REVIEWS IN BRIEF: AUGUST, 2015

I mentioned some while back that going forward, there were going to be a lot of shorter reviews popping up, and going forward, I hope to make these posts happen weekly - biweekly for sure. But it's been a bad month for watching things, so this first capsule review round-up is going to stand instead as the collection of all the things I watched in the month of August that I thought I wanted to talk about in some capacity. Bonus: this means, now and in the future, that I'm going to review classic movies that happen to cross my transom that would otherwise never make it to the blog.

* * * * *

A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Contemplating Existence (Andersson, 2014)

Just like that other Anderson from the United States, there's not point in denying that Roy Andersson tends to make films that resemble each other, and A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, his Leone d'Oro winner from the 2014 Venice Film Festival, does pretty much exactly the same things as 2000's Songs from the Second Floor and 2006's You, the Living, and it it does them in pretty much exactly the same way. Long takes of barely-moving scenes, sudden eruptions of po-faced absurdism, and the whole thing would be suicidally depressing if it the comic timing weren't flawless. Third verse, same as the first.

Or is it? Whether I'm just starting to feel diminishing returns, or whether Andersson is slowly running out of inspiration, the one clear difference between Pigeon and its two forerunners in his trilogy of modern life is that it's not as good as they are. Which is a very different thing than saying it's not good, period, and I laughed heartily, many times, throughout the film, and was then cut off cold, many times, by the mordant shifts in perspective and tone. It's virtually impossible to imagine anyone who responded to the other films not liking this one at all, or even liking this one a whole lot. But comparatively, it lacks the passionate fire they possessed in such quantity; there are many handfuls individual shots and gags I could recite in loving detail from the first two movies, but the scene from Pigeon that lives strongest in my memory does not do so because I admire it the most (though a repeating motif involving 18th Century King Karl XII of Sweden, played by Viktor Gyllenberg, imposing upon the confused patrons of a rundown portside bar in the 2010s does give me enormous pleasure as I roll it around in my head).

Still, if we free it from the tyranny of having to live up to the standards of two of the most brilliant, idiosyncratic comedies of the 2000s, Pigeon is a fine piece of work on its own merits. The crawling pace of the static long shots - which are frequently exteriors or otherwise not beholden to the "this is a shadowbox in a room" staging of the earlier films, and that gives things a nice sense of sprawl - is absolutely perfect in establishing the film's erratic humor, and telling us how to appreciate it: first you're confused, then you're repulsed, and eventually the stiff stillness becomes hilarious. Or it doesn't. This is, beyond doubt, the kind of material that appeals to a very particular audience, and I think Songs from the Second Floor is absolutely more immediately winning, but there's no doubt that this is a thoroughly enjoyable experience for folks as what like morbid humor based in the pasty-faced frigidity of both people and their actions.

8/10

* * * * *

A Star Is Born (Pierson, 1976)

Two terrific versions of the highly melodramatic story A Star Is Born - three if you count the original 1932 What Price Hollywood? (as you absolutely should), the same material in all but name - was perhaps already pushing it, but least the 1976 incarnation of the story tries to freshen the material by changing the setting from the movie industry to pop music. That doesn't entirely work out in practice, owing to the differences in image management between classical Hollywood and the '70s music industry, and it's only the least of the problems that brings the movie down to its knees.

One can have heard rumors and mutterings for years, as I had, that the '76 Star Is Born is nothing but a colossal ego trip for star-producer Barbra Streisand (who won the film's only Oscar, for the gooey love ballad "Evergreen", co-written by Paul Williams), but it's impossible to be prepared for how all-encompassingly dreadful a movie it is. It's not simply that the screenplay, assembled by too many cooks who clearly didn't work in the same kitchen, sacrifices its dramatic integrity in favor of giving Streisand one moment after another to show off. Though it's not possible to have enough favorable feelings for the star nor her vehicle to excuse the grotesqueness of extending the sodden 139-minute film's ending by a good quarter of an hour beyond its natural stopping point just to facilitate a showstopping solo number at the end.

But really, everything about the movie, save perhaps for its nifty grit-soaked concert-doc cinematography (by Robert Surtees, Oscar-nominated), is just embarrassing hackwork. Kris Kristofferson, cast as the third wheel in the love story between Streisand and herself, ambles in like a guy who figures that you'll buy him a beer if he has a relaxing enough smile, while the rest of the cast shuffle around in the background; the luckier ones get to furrow their brows and look sad at the thought of Kristofferson's drinking. Occasionally, a pair of African-American backup singers materialise to give the film a jolt of incongruous lazy racism. As a work of craft, the film begins and ends with Surtees; the '70s fashions are charmingly dated, but still more campy than anything, and the less said about the raw editing in some of the singing scenes, the better.

No, the film lives and dies on Streisand's talent, which is of course considerable, but sabotaging the drama to get us there is hardly worthy of anybody's time or energy, hers least of all. I would at this point name some of the films to better show off her iconic vocal powers, her loopy screen presence and comic timing, or her gift for turning woundedness into lashing anger, but it would take too long: all of Streisand's films are better showcases than this, even the most overt vanity projects. And yes, I have seen The Mirror Has Two Faces.

3/10

* * * * *

Fantastic Voyage (Fleischer, 1966)

One of the last big sci-fi pictures before 2001: A Space Odyssey came along and fundamentally changed the possibilities of the genre, 1966's Fantastic Voyage is the platonic ideal of a movie that gets praised, sincerely, for its visual effects, by someone whose tone of voice and inability to maintain eye contact make it clear that they hope you don't ask about anything else. Because it feels bad to attack the movie: the visual effects are really good, even if they were supplanted and then lapped within a few years of its release. And how much nicer to have those kind of top-drawer visual effects in a movie about interesting concepts and adult characters, and not one that involves giant robots walloping the shit out of each other.

