Frozen (2013)

Ice-Ice, Baby
or
(The Cold Never Bothered Me, Anyway...)

Disney's latest animated feature—not in the flat 2-D classic animation, but in the 3-D pixilated version ala Tangled—is "inspired" by Hans Christian Anderson's "The Snow Queen," according to the credits.  That's a whole new interpretation of the word "inspired" because Frozen has next to nothing to do with "The Snow Queen" other than...there's a Queen...and she makes snow.  But Tangled wasn't exactly "Rapunzel," either.

But, it's a quibble (And it's Disney).

Disney, who just put the first female (albeit co-director) on one of their female-dominated animated films. Based on a screenplay by, and co-directed by Jennifer Lee (with Chris Buck), it's another "Princess" movie that will expand the Disney marketing franchise (with two of them), but as with Pixar's Brave it dares to up-end some story-book conventions, making the royal sisters Elsa (Idina Menzel) and Anna (Kristen Bell) the emotional hub the story revolves around, and relegating the two hunky guys that are standard love interests pretty much transportation tools. This is a good thing.  And especially when the movie sets up "the guys" (one prince/one working stiff) as the solution to the problems and then very briskly pulls the cloth-simulated tapestry out from underneath that cliché.  I like that.  And I like how the solution to "the problems" is bundled very tightly in one unexpected moment that, frankly, shocks, and takes one aback emotionally.  I like that even better.

So, it's not "The Snow Queen."  What is it?  Elsa and Anna are princesses in the kingdom of Arendelle and they're by no means twins—Elsa is older by a couple years, and she has the telekinetic power to freeze things and project snow and ice from thin air.  This delights Anna, but a childhood accident forces the King and Queen to seek the assistance of trolls who save Anna's life, but take away her memory of Elsa's power to prevent such a tragedy from ever happening again.  The Royals also lock up Elsa, keeping her from her sister...and everyone, until she learns how to suppress her powers, usually brought on by her emotions.

The two sisters grow up apart under the same roof, even after tragedy strikes the household.  The two don't see each other until Elsa's coronation day as Queen of Arendelle, but the two are distant even when inches apart, and when the scattered Anna becomes enamored of a visiting prince (Santino Fontana), upsetting Elsa and exposing her powers to the Kingdom.  Elsa flees, now that her frightening powers are out there for all to see.  

You couldn't miss it.  She's dropped Arendelle into a permanent winter, with no way to get it out.  It's up to the plucky Anna to go after her and try and mend fences and thaw her relationship with her sister and the town.

Prince Hans is a love interest, but so is an ice-cutter that Anna finds on her journey (voiced by Jonathan Goff), whose best pal is an anthropomorphized reindeer named Sven.  There's also a walking, talking snowman (created by Elsa) named Olaf.  The revelation of a goofy snowman in the movie was enough to give me a brain-freeze, but, as voiced by Josh Gad (he of "The Book of Mormon"), he's pretty danged funny.  The songs have the same show-connection, as well, as they're a collaboration between Robert Lopez (who co-composed both "Mormon" and "Avenue Q") and wife Kristen Anderson.  That's very much in the tradition of bringing the song-writing team of "The Little Shop of Horrors," Ashman and Menken, to Disney.  The songs are decidedly less Broadway, however, and more "pop" oriented—and will be appearing on the many reality-talent shows on the air in the not-too-distant future—and geared more for a cartoon audience than a theater one.

Again, quibbles.  And if Frozen didn't exactly warm my heart, my brain had some warm thoughts towards it.

Frozen is a Full-Price Ticket (I wouldn't spring for the 3-D, though).

One of three "I Want" songs in Frozen (four if you count Olaf's "In Summer").

Going in...er, "cold," the power-ballad approach makes one cringe, but given the back-story 

preceding it, it's a break-out moment...and a little scary.  In fact, the Elsa character was 

slated to be the villain of the movie until this song's themes of empowerment changed everything.

Monsters University

Crossing the Line
or
Big Monsters on Campus

They're ba-ack.  The monsters who regularly hide in your childhood closets to go bump in the night have returned.  And the whole premise of Monsters University is to show how Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal) and James Sullivan (John Goodman) first bumped into each other in the first place.  It was a given in the first film (and one of its unstated charms) that a one-eyed puke-green bi-ped and a shaggy polka-dotted blue-green beast became friends in the first place.  M.U. feels the need to explain this monstrously odd color in the first place.  You just know that at some story-meeting, the Pixar geeks leaned back and said "they probably met in college."

