating even in the trailer for his upcoming child's feature, also based on a book (by Rick Riordan).
The movie is based on the story of a boy who doesn't realize that he has the power of the Olympian gods of old, who have returned to help him fight those that would seek to kill him. The young boy must quickly learn the ways of the gods and find his place and his power to defeat the growing evil around him.
Sound somewhat familiar? I told you so...
Watch this trailer:

Notice anything interesting about the castle of the gods?


Starring Logan Lerman (3:10 to Yuma and Gamer), as well as Kevin McKidd, Uma Thurman, Pierce Brosnan, and Sean Bean, the film is set to open in theaters February 12, 2010.

Imminent Death.

SLING BLADE SPOILER ALERT!
Though not explicitly stated at the beginning of the film as was the death of Lester Burnham in American Beauty, the death of Doyle in Billy Bob Thornton's Sling Blade is just as imminent. We are introduced to the character Karl, a mentally challenged man who murdered his mother and her lover with a Kaiser Blade (some people call it a Sling Blade) when he was a young boy. After many, many years of being locked up in a mental institution, he is released into the free world. Because of the abuse inflicted upon him by his father, Karl's issues with the free world arise when he meets Frank. Frank is a young boy whose father died when he was younger, leaving him and his mother to live life together. His mother sought out a new boyfriend, and unfortunately wound up in the hands of Doyle, an abusive drunkard who loves controlling people.
As Karl befriends young Frank, he learns of his troubles with Doyle. And as Frank learns of Karl's current situation (Frank is living in the back of a repair shop), a deep friendship forms between the two. Frank invites Karl to live with he and his mother, and this is when the audience knows that Karl will kill Doyle. The moment the audience actually meets Doyle, they see him for what he is: a man only concerned with himself, only with a family to make himself look better, seeking to control everything, and never relenting on degrading those around him. He is the abusive father figure in Karl's life once again.
Karl understands, even with his mental challenges, that killing is wrong. But why it is wrong remains elusive to him. The fact that he'd been locked up in a mental institution for forty years makes his understanding of the world very limited. And indeed, after all is said and done and Karl winds back up in the institution, he claims that the world was just "too big" for him.

December 2009

Hey, what a surprise, a ton of movies are coming out this holiday season and are certain to flood the theatres in a full spectrum of quality. ‘Tis not my uneducated and unbiased place to tell you which ones to see or not to see, you will decide for yourself. But certainly I could point to some of the more offensive ones to those of us that consider ourselves at least mildly cultured, educated, and respectable. If you are anxiously awaiting either Transylmania or Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakuel please stop reading at this time. This is not to say that these films are representative of the cornucopia of features available to us. The month includes what look to be fairly promising films like Brothers and Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air. Clint Eastwood’s new Matt Damon/ Morgan Freeman film Invictus comes out on the 11^th. And of course blockbuster filmmakers James Cameron and Peter Jackson release their visions, Avatar and The Lovely Bones, respectively.

The two films for which I reserve the most anticipation both find themselves conveniently ushering in Christmas. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus has already been discussed here. The same day also marks the arrival of Guy Ritchie’s (Snatch, Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels) Sherlock Holmes interpretation. From the look of the trailer it seems to resort to the heavy style found in the directors early films. It also comes more star-studded than any of his films even if it sits on the edge of ridiculous.

Imminent Death.

Regardless of the fact that he states it himself in the voiceover narration not five minutes into the film, we know Lester Burnham will die. So the only reason we hang on is to find out who kills him. It is not, as could perhaps be expected from the sedated lifestyle he occupies, himself. It is not his cheating wife who discovers the release of firing a gun and drives home with it placed conveniently by her side. And it is not his daughter who, in the opening frames, looks into the camera and asks for his death. As a matter of fact, it is his closet-homosexual ex-military neighbor who believes Lester to be having an affair with his drug-dealing son. Lester’s death is imminent. But it is not, as is readily suggested, the moment when his brains splatter over his white kitchen walls.