Still, you can't get too far into the film before you have to admit that for all its achievements, and the very real charm of mid-'60s sci-fi (notwithstanding the vast budget gap, the film more than slightly resembles TV's Star Trek, from the same year), Fantastic Voyage is a fucking slog. It shouldn't be: the hook is terrific. Both the U.S. and the USSR have developed miniaturisation technology, but only the Americans have a scientist who knows how to make the process last for more than an hour. And he's been almost fatally shot, and sent into a coma that can only be cured by shrinking down brain surgeon Dr. Duval (Arthur Kennedy), his assistant Cora Peterson (Raquel Welch), Dr. Michaels (Donald Pleasance), and sub captain Bill Owens (William Redfield), and injecting them and their microscopic submarine right into the scientist's body, with government agent Grant (Stephen Boyd), along for manly protagonist duties, trying to catch Duval in the act of being a Commie spy.

That certainly ought to be a fantastic voyage, and if you've encountered the story in Isaac Asimov's novelisation, you even know that it kind of can be (Asimov demanded permission to re-work the story to make it less idiotic). But Henry Kleiner's screenplay and Richard Fleischer's direction show off all the seams and plot holes while pushing the plot along as slowly as a nominal adventure movie could possibly support. The sub voyage takes place in something longer than real time, during which the plot plonks along through a repetitive cycle of theoretically tense moments flattened by lifeless direction. Every actor who isn't Pleasance stands around being vastly too serious, and sometimes we are given blessed relief in the form of the production designers' florid, psychedelia-tinged vision of the inside of the human body.

It looks great - there will be those who carp about how dated it is (and, sure, it is), but really is quite a special visual experience. Tragically, behind those visuals, it's bloated B-movie nonsense built around false characters, expanded and perpetrated by people who didn't know how to capture the proper spunk and speed of a good piece of junk sci-fi.

5/10

* * * * *

The End of the Tour (Ponsoldt, 2015)

Far be it from me to tell the nearest and dearest friends and survivors of David Foster Wallace, a great many of whom have said some pretty withering things about the beatifying biopic-in-miniature The End of the Tour, that they're wrong. There's something squishy and off-putting about the film just in relationship to itself, and the way it treats its version of Wallace (Jason Segel) as a soul too gentle for this cynical, cold world - literally, the film is set in the Midwestern winter - while constantly foreshadowing his suicide 12 years later. There's a distinct, appalling thread of "come laugh at the homey wisdom of Your Literary Idol®, and then cry to remember that he's dead" that runs through the whole thing.

And yet I find myself not only not-hating the film, but even admiring bits and pieces of it, though probably not the bits that the filmmakers wanted. Frankly, I found Segel's Wallace to be all mimicry (good mimicry) with limited willingness to let us inside - and this is, to be fair, much more a function of Donald Margulies's script, which presents the author as an enigma and a concept in the first hour, than it's a sign of Segel's limits as an actor - with not nearly enough thought behind his eyes. The movie depicts Wallace, but it's terrified as hell at grappling with him.

Instead, the real protagonist and by far the deeper, more thoughtfully played character, is minor novelist David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg), assigned by Rolling Stone to interview Wallace near the end of the promotional tour for the author's 1996 novel Infinite Jest. Eisenberg performance isn't as "revelatory" as Segel's, I guess - the doubt-ridden, antagonistic urban Jewish figure he plays here is securely in his wheelhouse - but it's far more expansive and tricky, full of threads that aren't quite in the script, allowing his version of Lipsky (whose story was never finished and ultimately turned into the 2010 book, Although of Course You End Up Meeting Yourself, that this film is adapted from) to be sufficiently resentful under the starry-eyed nervousness and awe that the film's lurch towards an interpersonal conflict as it goes along feels like a natural outgrowth rather than an imposition. It ends being, Amadeus-style, better as the story of an average man admiring and fearing a genius, than as the story of that genius itself, and it's easily Eisenberg's best work since The Social Network.

Stylistically, it's wholly undistinguished American indie filmmaking of a sort that has been unchanged in all particulars since sometime in the 1990s; director James Ponsoldt is clearly more interested in presenting his characters than in doing anything to frame them cinematically. A literary approach certainly fits the material, but the lack of aesthetic challenge is exactly the problem: all the film wants to do is gawk at Wallace/Segel, not engage with him, and the result is often more trivial than penetrating.

6/10

Read More

THE FROZEN NORTH

A review requested by Scott, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

We live in an age when anime - an imprecise term that I try not to use very often, since it doesn't inherently mean anything besides "animation made in Japan", which strikes me as condescending at least, but let's not get bogged down in that kind of aside just yet - I say again, an age in which anime is pretty well understood to be somehow more serious, artistic, and worthy of consideration than other forms of animation. This was not always the case. At its origin, Japanese animation was stuck in the same ghetto as its American and Soviet counterparts: fantasies of one sort of another, generally made for children and generally at a level of quality that wasn't much better than "good enough for children".

No one film or one studio was responsible for changing that state of affairs in Japan any more than in the Soviet Union (where the shift happened somewhat earlier), but you could do a lot worst in trying to pick the one movie that birthed the modern, artistic animated film for a more discerning audience in that country than a 1968 release that has gone by at least a couple of different English-language titles over the years: I gather that the original Japanese is closest to The Great Adventure of Horus, Prince of the Sun, but it's much likelier you'll encounter it these days in the anglosphere as Hols, Prince of the Sun, and when it was first shown in the United States, it was thanks to AIP's television division, which provided a rather undemanding dub under the name The Little Norse Prince (and it is this title, and this dub, that you'll encounter if you look for it on any of the major streaming sites - and while I'd want that to be nobody's only exposure to the film, it's absolutely worth it.). Regardless of what the hell we are to call it, it's the movie that is to Japanese animation as that church picnic in Liverpool where John Lennon and Paul McCartney met was to rock and roll: the movie's director was first-timer Takahata Isao, and one of the key animators was Miyazaki Hayao. This was their first collaboration together, and it kicked off an artistic partnership that led to some of the greatest achievements in Japanese animation in the 1970s before resulting in the foundation of Studio Ghibli in the mid-'80s.