Which leads to the question, what sort of college would that be?  Knowing that we, as an audience, had already suffered through the entire course-load at Hogwarts, M.U. was a good bet for movie-goers.  There are all sorts of easy ironies for a place of learning that specializes in scaring the tar out of you (just as there was in the "Potter" series), and the ways that faculty and staff can exert their own forms of terror can make for a fairly seamless story-line (Helen Mirren is brought in—seemingly the only Britisher not to appear in the "Potter" movies—as the dragony dean of studies).  And the writers have a good time expanding on the differences between Mike and Sully.  Mike has all the scary potential of a rubber ball, and his struggles through the "scare" curriculum makes him more of an over-achiever than he already is (one can easily see him pulling one-nighter's until his one eye is blood-shot, but they don't go there).  Sully has it easy—he's a legacy student and doesn't put much effort into it, until his own back is against the wall.  Both are campus mis-fits of a sort; they can't get into the fraternity lorded over by Johnny Worthington (Nathan Fillion) and can only get into the scary "animal house" of losers that are the nerds on campus.  Once all this is established, the story writes itself, as if by rote.

Ever taught at a University?  It looks kinda like this.

And that's the problem with Monsters University.  The basic concept does some stretching, but then it's "pixilate by the numbers."  Everything looks great-nobody makes a movie look as good as Pixar, whether it's a natural setting as in their Brave, or the unnatural one here, and the nuances of character draw from classic animation as well as a few wrinkles that Pixar tosses in.  But the studio's sequels (excepting the "Toy Story" series) have a sameness that feels like coasting, as opposed to the daring ideas like Ratatouille and Up.  The best of the Pixar films expand the horizons and stretch the form.  One like this one are more insular and shrink the potential and the possibilities.  At least it's better than Cars 2, which, basically, ran around in circles, as race-cars are wont to do.

The preview for the next Disney factory movie shows it's about airplanes.  *Sigh* It does not bode well.

Monsters University is a Rental.

One of the little details that makes me love Pixar:
A "traditional" styled map of Monsters U.

Wreck-It Ralph

Who Framed Wreck-It Ralph?
or 
Being Two-Bit in an 8-Bit World

It's not that I didn't "like" Wreck-it Ralph.  I did.  I just wasn't moved by it, nor did I care one bit about any of it—not the movie, not the characters—any of it.

Oh, there's a lot to admire: the animation is amazing, albeit to a limited world inside a video game (it can't be too complicated in its design as it's supposed to reflect the limited world-view of a flat 8-bit world refracted in 3-dimensions); the expansions and contractions of those worlds are quite cleverly done—the expansions of those environments being of the commingling of those worlds before the lights turn on in the video arcade, the characters commuting in a Grand Central Station hub to their various scenarios, and the contractions being in the limited animation movements of some of the characters.  The voice-acting is fine, headed by John C. Reilly, Sarah Silverman, Jane Lynch, Alan Tudyk, and Jack McBrayer (of "30Rock").  The cameos by various amusement game characters are amusing—the Pac-man ghosts, Sonic, Qbert—which gives the whole thing a tinge of Who Framed Roger Rabbit,* Disney Animation has done a great job of it under the tutelage of Pixar's Jon Lasseter.

But, as great as it is, it's hardly inspired, the central conceit being all those video game characters have lives and concerns when no one's looking, which is the idea behind the "Toy Story" franchise.  But, instead of that series forming a concept of the toys banding together to get along in The Big Toy-Box, the issues of the segregated video game characters are decidedly trivial and territorial.  They inhabit an 8-bit world, but their concerns are decidedly two-bit, as in the story's central story-line.  "Wreck-it Ralph" is the villain of the game "Fix-it Felix"—inspired by "Donkey Kong" but not (Mario, remember?) and he's dissatisfied with his life as a villain.  He wants to be a hero, but is never given a chance and his intended role keeps him ostracized in the "Felix" community.  He's shunned, gets no respect, and isn't even invited to parties.  His "villain support group" provides no comfort.  So, Ralph decides to expand his horizons (if video games have horizons) and starts visiting other games, like a WOW game with a butch commander in curvy leather (Lynch, of course), then navigates to another game "Sugar Rush" (no doubt coming to a Game Stop near you) where perky princesses race in a candyland world (and one of the racers is voiced by Silverman, not of course).  

