Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995)

Toying

Toy Story is a witty, precisely paced picture, a flawless entertainment. It has all your favorite toys packed in one movie. It has the voice of Tom Hanks and Tim Allen, two proven actors with a pair of Oscars and several hundred million in boxoffice between them. It has wall-to-wall, state-of-the-art, computer-graphic effects designed to pop your eyes out, if you’re not careful. It has the multimedia might of the Walt Disney conglomerate behind it, for heavy marketing muscle. It’s going to be the biggest hit of the year.

Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995)

Toyed are us

Toy Story is a warm, witty, precisely paced entertainment. It has all your favorite toys, featured in one movie. It has the voice of Tom Hanks and Tim Allen, two proven actors with a pair of Oscars and several hundred million in boxoffice between them. It has wall-to-wall state-of-the-art computer graphic effects designed to pop your eyes out if you’re not careful. It has the multimedia might of the Walt Disney conglomerate behind it for heavy marketing muscle. It’s going to be the biggest hit of the year. 

The Last Jedi (Rian Johnson)

The lame Jedi

(WARNING: plot twists and overall narrative discussed in explicit detail)

You thought The Force Awakens was clumsily stitched together from the cold leftovers of the first Star Wars movie?* Get a load of this carcass--

Beauty and the Beast (Bill Condon)

Furry tail

I'll say this much for Disney's live-action remake of their animated feature: it improves on one scene, where Belle (Emma Watson) gushes to the Beast (Dan Stevens) about Shakespeare's Verona-set tragic romance. The previous incarnation of Belle sang about her love of books but never once mentioned a title or author, just details about some generic standard-issue romance (Stephenie Meyer? E.L. James?); at least this one volunteers an actual name, a published work, a real writer.

The Beast rolls his eyes--of course she'd pick that! Belle indignantly demands that he suggest a better alternative, and he promptly leads her to his vast library stack, with shelves stretching above and away from her. Yes the earlier flick did turn on their supposed love of literature but in this one you actually feel the sexy give-and-take of two bibliophiles wrangling over their preferred texts. 

And the Beast's eye roll? Who has ever run their fingertips across a sheet of pulped wood and scribbled ink sniffing its heady aroma and hasn't felt some measure of condescension for the relatively uninitiated? It's the movie's best moment, so funny and honest (particularly because the Beast doesn't think much of his expensive education, possibly because it failed to lead to a high-paying job) it actually made me sit up and pay attention for maybe O an entire minute.

Moana (Ron Clements, John Musker)

Aloha oe 

Moana, directed by Ron Clements and John Musker is Disney's latest attempt at politically correct culturally sensitive storytelling. The results I'd say are better than anything the studio has ever done before, which if you know my history regarding all things Disney is saying something.

Pete's Dragon (David Lowery)

Pete's dragging

Walt Disney Studios in case you haven't noticed has been remaking its movies with mostly dire results. There was the live-action The Jungle Book (which digitally rendered India a uniform gruel gray); the live-action Malificent (which totally bypassed the splendor of the original--possibly the only Disney animated feature I really liked--in favor of a puny little girl-power parable) and I hear that Kenneth Brannagh did a live-action Cinderella (which I missed, thankfully; there's only so much punishment a critic can take).

The 1977 Pete's Dragon wasn't exactly a Disney classic come to life--it's not as funny as Jungle Book, does not feature cute rats like Cinderella, does not frighten you with a ten story high walking nightmare clad in clashing nightblack armor, bristling sable steel pikes a la Sleeping Beauty. There's room for improvement in the original, an entire apartment building's worth, tantalizingly promised by the opening sequence--man woman and child driving through forest road, reading a children's book (Elliot Gets Lost) and discussing adventure. "That's the other thing about adventures," declares Pete's dad; "you got to be brave." At which point of course the deer hits the fan. 

Captain America: Civil War (Anthony Russo, Joe Russo), The Jungle Book (Jon Favreau)

 
A feeble War

Calling brothers Anthony and Joe Russo's Captain America: Civil War the best superhero movie to date is I feel a bit much. It limps along more nimbly than the rest of Marvel's profit-animated undead, is a huge improvement over such joyless efforts as the Thor or Wolverine movies, is a quantum leap in quality over Snyder's multimilliondollar super-powered cowflop--but saying all that is like saying you didn't feel like flinging your 32 oz. soda at the screen and bashing your head repeatedly on the theater's concrete floor; we're talking extremely low bar here. 

