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.

The Dilemma

"Mouth Wide Shut"

I put up a snarky comment on the LNTAM Facebook page that nothing strikes fear into my heart so much as the words "A Comedy by Ron Howard."  A little facetious, perhaps.  I like Splash a lot and Parenthood may be my favorite of Howard's films.  But the director of so many thunderously ponderous dramas does not have the necessary light touch,* at least these days, when it comes to directing comedy.  Instead, he's dependent on the flip style of his stars (like Tom Hanks and Steve Martin) to rise above his heavy hand, and The Dilemma** has no such talent in evidence.

Not that Vince Vaughn and Kevin James don't try, but they're caught in a script so painful in its ramifications that you feel more sympathy for them than any mocking superiority, that might allow some amusement.  It's a "Comedy-of-Errors" story, an "Incredible-Mess" scenario, and wants (wants, mind you) to say something about "the futility of good intentions" as well as "the value of honesty."  But, then goes out of its way to show that one should just avert your eyes and walk away.  The results, and the messages, are mixed.

Ronny Valentine (Vaughn) is a gambling addict in denial.  His struggles with the problem have previously derailed a relationship with Beth (Jennifer Connelly), and they're coping with honesty and trust issues, because its easier for Ronny to bull-shit over embarrassing situations with elaborate fictions rather than just stating the truth.  Its a helpful business strategy for him in his business with Nick Brannen (James) in automobile development—their current scheme is to give electric cars the same vibrating muscle power as a gas-guzzler.  But, lately, he's been thinking up elaborate ways to pop the question to Beth.  During one of his scouting forays to an ultimate proposal sight, he is appalled to find Nick's wife, Geneva (Winona Ryder, welcome back), canoodling with a young dude (Channing Tatum), something that a) affects both his personal and business relationship with his college buddy and b) strikes at the core of his fear of entering into marriage with Beth.  Not to add stress to Nick's life, he chooses to add stress to his own by NOT saying anything (except to the duplicitous Geneva, who is ready to make life VERY uncomfortable for Ronny).  This leads to a series of mis-understandings and down-right lies that makes everyone in Ronny's life think that he's back to his old tricks of hiding the truth to cover his gambling habits...and, indeed, by taking the dilemma by the horns, he is gambling with his life and relationships and losing...badly.

Hilarity is supposed to ensue, but nothing approaching a smile cracked my face.  Ronny's habit of lying, fudging and obfuscating makes him an easy mark for any sort of suspicion and the situation he finds himself in is somewhat Kafkaesque.  The former gambler can't win for losing, and the thought that kept pin-balling through my mind was "since the creative Hail-Mary's of over-promising to his potential clients is so integral to his success, how can he effectively keep his salesmanship from entering osmotically his personal life?" (Honestly, that's what I was thinking).  I found it tragic more than comic, and wondered how any person with an addiction can hope to live out a normal life...even after overcoming it.

Pretty depressing thoughts to arise from a comedy.

Maybe such thoughts wouldn't have popped up if I'd laughed more.

Or...at all. 

The Dilemma is a Cable-Watcher.

* I'm omitting, of course, the bright spot of Ron Howard's recent comedy output, his shepherding of the TV-series "Arrested Development," whose crazed blunderbusting of the immaturity of the entitlement class was one of the better comedies of recent years.

** The most interesting aspect of The Dilemma is the spelling of its title.  I'd always learned that it was spelled "D-I-L-E-M-N-A," and would frequently make a joke of too literally pronouncing it "dilem-na."  But, these days spell-checks and my own (previously trusted) Random House Dictionary spells it with the double "m." However you spell it, it's a quandary. 

Black Swan

"The Red Shoes Diaries"
or
"Losing Control (She-Bop, Sh'Bop, Sh'Bop)"

Black Swan is a head-trip, alright.  Darren Aronofsky's latest of his films exploring the limits of obsession—the pursuit of it, the need for it, and its cost—never travels too far afield from the whirling dermis-dome of Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman—brave).  A "girly-girl" to the nth degree, Nina still lives with Mom (Barbara Hershey—even braver) in a 12 year old's bedroom, blushes in embarrassment when sex is brought up, and still pursues the girl's version of what the Bible calls "childish things"—prima ballerina.

And like the dervishes who spin to achieve some form of religious ecstasy, she is looking for an epiphany in her pursuit of perfection.  Be careful what you wish for.

From the loges, it all looks so elegant, but on stage it's a board-thumping, sinew-stretching, bone-popping athletic performance, practiced to such an extent to be made to seem easy.  The body takes a beating.  Callouses form, bones snap, nails bear the brunt of the quest for perfection.  It's beautiful but brutal.  And, as any athlete will tell you, it's as much a challenge of the mind, as well.  There's the discipline to do the job unerringly, but there's also physical acting, as well.  Synapses fire to work the muscles, but those same synapses are under assault psychologically, fraying from the pressures on-stage and backstage.

For Nina, it's an obsession for perfection.*  Her director (Vincent Cassel) knows she can nail the star-part of the pure white swan in "Swan Lake," but the vixenish back swan is more of a challenge.  "Perfection isn't about control.  It's also about letting go."  For the more sensuous black swan, Nina is at a loss, so bottled up in being perfect, she's afraid to open up from the discipline.  "Live a little," he suggests, telling her to touch herself.