There are some wonderful things that could be done here as far as the migration of traditional characters in non-traditional environments, but what's here doesn't have a lot of imagination as far as plot, the complications or the resolution.  Ultimately, it's a bright, pretty snooze-fest (I felt the need to feed myself quarters to keep from nodding off).  But ultimately I just wanted to move on, feeling like I was losing a life—the only one I have!—just waiting for the blessed relief of "Game Over."

Wreck-It Ralph is a Cable-Watcher.

The game-screen of "Fix-It-Felix" and its inspiration "Donkey Kong"©

* ...although you wonder where some other characters are, like Prince of Persia, Mario, Halo, and then you remember "Oh, yeah, they have their own movie franchises" (mostly inactive) and their places are "suggested" by other characters.

Frankenweenie (2012)

Recycled Material From the Grave
or
"I Can Fix This..."

Really, it's a little soon for Tim Burton to be re-making one of his own films—albeit his first live-action short for Disney.  One worries that maybe he's run out of ideas, or that he's simply doing what he's always done—take a property and combine it with that goofy blend of the kinky and ghoulish that he has made his own...it's just that this time the property is his...and he's already made it his own once.  Maybe, he looked at this product of his younger self with limited resources and thought "I can do better. I can do more."  Or along the lines of young Victor Frankenstein, he looked at it his earlier creation and vowed "I can fix this."

At the time of the live-action short, Disney looked at the product of their young animator...and promptly dumped it...only acknowledging it when Burton became an A-list director (with some studio hesitancy) with the first "Batman" film.* Now, Disney is crowing about its brand new Burton movie, and one can only imagine the wry smile that must produce for the director.  It was natural for Disney to want an expansion—they owned the property—and although this new version of Frankenweenie has a lot of (dare I say) re-animation of material, it did give Burton a chance to give it a little more depth and play around without the inhibitions of live action.

I say inhibitions rather than limitations because the differences are exhibited in a weird and rather contrary way, given that the film is done with puppet figures: emotion.  The character of Sparky exhibits a far greater depth of moods than a trained pit-bull terrier could exhibit in live action, not only in its darker moments, but especially in moments of joy—the animation of the dog running elicits fond feelings immediately, as the puppet is rarely touching the ground in motion, not unlike Charles Schulz's "Peanuts" kids who hover over the ground in transit.  And although the human figures are Burton cyphers (resembling the human character designs of his first film Vincent) they are still soulful, their eyes expressing more emotions than their faces will betray. Given that the subject matter is about a mad scientist of a little boy who runs the parallel path of his literary namesake to re-animate his beloved dog, killed in a traffic mishap, there's a lot of room for high emotion there, and far more than in the motivations of the original story.

But, Burton takes it further and makes it more than about young Victor.  Taking pages from The Nightmare Before Christmas and Batman Returns, he stages the denouement at a city festival that brings all parties together in one spot, the communal experience gone awry.  Seems that Victor's work has attracted a lot of attention among his classmates, and as there's a science fair going on, all the kid's are doing the same thing—literally, the same thing, bringing to life their dead pets with very mixed results, and providing Burton a chance to explore other species of monster movies (and recreating scenes from them) than just the one, paying tribute to each, just as he does by including a scene from friend Christopher Lee's turn as "Dracula."  Like Victor's experiment, this is a labor of love as Burton—just as with the earlier short—resurrects the movies he loved as a kid, long-buried memories that never really leave, and have influenced Burton throughout his career.  It's a fun, resonant electrification of his earlier work, with just enough fresh in it to make it worth the effort and bring it back to new life in leeched black-and-white (which Burton always manages to make look sumptuous).  Now, if only we could see something wholly new and original from him, that would be some experiment.

The original Frankenweenie

Brad Bird's "Family Dog" (based on animation designs by Tim Burton)

* It did find it's way to Paul Reubens who'd been trying to find a suitable director to collaborate on his long-in-the planning Pee-Wee Herman movie he'd been dreaming about.  Frankenweenie convinced him to contact Burton.

ParaNorman

Re-Animators
or
"I See Dead Puppets"

The town of Blithe Hollow depends on the supernatural for its tourist trade.  But, what the city fathers probably don't understand is that if you live by the sword...well, let's just say you'd better have a good cleaning crew.

One of the town's citizens is young Norman Babcock (voiced by Kodi Smith-McPhee) and he has a problem—he sees dead people, all of them. He's ostracized from friends, family and reality...from life, really...as most of his acquaintances are non-corporeal and that leads to bullying, loneliness and a general lack of enthusiasm.  He'd be better off dead—as the only people he can relate to already are.