Zootopia (Byron Howard, Rich Moore, Jared Bush, 2016)

Animal house

Disney's latest (directed by Byron Howard, Rich Moore and Jared Bush, from a screenplay by Jared Bush and Phil Johnston, story by a menagerie of writers) proposes an unlikely community where predator and prey live in uneasy harmony. 

The burg, officially named 'Zootopia,' looks suspiciously like Disneyland: towering central structure much like Cinderella's Castle from which radiates neatly divided 'lands' with neatly assigned themes (Tundraland, Rainforest District, Sahara Square, Little Rodentia) and neatly divided microclimes (freezing, humid, arid, urban), not to mention a fast-gliding monorail linking all realms together. The movie borrows details from The Godfather and Who's Afraid of Roger Rabbit and granddaddy of neo-noirs Chinatown (from which Roger Rabbit cribs much of its own plot) to present a mystery: who's kidnapping the citizens of Zootopia (mainly predators), and can a rabbit (Officer Judy Hopps, voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin) and con-artist fox (Nick Wilde, voiced by Jason Bateman) work together long enough to solve the case?* 

A pair of Burnetts: 'Nightjohn' and 'Selma, Lord Selma'

A pair of Burnetts

I suppose Selma, Lord Selma (1999) might be called Burnett's take on the Civil Rights Movement. Easy to wish it had been produced by anyone besides Disney, but thewish is a double-edged sword: if Disney had not coughed up the money, would there be a film at all?

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

(Warning: plot twists and story discussed in detail)  

The Forced Turducken

Ingredients:


One (1) putrefying carcass of once-popular movie franchise.

One (1) fanatic fan base composed of millions of acolytes (cerebral cortex removed).

One (1) director fast becoming better-known for rebooting tired old series than original projects.

One (1) evil empire bent on dominating the minds of youths all over the world. 

Tomorrowland (Brad Bird, 2015)

Tomorrow belongs to me

Talk about optimists: Brad Bird's Tomorrowland was done for a largish $190 million, the makers hoping to make around twice that amount back--despite so-so reviews and a less-than-stellar first weekend. 

I know the question on your mind though ("Screw the money figures, what about the movie itself?").

Maleficent (Robert Stromberg, 2014)

(Warning--story and plot twists in the movie discussed in detail)

Once upon a cream

Saw Maleficent over the weekend, and what King Stefan (Sharlto Copley) does to the eponymous fairy (Angelina Jolie) is nothing compared to what Disney does to its original film--from behind; over and over again; in the grossest most graphic manner possible. 

American Hustle; The Wolf of Wall Street; Frozen (Chris Buck, Jennifer Lee); The Time of the Doctor (Jamie Payne; Dr. Who Christmas Special)

(Warning: plot twists of the various titles mentioned are discussed in close and explicit detail)

Do the hustle

Call it the Year of True-Life Movies:  American Hustle is David O. Russell's take on the Abscam scandals, some of which, he cagily admits in an opening title, "actually happened." The succeeding events at most provide a rough outline on which Russell hangs a series of sexy, funny, occasionally poignant encounters between memorably sleazy characters, played by some very smart (and smart-looking) actors, filmed in the director's distinct adrenaline-rush style (frenetic cutting and handheld camerawork that somehow retains visual coherence), perhaps channeling filmmaker Martin Scorsese more than usual what with the outrageous '70s outfits and tremendous '70s hair. Bradley Cooper's Jheri Curls, Christian Bale's swollen belly, and Jennifer Lawrence's blonde fizziness got the most favorable notices from critics, but it's Amy Adam's faux English mistress--juggling her attraction to both Bale's swindler and Cooper's FBI agent and countering the threat of Lawrence's housewife--that feels more and more like the film's true heart: her and her comic struggle to remain true to a tangle of loyalties.