It's so easy to over-read that magnificent future into Horus, Prince of the Sun, which isn't just their show - in fact, not even primarily their show, really, since the director of animation, and therefore the man most singularly responsible for the film's visuals, was Otsuka Yasuo (though Miyazaki, along with a few other lead animators, helped Otsuka with the character designs). But this isn't merely an important footnote in Ghibli history: Horus is a splendid film in its own right, one of the most accomplished animated features up to that point in history, from anywhere in the world. It's visually rich like virtually nothing else Japan had produced yet: a clear attempt to meet the standard-bearers at the Disney studios on their own battleground and even surpass them (for it started production in 1965, by which point Disney's aesthetic decline from the lavishness of its 1950s Silver Age had already clearly manifested itself), with a great deal of time and care spent in getting everything perfectly right.

The results speak for themselves. In terms of technique, the film is best-known probably for a tremendous battle between the title character and a giant, murderous pike, which is simply one of the great animated movie monsters ever accomplished, lightning fast, and thick with muscle that twists and jerks with extraordinary fury. It is as great a setpiece as a fantastic adventure could possibly hope for. And every bit as impressive is the character animation - even more impressive, perhaps, because the pike battle demands that you notice it. Whereas the characters, for the most part, are the round little cartoon blobs of any random sample of children's animation in the 1950s or 1960s, but the animators poured so much time and intention into the details of how those soft, ovoid faces would move that the characters are as sophisticated in their range of expression as the more detailed, vividly realistic characters of Disney at its height. It's an extraordinary achievement, maybe even an unprecedented one in its native industry: the soulfulness of the main characters all the way down to the striking reactions of non-characters in comic cutaways are perfectly drafted and animated at a level of fluidity rare in Japanese animation of any generation.

Every bit as impressive, and every bit as foretelling of Ghibli's great achievements to come, is the storytelling. Taken as its basic ingredients, Horus looks like pure fairy tale boilerplate, and in fact the story is ultimately descended from a piece of Ainu folklore. Horus (Okata Hisako) lives out in the wild with his aging father (Yokomori Hisashi), where he one day encounters a rock giant (Yokouchi Tadashi) while escaping from a pack of particularly monstrous wolves. From the giant's shoulder, he plucks an ancient magical sword, thus proving his great fate: he, with his talking bear cub friend Koro (Asai Yukari), shall return to the land of his father's birth to fight a wicked ice demon named Grunwald (Hira Mikijiro). In so doing, he becomes the hero of a small fishing village, and meets a haunted young woman with an ethereal singing voice, Hilda (Ichihara). She is, as it transpires, Grunwald's sister, and initially just a pawn in his attempt to control Horus and destroy the village. But she longs to do good just as much as Horus, only it comes harder to her.

There's nothing about this that's not a kid's movie. But oh, how much more sophisticated and nuanced it is than "kid's movie" implies. The title and first act notwithstanding, this is not just a flouncy adventure about a Chosen One boy with a magic sword. What it turns out to be, first, is a story of how that boy finds himself part of a community, which is depicted mostly by centering on a few key characters, but emphasising the needs of the village as a whole, with the villains those who prefer advancement and power over the greater communal good. Second, it's the story of Hilda, a far more dynamic character than Horus ever comes close to being. Her moral struggle, which dominates the second half of the movie, makes her the first in a grand tradition of young female characters that the future Ghibli artists would take to such great heights in films like My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, and The Tale of the Princess Kaguya. I have not, of course, seen every animated feature made prior to 1968, so I can only go so far as to say that Hilda is the most psychologically complex animated protagonist up to that point that I know of, not that exists, period. But I wouldn't be the slightest bit surprised to learn that such was exactly the case.

In Hilda, Takahata and the story development team (which mostly consisted of Otsuka and the key animators) created a truly groundbreaking animated figure: delicated and conflicted in her visual expressions, deeply intriguing and challenging in her relationship to her sense of morality. It is she, more than anything else, that makes Horus, Prince of the Sun a truly great landmark in grown-up animation, and even as the film feels rather juvenile compared to just about anything that we'd stack it up against nearly a half-century later, Hilda is still as strong as animated protagonists get. Naturally, for this complexity and depth, the film underperformed at the box office; but it was immediately recognised for its greatness and ambition by those who needed to recognise it, and it has managed to acquire the legacy it deserved even if it took some doing to get it there.

Read More

MICROCOSMOS

A Bug's Life is the most readily-overlooked of Pixar films, and I'd be lying if I pretended that I couldn't figure out why. After a decade and a half of riches, the 1998 film (the studio's second feature) can't help but seem unduly modest in every aspect of its writing. The story is perfectly ordinary - it's yet another riff on the basic Seven Samurai model - the jokes are largely ordinary and a bit shticky, the characters go through the most expected possible journeys. But it is a greatly important film: it's where Pixar proved that it had something to it besides novelty, and that the enormous success of Toy Story in 1995 augured for a real lifespan for this whole fully-rendered computer animation thing. Indeed, A Bug's Life was only the third CGI animated feature made in America, and would have been second if Jeffery Katzenberg wasn't hellbent on beating it to theaters with the transparent knock-off Antz, the first of many "fuck you" Valentines he'd deliver to the Walt Disney Company with his new DreamWorks Animation.

It's not true, of course, that A Bug's Life was the gatekeeper that needed to succeed for any and all further Pixar films to exist; Toy Story 2 was already in production, after all. But A Bug's Life did prove that Pixar's creative trust had the chops to be more than just a Toy Story factory, and demonstrated the studio's commitment to constantly challenging itself. Technologically and stylistically, the transition from Toy Story to A Bug's Life is probably the single biggest leap in aesthetic quality made by any individual Pixar film: while the 1995 picture shows its age in every implausibly smooth wood surface and rigid piece of cloth (to say nothing of its hideous human characters), A Bug's Life still looks pretty great out of a few aberrations here and there, most notably the surface texture of some of its insect characters, and generally feels like the baseline from which all of Pixar's subsequent triumphs have developed, much more so than Toy Story does.