Then, there's his creepy Uncle (a wonderfully comic vocal performance by John Goodman) who tasks him with a special duty—saving Blithe Hollow from destruction by the wrath of the very witch of the town's fame, killed by the city elders centuries before.  To do so, he must go on a hero's journey with unlikely allies, many roadblocks both physical and emotional, while evading zombies, the undead, jocks, bullies and narcissistic big sisters to confront the evil witch.

ParaNorman is hilarious, quirky certainly, but also has a lot of depth and breadth to it.  It would be an easy—too easy—temptation to call it a Tim Burton knock-off (stop-motion animation, horrorific subject matter...it must be a Tim Burton knock-off), but it's actually far more concerned with story over effect than Burton, whose work can become tangentially derailed for a sequence or bit that the director finds funny, even if its a mismatch for the rest of the film and its nonsensibilities.  ParaNorman stays on track, managing to brings its humor out of character, rather than despite it, and with a sense of comic timing that's by turns subtle, surprising and goofy.  Yes, there are scary bits—it's rated PG, so maybe the littlest of kids shouldn't go—but its horrors are not there to shock, but to thrill.  And when the film does build up a full head of horror steam at the end, it provides some of the most awesome sights and effects that have been seen in animation in quite some time.  A hybrid of the Burton and Aardmann animation studios—directors Chris Butler and Sam Fell worked for both groups, respectively, and you can see aspects of their animation styles meshing, hallmarking the best of both stop-motion worlds—Burton's anticness and Aardmann's appreciation (and mining the comedic possibilities) of stillness.  Combine that with the story of an outsider who manages to collect a posse of co-adventurers who handle the auxilliary parts of the hero's main mission, and you have a well-rounded story that manages to surpass the limitations of the parts (making it, amusingly, a bit of a zombie-movie itself).  

What's nice is there's enough time in the plot (involving more than just the cemetery variety) to appreciate the artistry behind it—the way the town is laid out with abandoned squalor in the detail, the people with perpetually bemused expressions, and are, like us, anything but symmetrical, the way an ear glows with the back-lighting of sunshine, and in the ending that manages to combine moments of dark beauty and true psychotic scariness.  Lots to appreciate.  Lots to like.  It's a fine film that makes the most of its slim ambitions, and rises above them.

ParaNorman is a Full-Price Ticket.

Brave

We All Have Our Bear to Cross
or
"A Princess Strives for Perfection"

They used to have a lot of trouble with hair in the early days of digital crafting.  For instance, you remember the monkeys from Jumanji—the hair was short and matted and plasticene looking ("Not good enough, Sonny Jim").

Things have come a long way; Princess Merida (voiced by Kelly Macdonald) in Brave has an unruly hedge of red hair, of all different textures and tensile strength, thatched together, the odd curlicue strands floating, like the representatives of an unruly spirit.  The one girl in the royal Scottish family of Lord Fergus (Billy Connelly) and Lady Elinor (Emma Thompson), she is being groomed, quite radically by Elinor, to be the perfect little princess, a prim and proper consort to one of the sons of the other clans (led by voice actors Robbie Coltrane, Craig Ferguson, and Kevin McKidd)—losers all.  Trouble is, Merida is very much a product of her parents.  The first born, she takes off a lot from her Lord-father, who when we first encounter the family, gives his daughter a bow for her birthday.  A wild shot sends an arrow deep into the forest where Merida has her first encounter with will'o-the-wisps, which her Mother tells her can lead her to her Fate.  As if Merida wants to be led anywhere.  As she grows, she'd much rather take off with her steed Angus, firing arrows at a full gallop on an archery course of her own devising, going on adventures that her potential suitors might blanch at.

But, when forced to play the role imposed on her, Merida becomes defiant, setting in motion a series of events that will prove disasterous to her clam, politically and personally.

To reveal any more would be spoiling the surprises along the way, which are heart-felt, potentially extremely tragic, and ironic all at the same time.  It's a grim fairy tale, conceived by original director Brenda Chapman (Pixar's first female director, although she was let go in the middle of production over "creative differences.")

There are a lot of "first's" here: it's Pixar's first "period" film; their first with a female protagonist, believe it or not (and this has a strong one to start off with, with feminist leanings, and mother-daughter issues); their first "princess" film and their first "fairy tale" of sorts, although it's not based on any story I'm aware of, treading new ground, although the touchstones along the way have all the familiarity of ages-old myth.