Some of Russell and co-writer Eric Singer's story choices are puzzling--I can see the need to depict mistrust of government, but is the Mafia that much more trustworthy, or effective? Is Russell saying you can cut a straight deal with gangsters sooner than with government, or that gangsters are so lethally effective it's better to screw the government? And granted the real-life equivalent of Bale's swindler really liked the real-life equivalent of Jeremy Renner's Camden mayor, did they really have to gloss over the fact that the latter was not as innocent as depicted onscreen?

Not perhaps as drenched in gritty pathos as Russell's The Fighter, or as stubbornly, imaginatively idiosyncratic as his I Heart Huckabees (in my book his masterpiece), but still a fine entertainment, and any excuse to watch Russell flex his considerable filmmaking muscles is in my book a perfectly valid excuse. Good hustle, sir.

The lower depths

There's Russell's vivid approximation of a Martin Scorsese film, and then there's the original. The Wolf of Wall Street is everything American Hustle is--sexy, funny, fluid, profane--and more: disgusting, despairing, demented, in both a good and bad way. 

Why watch a hundred and sixty plus minutes of Leonardo DiCaprio sniffing and screwing and screaming when Ray Liotta had done all that back in '90 and Robert De Niro had done it best (in my book, anyway) in '95? Because, well, no one does it quite the way Scorsese does, and I suppose if anyone has to repeat himself--switching the milieu from '70s Brooklyn to '70s Vegas to '90s Wall Street--Scorsese's earned the privilege, charting the grotesque rise (through violence, through business, through deceit) and ignominious fall (through violence, through hubris, through sheer accident) of a white male in American society yet again. It's a story so vast and broad (if not exactly profound) it could stand being repeated twice, the volume cranked up louder with each retelling--or at least that was what Scorsese must have thought when he did this film.

Christina McDowell makes a compelling case that the story shouldn't be told at all; that if anything Scorsese has done us a disservice telling Belfort's story with such cinematic brio. It's a heartfelt, harrowing letter, and should give the viewer pause; Scorsese does much in the picture but one thing he doesn't do is tell the victim's side of the story.

Hard to see Scorsese doing that, though. He rarely editorializes--simply tells the tale, whether it's Jordan Belfort's or Henry Hill's or Jake LaMotta's; shows us the glamor and dirt, then shows us the fall. The most he'll give us by way of message is that the man--any man--gets his, eventually. Scorsese practically insists on this point--even Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ is punished for wanting an ordinary life. We see Belfort snort up mountains of coke; we also see him struggle to his Ferrari, barely able to crawl because he's overdosed on 'luudes. We see him fucking everything in sight; we also see him atop his wife in one particularly excruciating scene, where she clearly doesn't want him there (I personally don't think Margot Robbie got near enough the credit she deserved).

And is all that high life--the booze, drugs, naked girls--necessary? Scorsese doesn't quite sell the decadence: you see what's happening, you get loud rock on the soundtrack, but he doesn't linger; the excess comes at you in a rush much the way you imagine it came at Belfort, or at least the way Scorsese imagines it must have come at Belfort. Scorsese's acting as anthropologist here, a cool observer with maybe a bit of inside information on the effects of being high (and other less pretty symptoms). He shows us the arc of Belfort's addiction (not to drugs--when he's compelled to quit he does so without much struggle--but to money and the power that money brings) in a way that's fascinating, almost addictive. We crave the high of Scorsese's style, the way Belfort--and Hill, and Rothstein, and LaMotta--crave the high of their respective vices. 

If Scorsese is guilty of excusing or prettifying any of the facts, it's in suggesting that Belfort victimized mostly the rich (a lot of small business entrepreneurs got hurt); Belfort himself claims to have turned a new leaf (debatable) and has announced plans to hand over the profits from book and film to victims.*

*Possibly a moot point, as the film is doing disappointing business. Which leads one to ask: the film is encouraging what? Glorifying what? Seems to me the general audience understood well enough what critics didn't: that Scorsese's picture is less an entertainment than an ordeal, one we don't sit through so much as suffer, the way Catholics suffer through Lent.

Will Belfort's proposed generosity become reality? Frankly I think Belfort hasn't stopped hustling. But the biggest disservice Scorsese may have done is to call attention to flashier predators, instead of the real criminals living quieter, more respectable lives. 