That said, the studio's films are at least as beloved for the high quality of their storytelling as for the beauty and complexity of their images, and this is where A Bug's Life simply can't hold pace with most of its successors, though this speaks more highly of Pixar's run of masterpieces from 2001-2010 than it diminishes A Bug's Life in any particular way. Born out of the legendary lunch meeting with Pixar's top heads pitching the ideas that would make up most of their output through 2008's WALL·E, A Bug's Life's story, credited to John Lasseter (who directs), Andrew Stanton (who co-directs), and Joe Ranft, centers on an ant colony on a small island in a dry riverbed, where we meet the standard-issue ambitious outcast with ideas too big for his hidebound community, Flik (Dave Foley), whose attempts to make life better for all have been hell on Princess Atta (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), currently in the last stages of taking control of the colony over from her aged mother (Phyllis Diller). When Flik's latest invention manages to destroy the entire food offering the ants have left for the tyrannical grasshopper leader Hopper (Kevin Spacey), Atta and the other ant leaders are more than happy to ship Flik off on a mission to find warrior bugs to defend the colony, hoping to keep him out ofthe way while they work double-time to accede to the grasshoppers' demands.

In the big city - a collection of boxes outside of a trailer - Flik finds no warriors, though he thinks he has: instead, the band of lost souls he stumbles across are the refugees from a crappy circus run by hapless P.T. Flea (John Ratzenberger, Pixar's good luck charm). These include angry male ladybug Francis (Denis Leary), sad sack walking stick Slim (David Hyde Pierce), upbeat black widow spider Rosie (Bonnie Hunt), hammy magician Manny the praying mantis (Jonathan Harris) and his assistant/wife Gypsy the moth (Madeline Kahn), hungry caterpillar Heimlich (Ranft), sweet rhinoceros beetle Dim (Brad Garrett), and incomprehensible pill bug twins Tuck and Roll (both voiced by Michael McShane). Under Flik's leadership, they concoct a plan to fight the grasshoppers, and all the beats you would expect turn up: Atta and the rest learn of the deception, Flik becomes a greater outcast than ever, Hopper doubles down on his demands, and eventually Flik is able to redeem himself by saving the day.

In the most abstract strokes, this is just about the commonest set of personal stakes a children's movie can adopt for itself. And make no mistake, A Bug's Life is a children's movie. Years of Pixar movies blurring the line between movies mostly for kids and families, versus movies that are kind of for adults but kids can enjoy them (and in the case of The Incredibles and Ratatouille, traipsing right over that line) have made it hard to remember that initially, they made no real claims to that kind of sophistication. And while I regret the implications of the word "unsophisticated" is exactly the adjective to describe A Bug's Life, from its paint-by-numbers character motivations to its easy and surprisingly lowbrow humor: there are more potty jokes here than in any other Pixar movie, though given how many of them contain no potty jokes at all, that's not a huge bar to clear.

All of that being the case, the film has the basic decency to be an extraordinarily good version of an undistinguished children's movie. The finished script, by Stanton and Don McEnery & Bob Shaw, is characterised by crisp dialogue and strong jokes, and the layers of callbacks and internal echoes give it a nice overall shape that strengthens Flik and Atta's arcs; the random asides that play on the reality that we're watching insects living like humans are generally cute rather than actively smart, but I cannot lie: I chuckled at things like a fly grousing "I've only got 24 hours to live and I'm not wasting them here" in '98 and I continue to do it in 2015. And the light humor is aided enormously by the cast, made up disproportionately of sitcom veterans (Richard Kind and Edie McClurg also show up), who thus have exactly the right skill set to make lines and scenarios that you can see coming from quite a distance still play with honesty and energy and feel like they're coming from the characters, not from the writing room.

And again, film looks pretty great, too. The filmmakers' fascination with a scaled-down world, what that means to lighting and texture, is the first great experiment in finding the realism in fantastic setting that makes Pixar's films the most physically authentic animated features in the world. Just the way that clover and blades of grass filter light is enough to make the film look truly marvelous and rich, and that's not even the most conspicuously beautiful lighting effect that the film has to offer. It's a bit baffling that this carefully researched and highly thoughtful attempt at making a realistic miniature world would be in service to such a weird misrepresentation of ant society. Even Antz, which is literally a movie about what would happen if Woody Allen was an ant, comes at least slightly closer to correctly representing how ants function, which for starters involves having six limbs and not coming in shades of blue and lavender. Not till Bee Movie nine years later would a film get insect society so palpably wrong as a basic condition of having a narrative.

But it is, in fairness, a cartoon riffing on the old "Grasshopper and the Ants" fable in a thoroughly unexpected way, so realism is probably the wrong complaint. And by creating a race of fantasy creatures that it calls ants for no reason, A Bug's Life (last nitpick: ants aren't bugs) succeeds in portraying simple situations with warm characters whose relationships, though they mostly come right off the shelf (the simple commoner charms the princess with his bravery? YOU DON'T SAY.), are treated with utter sincerity and a glancing touch. There's no question that this is near the bottom of Pixar's output, but it didn't know that it would be competing with those other films, and on its own terms, it's an entirely beguiling little adventure that advancing technology and a vastly different marketplace haven't robbed of its merits.

Read More

FLOCKING WONDERFUL

I will likely never get over the grisly syntax of its title, but in all other ways, Shaun the Sheep Movie is a miraculous film. It is gripped by a gentleness in both tone and worldview that has been almost totally invisible in children's cinema in the English speaking world for years upon years - and this is, very much, a children's movie. There's no merit in claiming for it the merit of sophistication it does not possess; no complex metaphors for the structure and process of human consciousness here, nor filthy double entendres placed atop a rickety scaffold of self-aware pop culture references. It has the simplest (though this does not make them less rich or important or humane) of themes - do right by your friends, and clean up after your mistakes - and wordplay that anyone old enough to read words in English can understand.