And Pixar has re-written their software codes to make a truly complex-looking film.  It's not just the hair, but also the verdant forests, rough-hewn roads, castles, and water effects all have a photo-realism quality, while the cartoon-proportioned people have a fastidiously eclectic design and a malleability of expression far beyond what Pixar's animators have been able to accomplish before.  There are no short-cuts here, but only the pushing of the artistic envelope (and that includes the 3-D effects which looks seamless and flawless with no speed-artifacting) that has been the standard for every production out of this studio.

At the showing I attended there was a technical glitch with the projectors that delayed the film somewhat (pfft...so I missed a couple of previews), and one of the patrons remarked out-loud how much the theater might compensate for the delay.  It left me wondering what sort of compensation is needed besides a great film, flawlessly done. 

Brave is preceded by a magical short, La Luna.  And stay 'til the end as there's a nice little coda.

Brave is a Full-Price Ticket.

Dr. Seuss' The Lorax

Geiselling Up the Wrong Tree
or
What the Dr. Ordered (What the Patient Thneeded)

The Dr. Seuss library was getting a bad shake from the movies when they started.  How the Grinch Stole Christmas (actually an expansion—and declination—of the excellent Chuck Jones Christmas special) was a live-action mess directed by Ron Howard.  Then, the studio actually raised the ire of the estate (in the form of Geisel's widow, Audrey) with the live-action version of The Cat in the Hat.  Then, someone had the brilliant idea of making them computer cartoons, starting with Horton Hears a Who (which did the book justice and stood out on its own as quite a good flick, being the closest representation of Seussian architecture, or lack thereof).  Now, comes Suess' cautionary (and controversial) ecology tale The Lorax in the same format "from the creators of Despicable Me," Chris Renaud and his animation supervisor on that film, Kyle Balda.

And it's not bad.  Despicable Me had a weird way of looking at the world all its own, and the creators have a tendency to take the "edge" off Seuss, (although preserving his architectural view of "no right angles") while still making a film that is lively, and with a comic timing that depends on the "ol' switcheroo" for laughs, not unlike a perpetual motion "Roadrunner" cartoon.

The expansion is interesting.  Ted (Geissel's Christian name and voiced by Zac Efron) lives in a polluted plastic community of Thneedeville, run by a corporate overlord named O'Hare (Rob Riggle), who's a "zillionaire" from producing bottled air—a necessity since all the real trees have been cut done, owing to (and this where the book comes in) The Once-ler (voiced by Ed Helms) who used them all to make his fortune producing and selling Thneede's, which appear to be a scarf/sweater/hat contraption, which became a sensation. 

His initial tree-toppling leads to the appearance of The Lorax (cackled by Danny DeVito) who "speaks for the trees"—sarcastically, I might add—to try to set the young entrepreneur onto a more green-path when it comes to business (like that ever works without tax-breaks, cute woodsy animals be damned).

Ted, meanwhile, wants to grow a single, solitary tree for the woman of his dreams, Audrey (played by the woman of my nightmares, Taylor Swift, and despite my prejudices, she's quite good!) and the only way he can do that is to get by O'Hare, his burly security guards and escape Thneedville to find the Once-ler and let Nature take its course, Lorax or no Lorax.

It's not a bad translation of Seuss, story-wise.  But one wishes that the visuals could be a little less plasticene looking, given the ecology story, which leads one to wonder if such a subject should even be rendered with pixels (and makes one cynical enough to note how much the End Title tune is auto-tuned to a semi-quaver of its unnatural life).  Such thoughts should not be creeping into one's thoughts when one is watching a movie about how wonderful Nature's way is, and nature has nothing to do with it, no matter how "green" the movie declares itself to be.

Dr. Seuss' The Lorax is a Matinee.

Cars 2/Transformers 3/Audiences 0

"The Summer of Our Discontent"
or
"Cash for Clunkers"

You almost don't want to go To the Movies this Summer.  Oh, we were warned; so many sequels and comic-book movies, the "experts" pouted and clucked.  But the law of averages were in the audience's favor; there had to be something good in "the numbers."*  But, this Summer has made me a little gun-shy and I hesitate from pulling the trigger on my credit card for a ticket.  Nothing's excited me so far (apart from The Tree of Life**) and it's July already.  Of the comics films, only X-Men: First Class had powers and abilities far beyond most super-hero movies—certainly over the previous "X-Men" entries.  The 3-D "phenomenon" has constricted budgets, pushed opening dates, and the only thing it seems to add is an extra dimension of "suck" to the productions in the end.