But a film that probes into big-time financial corruption probably needs a different director with a different (more sober?) approach; even then you wonder if he (the theoretical filmmaker and his proposed work) could attract enough financing--or audience--to make a difference. 

Meanwhile we've got this, Scorsese's latest, and what he does manage to do--while hardly his best work--is pretty damned good, I'd say.
 

Brain freeze

Give the filmmakers of Frozen (Chris Buck, Jennifer Lee) some credit: they take the standard-issue Disney princess and tinker with her a bit, make her more kickbutt, more assertive, less dependent on her Prince Charming (in this case a Danish lunkhead named Kristoff). In place of insensitive parents (they're killed off early) a troubled sister; in place of sneering villain, a smooth charmer. 

There's effort made in the digital animation department too, and when not being sandbagged by the inane songs one can marvel at the way the digital snow clumps and falls, or the way the digital ice gleams in the chill air (filled with digital flakes that seem suspended in silence, a nice little digital effect). 

But alas, movie, thy studio is Disney, and before long stupidity takes over. Enter an annoyingly cheerful snowman sidekick; notice the inordinate amount of time spent on extreme snow sports (sledding, tobogganing, ice sliding, etc.); marvel at the standard-issue happy ending, complete with lunkhead by the heroine's side (couldn't she opt to be single with her sister, or--better yet--shack up with a Danish hottie named Kristine instead?). 

After The Wolf of Wall Street I thought I knew something about disgust, and revulsion, and overwhelming nausea. Pfui--just had to sit through this and found myself wanting to see the Scorsese again, to wash away the thick taste of treacle coating my tongue.

Worse of all is the end credits, which reveal that the story was based on one of Hans Christian Andersen's greatest stories, The Snow Queen: about a brother, subverted into evil by a shard of glass in the heart, who runs away from home, and the loving sister who sets out to bring him back. It's a tale full of subtle psychological subtext (the brother might be undergoing the painful transitions and traumas of adolescence) and harrowing drama (the sister moves heaven and hell to find him), and really deserves a proper adaptation--by Studio Ghibli, perhaps? Certainly something far better than this mouse dropping of a movie.

Time to die

Not much I can say about director Jamie Payne and writer Steven Moffat's The Time of the Doctor except that Moffat tries to cram too much material into the hour and fifteen minutes allotted to him--though to be fair I'd say this is a far better problem to have than too little spread out over the same period of time. 

Oh, and while Moffat seems to have tied all loose ends into a more or less tight knot, the accomplishment hardly seems as significant as the special's real achievement: celebrating Matt Smith's tenure as The Eleventh Doctor before he hands the reins over to the upcoming Thirteenth, played by Peter Capaldi. 

Why, after ranging all of time and space, should Eleven waste the rest of his natural lifespan defending a piddling little town (named Christmas, of all things!) occupied by a mere few hundred lifeforms? More to the point, why waste so much of the episode's precious running time delineating Eleven's growing bond with the townsfolk, when we could instead watch the growing antagonism between Eleven and his countless foes?  

Because Eleven as Matt Smith has played and developed him through the years isn't really about foes, or fighting (or the First Question, or The Silence, or Gallifrey, or all the other piddling little subplots smaller minds have worried about all this time); Eleven as Matt Smith has played him is about the people--kids in particular--he's come to know, and who have come to know him. Smith loves the fans--the Whovians--and is loved in return, and that's what the episode's really all about.

So the premise is a bit silly--a town called Christmas, to be defended against the rising hordes--so what? It's a charming little town locked in an endless White Christmas, with a brief sunrise and sunset for variety; not a grand setting or even a logical setting for Eleven's final days, but a poetic one, a--yes--living Hallmark Holiday Card, with Daleks and The Silence and the odd wooden Cyberman hovering about the margins to add a bit of tension, a bit of cool.