It is also, by all means, enormously satisfying and pleasurable: the gentleness may be there to make a safe 85 minutes for little ones, but it makes a gratifying respite from the hectic large-scale nature of most animated features. Even when Shaun the Sheep Movie turns hectic - as it does during the de rigueur third act chase scene that represents the film's one indefensible commitment to the limited narrative imagination of mainstream animation - it remains breathtakingly little in its scope and in its miniaturised craftsmanship. We should expect no less of England's great Aardman Animations, a studio whose hand-crafted stop-motion animation has resulted in some of the most lovely, warm, and delectably tangible cartoons of modern cinema, and here returns to its roots: not since 2000's Chicken Run has one of Aardman's features so proudly foregrounded its clay-based construction and the dollhouse-like fineness of its sets, nor worn the smudgy fingerprints to appear in its character's bodies as such badges of honor.

Expanding from the Aardman TV series Shaun the Sheep, of which I have little firsthand knowledge, the movie starts at a sheep farm somewhere in the north of England, where the cleverest of all the sheep is a small fellow named Shaun (there's not a single line of recognisable speech in the movie, but Shaun's vocalisations are provided by Justin Fletcher). As we see in a sweet opening montage staged as old 8mm footage, Shaun and his flock were the pride and joy of a farmer (John Sparkes) when they were all much younger, but age and routine have gotten the best of everybody: the sheep, the farmer, the long-suffering sheepdog Bitzer (Sparkes also). And thus it is that Shaun decides, with the help of a serendipitous bus ad, that it's time for a day off. He and his fellows stage an elaborate trap to distract Bitzer and put the farmer to sleep with the ol' "counting sheep" trick, and prepare to goof off in a harmless way, but in so doing they manage to send a trailer with the farmer inside careening down a hill, all the way to The Big City down the road. Lost and alone and hungry, the sheep and Bitzer have no option other than to head to the city to find the farmer, in the process running afoul of the zealous animal control officer Trumper (Omid Djalili), who makes capturing Shaun his primary goal for the duration of however long it is that the animals hunt through downtown. The farmer, meanwhile, has received a nasty bump on the head and lost his memory, upon which his muscle memory of shearing sheep leads him down the path of becoming a great new celebrity barber.

That last point undoubtedly sounds like a bridge further past the bridge too far, but one of the joys of Shaun the Sheep Movie lies in its redemption of ideas that seem, on their face, to be just as awful as they could possibly be. For example, the film is eagerly full of crude jokes about bodily emissions of all sorts, the worst bane of contemporary family filmmaking if there can be only one, but these jokes are centered so carefully on the characters and the world they inhabit that they end up feeling... not clever, but certainly funnier than "he just farted!" humor has any rational right to be. Or a hoary, ancient gag about how it looks like someone is peeing in a fountain but it's actually something innocuous. This doesn't always happen: the soundtrack is ready and willing to launch into a pop music interlude at the drop of a hat, and while the original song "Feels Like Summer" is used well as an emotional tether throughout, most of the song breaks are jarring and only serve to break the delicate tone that the wordless animation works so hard to craft.

When that tone works, however, the film is an irresistible gem of sweetness and concision. The clay puppets that make up the cast are astoundingly expressive - with eight sheep to keep track of, the film not only gives them all sufficiently different designs all on the same basic model that we can readily tell them apart without ever wondering why none of them look like sheep. Better yet, they're all given specific personalities, all depicted solely through pantomime and facial expressions of deeply appealing flexibility and subtlety. I assume this is all held over from the series, and that it's long practice and familiarity with the characters that makes it work so terrifically - nor should we forget that this is the studio behind the timeless Gromit, maybe the most expressive and relatable of all nonspeaking characters in animation. Animals that act like humans without betraying their animal nature and have fully realised personalities are kind of what Aardman does best, and Shaun the Sheep Movie is a least in part a victory lap to show how they can sustain doing nothing else for nearly an hour and a half.

The characters, especially Shaun, the guileless lamb Timmy (Fletcher), and the new character of a hideous stray mutt named Slip (Tim Hands), give the film its heart and resonance, and they're also marvelous comic performers: while the humor is never less than predictable (it's hard to imagine it being anything else, given the target audience), this ends up being funnier than one would expect of something with the edges sanded off so vigorously. The timing that co-writers and -directors Richard Starzak & Mark Burton bring to bear is flawless: beats hold for just long enough, character reactions are just extreme enough, and once punchlines land the film moves by them without dawdling. But better even than the character-derived humor is the wit baked into the look of the film: as much as any Aardman film yet, as much as any animated film period, the world in which Shaun the Sheep Movie is crammed full of little grace notes that the film lingers on just long enough that you can tell it wants you to notice, and the staging at times invokes the visual punning of a Jacques Tati film.

It is a playful movie, all in all: drifting into an impromptu musical number during an early montage and a more steadily choreographed one later, building a satisfying nest of callbacks and repeated gags, giving all of its characters squashy, flexible ways of moving that complement their rounded designs. That plus the directness and emotional accessibility of it make it immensely pleasurable and reassuring cinema: a movie that's perfectly tailored for children but made with such command of its aesthetic and with such a sincere belief in what it's up to that not being a child is absolutely no obstacle to finding it a wholly rewarding experience.