Lester died an indefinite amount of time earlier. We meet him as he stumbles, in job, marriage, and life. But more importantly, we also meet him when our shared ideologies stumble. The perfect American Family with a projected image of prosperity, success, and happiness is an empty promise. The idea that one man can build his life, be master of his own success, and age into happiness is shattered. Lester had quite likely done so. And so what? Years later this very lifestyle of materialism and consumption and working to provide had its hold on him and would not let go. He tried to escape it by reverting to the mentality of his youth. He tried to challenge expectations by working down the occupational ladder from writer to burger-flipper. He also tried to satisfy himself by pursuing the attention of his daughter’s best “friend.”

American Beauty is an unnerving film even if its effect is not immediately noticeable. It is a film that has the ability, and in a way the responsibility, to challenge our accepted beliefs. So many films re-iterate the same ideals of success and the importance of image and the infatuation and inability to cope without commodities and possessions. We can only really grow if we know what we are growing from and without films that point this out to us how are we to know?

Upcoming Feature: Fantastic Mr. Fox

Wes Anderson's films have been known to be not the biggest blockbuster movies around. It might be a shared opinion that many of them simply don't make sense. Released yesterday in LA and New York, Wes Anderson's most recent film Fantstic Mr. Fox is based on a childrens book by Roald Dahl and is expected to have a wide release on Wednesday, November 25, 2009. The story was adapted for the big screen by Mr. Anderson himself along with a co-writer Noah Baumbach and runs approximately 87 minutes long.
Similar to this years Coraline (Henry Selick), the film breaks away from recent animated features put out by Pixar and Dreamworks, utilizing stop motion instead of computer generated characters and landscapes. Unlike Coraline, though, Fox is capture on film (instead of HD video) and uses a less than perfect stop motion technique, giving the characters a choppy, amateur-esque appearance. The strong emphasis on this style may distracted Anderson from the story, according to one New York Times writer, which is loosely based on the book, "truer to the spirit than to the letter of the source."
Don't miss this one of a kind animation starring George Clooney, Maryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, and Bill Murray.

Ever Seen It: Freaks Revisited

Cinema has always shocked people, and filmmakers have always looked for the next way to do so. But Tod Browning, who had just directed the classic Dracula starring Bela Lugosi, was not trying to shock anyone. He was not trying to disgust anyone. He was simply make a film, from a story by Tod Robbin’s, about a dwarf’s infatuation with an average sized woman. The result was more than an oddly paired couple, it was more than a lust story, and it was more than the oft-described horror film that categorizes it today. In 1932, Freaks repulsed its audiences and was banned in the UK for 30 years. It essentially destroyed Browning prolific if not profitable career. And it now stands as one of the more potent and poignant films of cinema past.

Browning worked as a contortionist among other things during his teen years in the circus. The material of Robbin’s short story, “Spurs”, was natural to him. For the audience it was not. He cast real sideshow oddities; a testament to the abnormalities of human anatomy. The pinheads dance merrily in the forest, encircling the human skeleton whose thin physique exposes his inner framework. The legless Johnny Eck joins them; moving adeptly on his arms as if they were legs. The Human Caterpillar (aka Human Torso) rocks back and forth, moving inch by inch. Later, he lights a cigarette by manipulating the match with only his mouth. We may be shocked at what we see, we may be offended. We may wish, as one character does, that such creatures be smothered at birth. Browning does not, and while the inherent exploitation that exists because of cinema’s nature may argue against it, neither does his film.

The creatures on-screen, the freaks, are not monsters. The physically deformed and mentally unequipped are not the danger. It is those that are “normal” that cause the trouble, those that consciously harm others to better themselves. Browning not only humanizes those that look least human but he uglifies those that are the true monsters. It’s no little wonder that the film turned out as it did; the source story casts the freaks as incompatible and indeed freakish. Certainly a horror film today would make them the monster. And it could certainly be argued that such portrayal would be more effective. Does this mean that this film could not be made today, not only because of its content but because of its tone?

Cinema has undoubtedly changed since the early thirties and more legality surrounds what one can do, for better or worse. I would like to think that such an interesting and eye-opening film could be made today without suffering the expected turns. I recommend this film not only for its various success at fostering humanity and acceptance but also because it is, frankly, weird and amazing. I mentioned in an earlier post a quote that suggests the final interpretation is with the viewer. And in this case it may become shock value, we may watch it simply to see the freaks in all their glory, certainly the cult status this film has achieved can give credit to this reason. To me, that’s part of cinema; to see things, observe them, and hopefully be amazed.