And against this background Smith rallies the people; takes a moment to speak to young Barnable (Jack Hollington)--from his very first episode he's always had good rapport with children--and yes, dons rubbery age makeup that fools no one, only there's something comfortingly paternal about Smith despite his age (he's the youngest actor to ever play the Doctor), and the makeup brings this out. Do the scenes of Smith as an old man crimp his manic energy? Perhaps, but they complete him, or our image of him, filling out the portrait in our heads of his entire unnaturally long life, from moment of arrival to moment of departure (added bonus that when he's re-energized--wrinkled and feeble and bowed, suddenly bellowing at the top of his voice--it's a mighty moment). 

Eleven's final scenes are blessedly brief--no extended bathos a la Russell T. Davis' sendoff of David Tennant--but no less finely written. Actually Moffat's suffered a lot of (to my mind undeserved) grief over his plotting (complex, to put it kindly) and characterization (eccentric, says fans; shallow and annoyingly cute, says non-fans), but I say he's at least master of the brief vignette that drives a barbed hook to the heart, and here manages two such scenes: Clara's grandmother's anecdote ("I wanted everything to stop.") and Handle's passing (which channels both Castaway and, weirdly, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia). 

"I will not forget one line of this; not one day," Smith promises, and we believe him--at that moment man and character seems to have perfectly fused, in intent, in feeling, in our feelings for him. Moffat allows Eleven a glimpse of "the first face this face saw," a kind of circling back or return, not to mention discarding (the bow tie falling to the floor), and then--zap. New face, moved on. We're caught off-guard but that's Moffat for you: never quite doing the expected thing. Farewell, Mr. Smith; we will miss you.

1.2.14

Flight, Cloud Atlas, Wreck-it Ralph, LIncoln, Life of Pi

(A warning: twists and surprises may be discussed in detail)

High, flying, adored

Robert Zemeckis' Flight surprisingly manages to lift its wheels off the ground and soar as often as it does scrape the ground, furrowing the tarmac. 

Judging from the previews I was ready for the worst: a drugs-and-alcohol parable of the most inspirational sort, ending with AA meetings and hugs all around. But Zemeckis' directing has grown only more impressive with each succeeding film (though this progress is harder to see in his brightly-lit, somewhat zombified digital animation features), the same time his sentiments remain stubbornly square, conservative even (in Forrest Gump the hero's sweetheart has to be punished for her liberal, sexually promiscuous lifestyle with childhood molestation, abusive boyfriends, and ultimately AIDs).

What the trailers don't prepare you for is how funny the film is. With a series of elaborately staged long shots Zemeckis throws us into the frenetic world of 'Whip' Whitaker (Denzel Washington): fueled by drugs, smoothed out by alcohol, basically surviving on an uneasy balance between several illegal substances, plus a sleep-deprived, sex-induced high. He takes the wheel of a passenger jet, dozes fitfully while the plane flies on autopilot, is jerked into sobriety by the plane's shuddering, sudden dive.

The rest of the film is Whip trying to survive the resulting crash. Not physically--if anything he's responsible for the insane stunt that saves nearly all the passengers and crew--but legally, socially, and spiritually; in effect, trying to take authoritative control of his tailspinning life the way he took control of the plane. The suspense doesn't arise from the oncoming crash, or even its consequences (an investigation into the crash, plus a blood test showing alcohol levels several times above the legal limit), but from Whip's jawdroppingly persistent ability to deny anything's the matter, and just how far this attitude will take him through the surrounding mayhem. 

That's the movie, basically; for Whip the crash never really ended; he's still flying upside-down, desperately trying to keep his messed-up head in the air. And he's good; what convinced me that he was the perfect man for pulling off that rescue was the way he'd coolly, nervily pull off everything else--a series of near-misses, quick dodges, outright lies. Best effect of all is the impression that he's a practiced hand at this, that he's been doing this all his life and this was business as usual (when he visits his estranged wife and son you can tell from their set and hostile faces how familiar they are with Whip's usual business; they're practically the only characters unmoved by his fast-talking charm). If he ever gets into real trouble it's towards the end, when circumstances have straitened enough that he has less maneuvering room and he's turning into a more earnest wannabe reformer, reduced to staring at a liquor mini-bottle. That little scene might have been a bit too explicit, a bit too earnest if it wasn't for the elaborate, extended spiral that preceded it. 