As if there isn't enough self-abuse going on.

The pressures start getting to her.  Given to obsessively scratching her shoulder, she develops a rash at her shoulder blades.  Toe-nails split.  Her fingernails turn bloody (at one point she tears off a length of finger skin down to the second knuckle).  She seems to be coming apart at the seams, and if she can't bear up, she'll be replaced like the departing prima Beth McIntyre (Winona Ryder**).  The number one candidate for the job is Lily (Mila Kunis), an earthy dancer from San Francisco, who typifies the black swan, and who becomes something of a paranoid obsession to Nina from their first glance.  By the time Nina actually pulls the bud of a black feather out of her scraped-raw shoulder, it's pretty apparent Nina has crossed a line and, like an exquisite ballet, fantasy has disguised reality.

It's scary, almost a horror film.  Aronofsky keeps the film taught, his restless camera taking a position directly behind Nina's head, clod-hopping behind her, seeing what she sees, agitatedly cutting out the dull parts.  Then it spins as she does, picking out the neck-snapping details that Nina sees in the blur. Fully a quarter of the film involves a reflective surface (even a shot of Nina looking at her mother's obsessive portraits of her—of course, Mom is trying to "get" daughter perfect, too), even if those mirrors don't always behave well.

And, as he did with The Fountain, Aronofsky proves himself a master of subtle sound-work, using extreme fields to further enhance the disorientation the audience feels inside Nina's head (more than once, I looked to see if there was someone behind me in the theater), and altering reality—making a toe-nail clipper sound like a guillotine, making you feel the gristle of toe-bones as they snap.

And he gets the best out of Portman.  It's a technically tough performance—she's in every scene, and her face, typically beautiful in serenity, is constricted in constant struggle, disrupting the planes of her face into a worried mask that seldom shows her at her best, veering into moments of hysteria.

For the sacrifice of art, she's not pretty, nor is the film, despite its subject matter and occasional forays into the dance-fantasy.  How can it be?  We're not sitting comfortably in the audience, but perched precariously in Nina's whirling head, dizzy with the spin, that even braking to a screeching stop, continues the momentum in our own minds long afterwards.

Black Swan is a Full-Price Ticket. 

* I don't want to get too far into this, although I'm sure Aronofsky and his scripters (Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, and John J. McLaughlin) probably did.  There's something called the "Black Swan Theory," about large, unexpected events and their shock-wave effect on human psyches that must come to grips with it.  What's most relevant about it are the ten principles the theory's author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, concocts to create a more predictable world: 

1. What is fragile should break early while it is still small. Nothing should ever become Too Big to Fail.
2. No socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains.
3. People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus.
4. Do not let someone making an "incentive" bonus manage a nuclear plant – or your financial risks.
5. Counter-balance complexity with simplicity.
6. Do not give children sticks of dynamite, even if they come with a warning.
7. Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence. Governments should never need to "restore confidence".
8. Do not give an addict more drugs if he has withdrawal pains.
9. Citizens should not depend on financial assets or fallible "expert" advice for their retirement.
10. Make an omelette with the broken eggs.

Hmmm.  Some of this relates. 
  

** A glance at the four lead actresses, Portman, Ryder, Kunis, Hershey, and most of the supporting ballerinas reveals that they are all similar-looking women—a long line of raven-haired ingenues, like their own organic mirror images.

A Scanner Darkly

"A Scanner Darkly" (Richard Linklater, 2006) Adaptation of the Philip K. Dick story that doesn't really seem "Dick-ish" until the last few minutes. Up until then we're in the Land of the "Juiced and Confused." Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, Rory Cochrane and Winona Ryder are the disparate personality types in a low-class drug fraternity. They live their barely functioning lives of paranoid schemes and arrested thinking never knowing that Keanu Reeves is a "scanner," a drug officer who wears a visage-shifting "scan-suit" when he's on-duty. So, in other words, he's only "undercover," when he's in police headquarters. Then he goes out on his "assignment," taking off his "scan-suit" to become Keanu Reeves--which he does in the police locker room. So, in even more other words (just to make sure this is perfectly clear), he's only in disguise among his co-workers, and not when he's posing as a drug-dealer/taker.

I'm sorry, but does that make any sense?*

But the real story of "A Scanner Darkly," is it's the latest Linklater experiment in roto-scoping computer animation. The film-makers shoot the actors, mostly on location, and then animate over the footage, giving it a "living-comic-book" feel. It works on sone of the actors--Keanu Reeves' lack of expression keeps his cartoon character consistent, and Robert Downey, jr. plays a more-together Hunter Thompson mostly through the eyes and using a lot of humor, so he looks fine. But Harrelson and Cochrane, because they're being animated, take their characters over-the-top, or "outside the lines," if you will, and as a result, their characters are not so much cartoons, as caricatures, and wildly shifting caricatures, at that. The biggest problem on the technical side is Winona Ryder--her character and her rendering are inconsistent, sometimes producing really ugly effects. It's tough to caricature attractive women and the animators fail her time and again. The animation is an interesting experiment and solves location and special effects limitations, but ultimately the lack of a compelling story makes the film as interesting as a demonstration disk.

* Story-wise, it suits a purpose (barump-bump). But the scanner of Dick's book was a device for reviewing biographical information, not a suit that someone had to wear.