8/10 (a galling rating, but its few flaws are glaring - taking out the poor song choices would get it up to a 9 without anything else changing. Don't be surprised if I retcon this when the year-end list happens)

Read More

IT'S ABOUT TIME

A third review requested by Andrew Johnson, with thanks for contributing yet again to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Personal anecdotes aren't criticism, of course, but in this case the anecdote shall lead us to criticism, I promise. The thing is, when I was a wee cinephile, I was quite addicted to George Pal's 1960 adaptation of H.G. Wells's The Time Machine. It was almost certainly the most violent and gory movie I had encountered at that point: one of the green-skinned subterranean humanoid monsters, the Morlocks, gushed blood out of its mouth when it died! Another one was shown onscreen decaying over the course of years rushed through in time-lapse, in extremely vivid detail! Its eye popped out! Basically, The Time Machine completely fucked me up, in the way that seven-year-olds crave being fucked up. I hadn't watched the film in fully two decades before seeing it for this review, but I could accurately remember some scenes right down to the editing. What I did not remember is that the sequence that so powerfully affected me is a mere blip in the overall movie; it's more than an hour into its 103 minutes before we even hear about the Morlocks, let alone see them, and they're not an active threat for more than 15 minutes or so.

Now the memoir turns back into a review, for what my experience teaches us is that you can't beat a great monster. Pal, an animator turned producer turned producer/director, knew from making a big impression with some good state of the art spectacle, and this time he went right off the edge of the map. Forget the staggering impact the film had on my 7-year-old self; as a fully-functioning thirtysomething, I'm still pretty well blown away by the film's violence. This is basically a silly matinee picture and it looks like it: one doesn't expect to run into gore effects that are as explicit as Hollywood in 1960 would have dared to try to sneak past the censors. Especially on MGM's dime, of all studios. It's legitimately shocking, even a half of a century after the specific effects that The Time Machine shows off have long since been surpassed. And it certainly tends to skew one's impression of what the film is and where its strengths lie, because the other thing I really really didn't remember is that the Morlock sequences are easily the worst part of the movie, despite all of Pal's bravura.

The movie starts on 5 January, 1900, which is dumb as hell, because it immediately flashes back to New Year's Eve just six days earlier, on the cusp of a new century. Here we find the greatly dissatisfied H. George Wells (Rod Taylor), a London inventor who thinks that humanity is the absolute goddamn worst. To get away from the miserable state of civilisation, George has perfected a time machine, or so he proclaims to his friends Philip Hillyer (Sebastian Cabot), Anthony Bridewell (Tom Helmore), Walter Kemp (Whit Bissell), and David Filby (Alan Young), the last of whom is the only one to even pretend that George hasn't gone completely around the bend. George doesn't care much about his friends' mockery, though; he's already built his machine, which allows him to travel any direction chronologically while staying in one place relative to the Earth's surface, and he hopes to use it to leave the ugly, amoral England of the Boer War to find a time when humanity has finally evolved beyond violence. His attempts dash all the optimism right out of him: he first lands in 1917, where he meets Filby's adult son James (still Young), and learns that his friend has dies in the Great War. George's second jump is even less successful: he stumbles right into an air raid during the Blitz of 1940. His luck takes an even worse turn when his third try lands him in 1966, just minutes before a nuclear strike that triggers a volcanic explosion. George has just enough time to enter his time bubble before he and his machine are covered with lava, and he has no choice but to move forward until the natural process of erosion reveals the outside world again.

That takes him all the way to 12 October, 802,701. Here, he finds a race of humans calling themselves the Eloi, according to Weena (Yvette Mimieux), a young woman who speaks pretty terrific English and looks pretty conventionally attractive for somebody with hundreds of thousands of cultural and physical evolution under her belt. George is eager to learn more about this apparently utopian future, but his inquiries reveal the Eloi to be massively incurious and almost dysfunctionally idiotic. It's the Morlocks, George starts to determine, who are the actual brains of this future society: they and the Eloi are two disparate branches of post-homo sapiens evolution, and the hideous underground dwellers are keeping the moronic surface dwellers as food stock. At any rate, they're smart enough to have stolen the time machine, and that means that George has to fight them off, all by himself, since the cow-like Eloi aren't going to put up any kind of resistance.

David Duncan's script leaves the plot of Wells's novel mostly in place, while denuding it of much of its detail and depth, but to be honest, I can't say that it's noticed. The movie is too busy being splendid to look at, frequently in ways that offer the illusion that it's brainier that it is, which was pretty much Pal's entire career as a producer of feature films. The biggest part of it is the setting: by virtue of setting its roots in Victorian London, The Time Machine attains an instantaneous level of seriousness, classiness, and literary prestige, and something about it just feels more weighty than if George was starting his forward journey from 1959 (if nothing else, the sequence in 1966, probably the most nuanced part of the movie - the way it makes a mere 6 years in the future seem dangerously alien is the sharpest piece of commentary Duncan and Pal line up - requires a Victorian time traveler to make any sense at all). And the movie does an absolutely extraordinary job setting up the reality of Victorian London right from the earliest moments, where a beautiful street set and some exquisite matte paintings establish the physical nature of the place as something that feels real but mediated, like it's a moving, living version of an aged photograph.

Then again, the effects work throughout the film is truly special (the film won an especially well-earned Oscar for them), starting with that matte and moving on to its groundbreaking use of time-lapse photography to visually depict time travel. It's too straightforward and unfaked for it not to have aged well, which makes this one of the only effects-driven films I can name that looks every inch as good after the passage of decades as it must have done when it was new (though the fact that its signature technique has become a mainstay of advertising and music videos means that it has lost absolutely all of its novelty), but eye candy isn't what matters. It's the way that the effects, as well as the design - particularly the design of the time machine itself, something like a sled with a giant spinning dish on the back of it that looks exactly like something a middle-class Victorian bachelor would assemble in his back yard as a hobby - casually establish the film's plausible reality in a way that isn't particular dazzling or spectacular: for the most part, the effects are just kind of there, hanging around over Taylor's shoulder, in the background. The showy parts are at least a little clever, not just dazzling: the film's justly celebrated use of a storefront mannequin and the change in fashions that occur over 40 years is a bravura moment, but also one that serves very specific story moments.