Two recent releases left me so completely unmoved—probably because they were manufactured machine-movies about manufactured machines manufacturing fights with each other—that I thought it best to combine them under one article...so I wouldn't have to spend too much time contemplating their existence, and simply move on. They also evoked the same thought of "What do I care what happens to machines? Machines can be re-built!" 

And movies series can be re-booted.  There are a couple I'd like to give the boot to right now.

Ultimately, both films are just long commercials for toys.  Better to buy the toys and make your own adventure than what's being served.


"Spare Parts"

I went into the original Cars with exceptionally low expectations, and found a surprisingly fun little film to appeal to the NASCAR crowd and anyone who had a love for the open road.  Automobile comedy would seem to be the lowest gear for laughs, but Pixar (and its guru/director John Lasseter, this time co-directing with Brad Lewis) managed a fine film that, if it fell short of the other Pixar products, at least managed to land on all four tires...and that's where the rubber meets the road.

But, what do you do for a victory lap?  Go around the field one more time? (Well...yeah).  With the novelty of a talking car universe safely a given, Cars 2 expands the concept, so that everything is talking, cars, boats, planes—although the oil-rigs featured are strangely mute.  It also goes global, with an environmental plot about an oil billionaire car (???) who decides to go "green" and develops a new fuel called "Allinol" (heh) and a promotional World Grand Prix to go with it.  This gives "Lightning" McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson) to go head-gasket-to-head-gasket with his racing rival, Francesco Bernoulli (John Turturro, who is having fun) for a best two out of three. 

Ah, but there's sand in the gas-tank, when a car-tel of lemon-models (Pacers, Pintos, Gremlins, Ugos) led by an evil genius (my guess it was an Edsel, but I was wrong) wants to exploit a weakness in the gas to destroy the racers in the Grand Prix, and it's up to Special Agent Finn McMissile (voiced by Michael Caine, standing in for a friend, I think)—a gadget-laden Aston Martin/Miata hybrid—and his co-agent Holly Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer) to stop the plot and learn the secret identity of the evil genius behind it all.  In a case of mistaken vin numbers, these crack agents think that Mater, the tow-truck (Larry the Cable Guy) is their American contact with information to stop the  plot in its tire-tracks.  

Now...wait a minute.  I know it's a movie about talking cars (fergawdsake), but it takes a new meaning of the term British Intelligence to make that kind of mistake.  So, the movie shifts its emphasis from the McQueen caracter to Mater very quickly and the movie never really recovers...I mean, there's only so much Larry the Cable Guy a person can take.  The movie's tone has the feel of those '60's films where they used to shoe-horn Rowan and Martin or The Three Stooges into a spy plot because it was "a trend" and they couldn't come up with anything better...or appropriate. So, it's all a little "off," the timing chain a little twisted, not sparking on all cylinders.  It LOOKS good—the city-scapes haven't looked so lovely since Ratatouille (although everything looks a little miniaturized, like a play-set), and the movie has a fairly amusing sequence in Japan—but the film moves way too fast to appreciate all the chrome and options and it's too loud and obnoxious that the impulse is to roll the windows up and ignore it.  Despite a stellar cast (Vanessa Redgrave voices The Queen?  And did I hear Michael Gambon—uncredited—as the disguised voice of the villain?) and despite its emphasis on Mater, nothing matters—there's no conflict, there's no drama—just a hokey plot, some slip-shod comedy, and everything running on auto-pilot. 

As such, it would have been more appropriate to have Roger Moore as the voice of the spy-car.

Cars 2 may be buffed and shined, but its parts are used and worn, and rather than having that "new car" smell, it has a distinct lemon-scent.

Cars 2 is Cable-Watcher.
(Wilhelm Alert @ 01: 24)




"Rock-Em, Suck-in Robots"

You should have no expectations walking into any film, but you really need to lower your guard going into a Michael Bay construction. His early films are such an annihlation of style over substance—to the point where action sequences are a mashugenah mish-mash between what looks like slo-mo Americana commercials for insurance—that you wonder if the guy at that point had any sort of talent whatsoever (I mean, Tony Scott has the same commercial gloss to his films, but at least you can follow them).