I mentioned flaws; the music is horrifyingly obvious ("Sympathy for the Devil" with the entrance of a dealer, among other groan-inducers), plus at every step you sense the squareness of Zemeckis' sensibility (this is after all a redemption film). Balanced this against the largely excellent cast, standouts including James Badge Dale's gem of a cameo as a patient whose cancer seems to have only sharpened his sense of humor, and a terrific John Goodman as the aforementioned dealer ("Don't touch the fucking merch!").

As Whip Washington is terrific; he's that rarity in movies nowadays, the charismatic leading man with an effortless ability to keep an audience's sympathy through the worse circumstances. More, if he doesn't try go through such circumstances--if he tries for straightforward hero and not something more curmudgeonly, more outright hostile--he comes off as flat, even dull. He needs contrast to push against, give his performance definition. 

It's Washington's show but really Zemeckis' film. The filmmaker gets the tone right from the very start, when Whip wakes up in a boozy, post-coital haze and clears his head with a few lines of coke. Yes, we do keep track of Whip's quest to keep his head pickled, we do spot the bottle raised surreptitiously to the level of his lips, but it's how he raises it that sells the shot--at the carefully calculated moment when no one (except the camera) is looking, managed with such casual elan that if you (or the camera) didn't know better you'd never notice. You might call Zemeckis Whip's enabler, giving us the calibrated angles and views Whip is constantly considering, the choices Whip is continually presented; the camera catches Whip's brows furrowing--he's making the necessary calculations--and he executes accordingly, flawlessly, sliding it all past the goalie with no one the wiser. 

A terrific collaboration really, and I can't say who deserves more of the credit; if Washington embodies Whip, Zemeckis with his sneakily simple angles, dollying shots and frenetic pace (frenetic not in the fashionable sense, with shaky-cam and ADHD editing, but the more classical (and more difficult) sense, through accelerating narrative momentum, accumulation of incident and detail), Zemeckis with his mastery of the film medium realizes a vivid world around Whip that slides past him faster and faster, till what looks like reality experienced at a run has turned into a slide down a slope has turned into a plummet down a precipice. Whip isn't sure just at what point it'll slip out of his control, or if he's in control at all, but he's all too aware that that point is close, and refuses to even acknowledge it--think of a man riding a rollercoaster backwards, a mix of fear and pleasure on his face.

A word of the difference between Zemeckis and his oft collaborator and kindred filmmaker, Steven Spielberg: both come up with inventive mis-en-scene, both follow modern man's largely adolescent sensibility as it founders and flails in an increasingly hostile modern world. Spielberg has only recently attempted to fight this aura of wholesomeness--problem is, the very seriousness with which he struggles works against him; Zemeckis seems to have arrived at his gravitas after a long and often hilarious odyssey (from Used Cars, the Back to the Future movies, and Death Becomes Her to Forrest Gump, Contact and A Christmas Carol). With Flight Zemeckis seems to have struck a balance between his cynical and sentimental self, and it has at least with this picture improved his work--simply put, I'd take this movie over anything Spielberg's done recently.

Six arcs in search for an auteur

Siblings Andy and Lana Wachowski and Tom Tykwer are brave souls to try tackle Cloud Atlas, and like Zemeckis' latest, theirs flails as much as flies. Perhaps the worse bits are when the messages of fellow humanity and social tolerance become galumphingly obvious, almost half the picture; best are when the movie relaxes and just tells the stories, which are often as hilarious as they are harrowing.

Six stories, two in the past, two in the more or less present (one takes place in the '70s) and two in the future, the quality varying widely. "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing"--about the friendship between a Moriori slave and a lawyer--didn't really do much for me, basically an odd-couple, slave-wins-freedom drama with an unsubtle bit of poisoning thrown in. "Letters From Zedelghem" fares better, mostly from the fascinating dynamics between Ben Wishaw as the apprentice composer and Jim Broadbent as his famous employer (the employer thinks the innovative melodies he's hearing are coming from his own head when they're really from the apprentice--who is both inspired by and attracted to him). "Half Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery" takes a page from the true-life mystery of Karen Silkwood but fails to transmute the basic premise into anything more interesting (the segment does benefit from all the cracker-jack action sequences (directed by Tykwer) punctuating the narrative). "The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish"--to my mind the funniest and best of the six stories--is about a publisher turned fugitive turned (thanks to his resentful brother) prisoner in a retirement home (is it a coincidence that this also prominently features Jim Broadbent? Didn't think so). 