Generally, the steadiness and sensibility of the opening of the film - everything up to the lava explosion, itself a pretty marvelous effects sequence - is so confident and so very unlike the normal stylistic gyrations of sci-fi in that period that it's honestly disappointing to me when it stops, and the A-plot starts. The fable of the Eloi and the Morlocks simply isn't as successful visually: imagining a post-apocalyptic future was apparently harder than recreating Victorian England, or maybe the budget ran out, but really, everything in 802,701 looks a bit threadbare. I am powerfully reminded of the most ambitious episodes of Star Trek, to be specific, and it doesn't help that the story feels so much like something that could have showed up there - nor, for that matter, that Mimieux's performance is so shallow and blandly flirtatious, though in her defense, that's exactly what the role asks for.

Parts of it work, beyond a shadow of a doubt: the Eloi boneyard is good and spooky, and there are moments in which the Morlocks, standing in the shadows, can be made out only as a pair of glowing eyes that have a great tension and dreadfulness about them (and not just because the slightly shabby make-up can't be seen). It's just a bit shlocky in the execution, and given that The Time Machine is at best an example of really savvy, gifted execution of impressive sci-fi visuals, this is the worst possible sort of weakness to infect it at any point. Still, even in its weakest moments, the film benefits from being graded on a curve: in its production design, its historical orientation, and the scale of its production, this runs rings around nearly any other sci-fi film in its generational cohort. Eight years down the line, and this would look utterly primitive, but on its own merits, it's damned impressive stuff, and there's just enough esoteric concepts dancing through the screenplay to make it feel more intellectual than the usual sci-fi action-adventure. Between the handsome production and the nerdy writing, this offers an unusually smart, sophisticated aura for what amounts to an expensive B-movie. There's better sci-fi, undoubtedly, but not in 1960, particularly not with the sort of glossy studio polish that makes this such a treat to watch.

Read More

ANTS, THEN, WHEREVER YOU MAY BE

A version of this review was published at the Film Experience

Ant-Man is maybe the most typical film yet made in the now 12-picture Marvel Cinematic Universe. It is up to the individual viewer to decide if that's a compliment or a vicious & lacerating criticism. But it's really hard to think of it as anything other than a factory-pressed rebuild of the same basic story beats, character arc, gags, and conflicts that have become locked-in through Marvel's seven-year multifranchise experiment.

The film's distinguishing elements are all at the margins: in the hands of director Peyton Reed (who is much more in Yes Man-style "mercenary hack" mode than Down with Love-style "crafty stylist" mode), this is the most generously comic of all Marvel films to date, with the zippiest, silliest performances; the stakes are refreshingly low, and there's no aerial battle with the fate of nations and worlds at stakes in the final act. The cinematography by Russell Carpenter - an Oscar winner for Titanic - is distinctly more interesting than anything in any Marvel movie so far, with something resembling a thought-out purpose for the muted lighting. In concert with the production design by Shepherd Frankel and Marcus Rowland, it strips back some of the polish and gleaming surfaces in the Marvel movies of yore, to make a film that feels like it takes place in an actual world.

Behind the uncharacteristically soft visuals, though, lies a perfectly ordinary story, originally by Edgar Wright & Joe Cornish, then revised and "Marvelified" by Adam McKay & the film's star Paul Rudd when Wright dropped out of directing in 2014. I should say, "perfectly ordinary at best", since whatever would have been true of Wright's version - and there's really nothing even vestigial in the script that tells me that this wouldn't have been his worst movie - it's unquestionably true that the corporate insistence on tying the movie in with the greater Marvel Cinematic Universe, the most persistently-rumored explanation for Wright's departure, has had specific negative effects across the board. The film opens with a gaudy, stultifying scene whose awe-inspiring CGI avatar of a youthful Michael Douglas is its sole justification for existing, while its pointless introduction of minor characters from the franchise's established back history, is conspicuously unnecessary in every way; later on, the most spurious and least-interesting action setpiece, by far, is the one that exists solely to introduce a pre-existing character into the goings on. The dozen or so lines of obviously inserted dialogue self-consciously referencing the other movies in the franchise all clang uncomfortably against the rest of the movie - there is a scene in which Douglas, otherwise a cheery, charismatic presence, downshifts so hard to talk about Robert Downey Jr's unseen Tony Stark that one half-wonders if Douglas was trying to get the line snipped from the final cut of the movie through turning in a totally unacceptable take.

The less corporate Ant-Man gets, the more enjoyable it is, though there are problems that go down to the bone: the Marvel problem with boring villains, for one thing, has only ever been worse in Thor: The Dark World, with slimy corporate boss Darren Cross (Corey Stoll) steadfastly refusing to be interesting for any other reason than his arrestingly shiny bald head. But at least the plot tries to have something animating it. Newly-released con Scott Lang (Rudd), desperate for any way to reconnect with his daughter Cassie (Abby Ryder Fortson), over the objection of his ex-wife (Judy Greer, in a role marginally less thankless than her performance as the wallpaper in Jurassic World) and her boyfriend Paxton (Bobby Cannavale), almost turns back to crime. But he is saved by Dr. Hank Pym (Douglas), a disgraced genius ever since his refusal to weaponise his miraculous Pym Particles. These particles, in combination with a contained environment, allow him to change the size of any human being down to the size of, well, the title makes it pretty clear what size Scott ends up becoming for large portions of the movie. The mission: stop Cross from selling the rediscovered shrinking technology to God knows what kind of shady characters. The stakes: two different generations of shitty dads attempt to reconnect with their daughters. For Pym's resentful offspring Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly, making a generic "The Girl" role even shallower through her colorless performance) is his man on the inside, and she's disgusted by his literally patriarchal refusal to let her take on the Ant-Mantle, at least up until the sequel hook.

The littleness of Ant-Man is extraordinarily soothing after the increasing bloat and bombast of Marvel movies in the past few years: no more plot than breaking into a single facility, and the emotional hook of lousy parents wanting to redeem themselves but not knowing how is refreshingly intimate and humane. It's not always the case that the execution is up to the concept: Lilly is a tremendous detriment that the film has a hard time compensating for, and nothing that Rudd does can make the "criminal dad resents his burly rival for his child's affection" stock scenario feel minutely insightful, while Cannavale and Greer are just going through the motions.