Over time, though, Bay's act has gradually gotten better. The action sequences smoothed out without losing any of the kinetic energy the director was striving for. Maybe there was even a good idea or two among the shrapnel flying through the air. But, the emphasis was always, and will always be I suspect, about demolition derby film-making with the occasional "grace note" of grinning nihilism and exploitive misogyny. One suspects that Michael Bay may become a better film-maker, but he will never grow up.

And he's still playing with toys. He directed all three "Transformer" movies, including the latest, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, and before getting into what's wrong with it, here's what's right: the action sequences, particularly a crazed, high-strung highway chase and a mechanical urban brawl fought on three fronts through the high-rises of Chicago*** are marvels of imagination and quite "followable"—in other words, Bay is starting to understand the logistics of a good action sequence involve perspective and relatable occurances—the swooping overhead shots let you see the relationships of what's happening, rather than just presenting a hodge-podge of in-your-face shots.  Yes, they go on too long—the evidence being the kids in the audience who couldn't sit in their seats long enough even when things started to go crash and boom—but at least things made sense, rather than merely noise and rubble.  Now, if he could just have things happen simultaneously—rather than have things stop on the other fronts while he concentrates on one sector—Bay might actually generate something his movies always lack: suspense.

So, the technique is improving, but he's still a far distance from being a mature film-maker.  The few women cast in the film, save Frances McDormand who manages to retain some inventiveness and dignity in her role, are all dressed like hookers with Bay's camera leering over their curves,**** the dialogue attempts double entendre but never gets beyond the singular stage, and the annoying Beavis and Butt-head mini-robots from the last film are back and just as juvenile.  The whole movie has the same air of arrested development, although attempts are made to make it seem like it is happening in something more than a fantasy world where aliens disguise themselves as muscle-cars.  The plot revolves around a derelict Autobot being salvaged from the Moon—its detection being the genesis of Pres. Kennedy's push for a fast lunar landing (and a cameo by "Buzz" Aldrin attempts to lend credibility to the idea).*****  But, there are also "realish-world" cameos by Kennedy (eerily good effects work), Nixon and Robert McNamara (not so much), Walter Cronkite (TV archival footage) and Bill O'Reilly (which negates the credibility factor...a lot).  John Turturro returns, and John Malkovich has a small role as a gung-ho business exec.  Shia LaBeouf is on-hand (much more caffeinated than usual, probably to be better noticed and for good comic effect, as, Unicron knows, the robots are DEADLY serious), and there's just enough of his parents in this one to outwear their welcome, whereas they were one of the best things in the original.  Here, that role is provided by Alan Tudyk, who enlivens the first half of the film before he's made into a functionary.

But, human interaction other than urgently delivered exposition or awkward comedy is rare as human beings become mere flotsam (sometimes literally) in the crushing of gears against gears.  Since I've whined in the past that the "Transformers" movies have suffered from "Saved-by-a-White-Man" Syndrome (where a movie's ethnic entities' problems are solved by the usually-white star), this is actually rather refreshing (in fact, the girl-friend/model is the only one who does anything to influence the fight, by displaying the same kvetching characteristic she does with LaBouef's character, a nice touch if you actually believe it inspires what transpires, rather than her merely being turned into designer-charcoal as an annoyance). 

One looks for small signs of hope wherever one can, when one is dealing with something in so need of repair.

Ultimately, though, for all the metallicrash on the screen, my attention kept returning to my watch...I couldn't wait to get out of there.

One further thought to Bay's detriment: he can't direct 3-D (the format I saw Transformers: DOTM in. On too many ocassions, the illusion was spoiled by Bay's insistance in putting an out-of-focus obstructing "something" in between the viewer and the "focus" of the scene...which in 3-D...DOES NOT WORK! The eye wants to focus on the nearest object and move outward in focus, and with merely a "blur" to look at, gets mixed signals, leading to a frustrating viewing experience. Bad idea. And given that Transformers was designed to be shown in 3-D, some bad direction.


Transformers: Dark of the Moon is a Cable-Watcher, but rent it, instead, so you'll be able to skip places, speed it up, watch it in chunks...it's too long and renting it, you'll have more control over how much time you're wasting..

* Just because there's a number in the movie doesn't mean it's going to be bad—it amuses me that the intro on the Cars 2 poster says "From the Makers of Toy Story 3."  And there are the inevitable jokes—that Ocean's 11 was followed by Ocean's 12, and I remember a comedian saying about Malcolm X: "I never saw Malcolm I-IX!!"  I saw Super and Super 8 this Summer...where're the other 6?