"An Orison of Sonmi 451" on the other hand is possibly the worst, a pious account of a dystopian future where servile clone Sonmi 451 (Donna Bae, usually terrific but not here) turns revolutionary. Again the direction (by the Wachowskis this time) saves the segment with vivid and coherent action sequences set in a future Seoul that outdo anything George Lucas attempted in his Star Wars prequels  (the Wachowskis finally redeeming themselves for their clunky direction of the Matrix movies). Sonmi 451 is presented as a mostly passive witness; when she's finally called upon to do something heroic, she solemnly quotes Solzhenitsyn while the world goes to hell below her (fortunately the image of all those people dying at her feet lend some gravitas to her otherwise uninspired oration).

"Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After" is the latest of the stories, taking place  a hundred and seventy-seven years after the Sonmi story, and features a kind of postapocalyptic lingo made up of (far as I can tell) distorted Southern and street slang a la Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker. The made-up language is fairly easy to follow (when in doubt just remember Tom Hanks is escorting Halle Berry on a secret mission). I'm on the middle on this segment--not especially bad but not particularly memorable, other than the Road Warrior costumes and makeup (somehow more suited to the Australian Outback than some vaguely Arcadian wilderness) and the fairly well-directed action sequences (again, the Wachowskis). Onscreen and summarized in a magazine article (or in this case a blog post), the storylines seem trite and overfamiliar.

The use of recognizable celebrities in elaborate makeup playing multiple roles is even more problematic--I suppose this echoing of faces is meant to imply an echoing of themes and values over different ages, over different cultures, and (as the occasional cross-dressing actor implies) even over differing sexual orientation. But you can make the connections without badly done makeup; you also avoid unintended comparisons to (among others)  Monty Python ("Oh look, Hugo Weaving in drag! Again!"). A noble experiment, not a successful one.

And yet--and yet--there's something to the film. The novel is shaped according to a brilliant conceit: each story is told in chronological order and ends--pauses, breaks off--in a cliffhanger, all except the last one which finishes; then the second-to-the last story continues and concludes, the third-to-the last continues and concludes, and so on till the novel ends with the earliest story, set in the 19th century--a sort of Russian matryoshka doll structure of narrative nested in a narrative nested in a

Don't know if Tykwer and the Wachowskis could have pulled this off onscreen (kind of wish they did), but they do resort to one of the oldest of storytelling devices, dating all the way back to D.W. Griffith's Intolerance: different stories from different time periods told in parallel, one cutting to the next in a vague matching scheme. Doesn't help the first half-hour much--we meet one new character after another, six stories' worth, and jump across stories without pause or introduction. Matters improve on the second half-hour, with the conflict established for each, the entire section being possibly the movie's most structurally conventional.

By the next half hour you begin to notice a reinforcing repetitiveness to the way the Wachowskis and Tykwer cut from one story to another. A door is blasted; Sonmi intones "Heaven is just another door opening;" another door swings wide to admitting Adam Ewing; and so on. The echoing gives these initially pedestrian themes emotional amplitude, starts to intensify one's viewing experience. By film's end--well, you may not have seen the best mainstream movie of the year (I'd say that's Zemeckis' Flight) nor the most lyrical and innovative (arguably Beasts of the Southern Wild), but you just might have seen the bravest, which is no small thing. 

Reel it in, Reilly

I suppose part of the appeal of Rich Moore's Wreck It Ralph stems from a nostalgia for video arcade games, and if one doesn't like arcades or video games one is basically screwed. All is not lost; John C. Reilly and Sarah Silverman make the most of their fairly substantial characters to form a fairly believable relationship, and Moore directs with some satiric bite, the way he presumably did some of the better TV animation out there (The Critic, classic episodes of The Simpsons). But the the real world is every bit as digitally animated as the virtual world inside (hence the lack of contrast), the movie overall follows the Disney/Pixar template of 'following one's dream' (in this case a game character's ambitions of winning a car race), and the finale is your standard issue saccharine sweet. If it comes to animated, make mine Ghibli, please.

Monumental movie
 
Spielberg's Lincoln is a preach-it-to-the-choir feel-good film about the United States' sixteenth president but--all that said--a surprisingly easy one to take, thanks mainly to Tony Kurshner's focus-on-the-details script and Spielberg's willingness to dial down on his trademark 'poetry' (not entirely, alas; the opening scene--where Lincoln has almost his entire Gettysburg Address quoted back at him--is wince-inducing, and the final sequence--where Spielberg equates Lincoln to an illuminating flame--can cause the tearing of hair and gnashing of teeth, and not in a good way).

Daniel Day-Lewis' decision to use the wavering, high-pitch voice contemporary historians deem as more authentic pays off: it dynamites our view of Lincoln off its encrusted pedestal. We can hear as well as see with what miserable equipment the man had to work with (except one: he was far uglier than the noble-jawed actor who plays him), and how he had to resort to indirection and tricks to bring his point across (the shortened speeches; the self-deprecating humor; the running gag that he liked to tell stories that appear to amble away from topic, and you see the people shifting impatiently in their seats, and hear the thin drone they're trying to catch). 

It helps, I suppose, if one enjoys a liberal point of view; the story (focusing on the passing of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery) recalls the passing of Obamacare, and the sausage-making on view is an unflinching reminder of how sordid was the process needed to pass a law so significant (whether the recollection is pleasant or horrific probably depends on one's political leanings). For a more unsparing and complex view of the legislative process one might have to go back to Otto Preminger's 1962 Advise and Consent (can you imagine how magnificent Laughton could have been in this picture?)--I can think of no higher praise. 

Almost everyone is good here, from Tommy Lee Jones as the terrifying Thaddeus Stevens (his fire-and-brimstone rhetoric contrasting with his exhausted, melancholic eyebags) to Jackie Earle Haley as Alexander Stephens (Stephens was oft sickly, and Haley looks appropriately consumptive). Perhaps the most serious flaw to the film (aside from the opening and closing) is the John Williams score, which was predictably full of horns and fanfare--one wishes Spielberg had instead resorted to period accurate songs, or perhaps just plain silence (he did black-and-white for Schindler's List; can't he teach his ear to be as sophisticated as his eye?).


The film's real ending has a servant full of foreboding watch Lincoln descend a stairway on his way to the theater--can't swear to this, but I'm willing to bet Spielberg appropriated the shot from Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru. A beautifully lit image, held for the right amount of time--perhaps my only problem with it is that Lincoln had to stop at a landing and do a right turn (Kurosawa of course never took half measures; he had Takashi Shimura go down a sufficiently long flight). It's fine, honest work, far better than Spielberg's visually and emotionally syrupy War Horse; it does its subject matter justice.

Fairy Tale

Ang Li's Life of Pi, an adaptation of the novel by Yann Martel is well made--never thought Lee was anything less than a skilled craftsman, able and always to bring good taste and moderation to any project he undertakes; perhaps my biggest problem with the film (and with Lee) is that he's a skilled craftsman, always bringing good taste and moderation to any project he undertakes. 

One sees the upper limits of that good taste here--the gorgeous cinematography, the striking images of boat, tiger and boy floating, either on a mirror image of the sky or seemingly on air, suspended as if by magic. The details of his survival are engagingly inventive and thorough--how to feed the tiger, how to catch fish, how to survive in a boat with a wild animal and not be eaten. Some details stretch credulity--a hyena, a rat, an orangutang, a tiger and a boy sounds like the setup for a dirty joke, and one wonders how Pi manages to create his floating mini-palace with a giant carnivore sitting on most of his supplies, and sharks circling the water.

Turns out the questions are all academic, which brings us to the truly crucial question: was this the right attitude to take towards Pi's two stories? Perhaps it's personal taste, but subscribing to the first and more fanciful one smacks too much of self-delusion in the face of life's horrors. It's like meeting a child who believes in Santa Claus--do you implicate yourself by maintaining the fiction, hope his inevitable crash in the sometime future isn't too harsh, or do you give him the facts straight? 

11.23.12