** Meek's Cutoff was interesting, but nobody's going to see that.  So much for blazing trails.


*** You shouldn't take these things too seriously or literally, although Roger Ebert in his nicely disingenuous journal entry "On the Origin of Transformers" wonders why such a global conflict shoukld be limited to "the corner of Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive in Chicago."  Um...budget?

**** Bay's very first shot of the female lead—Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, a Victoria's Secret Model (but still...) is an up-skirt shot of her walking up a flight of stairs.  This isn't exactly the tradition of women making a "grand entrance."


***** This is the same "Buzz" Aldrin who, when confronted by an Apollo landing-hoax enthusiast, hauled off and punched the guy!  Who's getting the black eye now?

The Illusionist (2010)

"The Disappearing Act"
or
"We Liked His Earlier, Funny Ones..."

The French comic/film-maker Jacques Tati left one unproduced screenplay when he died in 1982.  That script, entitled "Film Tati Nº 4," is the basis for animator Sylvain Chomet's first feature after The Triplettes of Belleville, The Illusionist (or L'Illusionniste).  It is a lettre d'amour to Tati, with a main character resembling the French Master in size, style and manner (right down to the examination of the world with hands placed on the back of one's hips), directed in the same spare long-shot frame that allows disaster to occur from corner to corner.  It has the same errant mechanics (the sense that what could go wrong will go wrong), the ironic timing and "marking time" quality of Tati's films, in the elegantly focussed manner of silent films with sound effects.

But, it is a special case.  Tati wrote this after Mon Oncle and never made it, for whatever reason, coming down to mostly personal grief...but over whom is much in dispute.  Tati had two daughters, a child-out-of wedlock whom he abandoned, named Helga, and his legitimate daughter Sophie. Tati was going to make the film with Sophie in the 1960's, but never did.  His estrangement from his daughters weighed heavily on him, and the result—this melancholy little mea culpa—might have seemed as cheer-dousing as Charlie Chaplin playing McBeth. Or, it was simply too close to commit to.

A not-too-well-considered prestidigitater, Tatischeff (Tati's real name, by the way) is pulling a living out of his hat on a low-rent club circuit.  It is 1956, and rock n' roll is filling the theaters, and television is emptying the minds.  Tatischeff can't compete with his props and particularly ill-mannered rabbit (he bites!) and he plays empty halls to little applause.  An invitation to perform at a private party in Scotland turns out relatively well, and he stays, making the acquaintance of Alice, who works the tavern and sees Tatischeff as a genuine magician.  Noting the condition of her shoes, he buys her a nice pair of red ones, leaving her convinced her that actual magic can happen.

On a trip to Edinburgh,* he discovers that Alice has followed him without a ticket.  He buys her one, and the two travel the rest of the way together and settle in the city in a flop-house for performers.  While Tatischeff performs to the dwindling crowds at the Music Hall, Alice cooks, cleans, becomes the roving ambassador to the other performers and wanders the streets looking at the promises of a better life in Edinburgh shop-windows. 

The relationship between performer and waif is completely a father-daughter relationship.  He is a bit aloof, but tries to provide for her dreams by taking on a series of increasingly demeaning jobs, which he manages to pull off with uneasy aplomb.  She cares for him, but looks to the horizon.  At some point, his job is to let her go...to perform his own disappearing act in her life, if she is to have one.  Bittersweet, to be sure.

The Illusionist also has up is sleeve the constant thread that everything is an illusion: performers and artisans put their best face forward, we hide behind masks, we project elegance, we learn as we go becoming expert only after trial and error, and there is nothing so false as the entertainment industry with its sad clowns, facile crooners and feathered chorines.  There are no inner lives on stage, only the projection of illusion, a made-up false-front for reality.

Rich in detail and sub-text, it's the sort of quietly deep-thinking comedy that has mostly been absent since Tati passed, and though it has its laugh-out-loud moments, it is mostly a meditation on the transitory nature of life, how we dress it up, corral the chaos, change it, make it into reality only to see it fade and move on.  It is partially performance, partially illusion, but we are constantly changing, turning something into something else.  Life is what we make it and what it makes us.  

The Illusionist is a Full-Price Ticket.

* I've been to Edinburgh—it's where Chomet's studio, Django films was located—and the recreation of the city is amazing.  There were all the places I'd seen, but all in the wrong place, a scrambled Edinburgh that doesn't lose any of its charm.