But more of Ant-Man is likable than not, especially when it goes off the map completely to indulge most fully in comedy. The film's obvious secret weapon is Michael Peña, ostensibly just one of Scott's ex-con buddies and eventual helper, but beyond a shadow of a doubt the most captivating figure onscreen: what madness drove him to decide that the way to play the role was as a combination of a plucky reporter from a '30s screwball movie and the designated pothead from an '80s teen comedy is hard to imagine, but the results are truly impeccable. There's not a single line delivery that doesn't shock and delight me with its unexpected velocity; he's invaluable to selling the film's best conceit (which feels like Wright through and through, but it's been confirmed as a wholly new invention of Peyton Reed's tenure), in which he narrates nested flashbacks through a flurry of zoned out, slangy patter. I frankly don't want to ever watch another Marvel movie without Peña in it; his performance adds a lighting strike of weird, wonderful energy to Ant-Man and manages in the process to completely transform my expectations for what a superhero sidekick can be.

Even without Peña, there's enough bright comic momentum in the movie to make it fun to watch, when it's not going through the motions. The good news is, things never ends up in the latter rut long enough for it to detract from the film as a whole; the bad news is, there's enough of those longueurs that the whole movie, which is already overlong and far too slow to rev up, is rather sleepy and aimless, two unfortunate descriptors for a popcorn movie. Comic book pictures have been worse - comic book movies have already been worse in 2015, frankly - but they're not usually this indistinct.

6/10

Read More

BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: THE SIZE OF A BUG

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: Marvel's Ant-Man shows us the fun side of being so small that you have to look up to an ant. Ah, but what of the scary side?

To begin with, it's thoroughly unreasonable to expect a '50s sci-fi thriller to star Orson Welles. But the teaser trailer for 1957's The Incredible Shrinking Man makes me faintly angry for promising such a miracle, knowing full well that it would never come to pass.

But enough about film advertising. In truth, even deprived of Welles, The Incredible Shrinking Man is a pretty terrific example of its genre, despite some rather obvious and avoidable flaws of story structure and a rather massive shortchanging of the sociological analysis of Richard Matheson's source novel, in favor of more straightforward survivalist adventure. In the hands of Jack Arnold, Universal's best genre film director at that time (he was responsible for Creature from the Black Lagoon, the studio's best monster movie since the 1930s, and he went uncredited for reshooting the best parts of This Island Earth), the film has a merciless pace and excellent scenes of tension, carried on the back of some of the very best special and visual effects of the decade. And beyond the film's admirable strengths as a taut spectacle, Matheson's screenplay ends on an especially strong note, surprisingly managing to achieve in one speech all the moral philosophising that the film needs to feel like it has real depth and nuance, and that despite tapping from the same brand of flowery religiosity that did in many a sci-fi film of the time.

Having gone ahead and given itself that title, the film wastes the minimal possible amount of time in getting going. The Careys, Scott (Grant Williams) and Louise (Randy Stuart) are enjoying a boat ride on the Pacific coast, and at the exact moment that Louise heads belowdecks, a mysterious fog rolls in, covering Scott with a reflective sheen that apparently soaks into his bare skin. Six months later, he discovers that all of his clothes are slightly too large: loose in the belly, too high at the neck, too long in the arms. A doctor's appointment confirms that he's inexplicably become 5'11" instead of his customary 6'1", and he's dropped from 190 to 180 lbs. The doctor (William Schallert) comes up with pleasant, rational explanations for why this is absolutely nothing to worry about, but evidence increasingly pile up that not only is Scott smaller than he used to be, he's continuing to shrink. We're still in the first reel.

God bless the film for its haste in getting us to this point, but it's symptomatic of the film's one overriding, unanswerable shortcoming. It's worth pointing out that the novel is non-linear: it intercuts the story of the very tiny Scott trapped in his own basement, facing down a spider, with the story of how he came to be in that predicament. In other words, it throws the good stuff at the reader first, and then luxuriates in the fine details of the story in the sure knowledge that our attention has been grabbed. By straightening out the narrative line, the movie suddenly makes itself vulnerable to the killer of all B-movies - and classic status notwithstanding, this is nothing if it's not a B-movie - which is that it permits the viewer to become bored. In order to make sure that this doesn't happen, Arnold absolutely flies through all of the material between Scott's discovery of his loose clothes and the moment that his pet cat finally decides that this tiny little biped would probably be an extremely fun thing to chase and dismember, thus precipitating his fall into the depths of the basement. That escalation starts some 33 minutes into the movie, which means that an entire feature's worth of psychological discombobulation, domestic strife, and medical suspense are condensed into just a half of an hour.

Pragmatically, it works: every last moment of the film from the shot of the cat looming through the window of the dollhouse Scott now calls home to the stately appearance of the words "THE END" is gripping, and the film gets to it fast enough that there's no chance of having burned off the goodwill the audience inherently brings to a movie titled The Incredible Shrinking Man (by which I mean, if you're going to hate a movie for showing a man the size of a bug being menaced by a spider, you know damn well enough not to start watching it). Subjectively, I'd say that the film almost doesn't survive it. The paradox is that, by racing through the material so quickly, Arnold and Matheson don't give it any chance to land and linger, which makes it difficult to feel very connected to the onscreen action. Which, in turn, means that it's more boring, because of the exact technique the film uses to keep us from being bored. The most significant example of what I'm talking about is a subplot about Scott's friendship with a little person from a carnival, Clarice (April Kent), who is at that point just about his size; it's undernourished, and the ramifications are left totally ignored (I mean, hell, you could get a whole act just out of what this means to his increasingly frustrated marriage), and while it adds some depth to Scott's arc, it's patently obvious how much more it could be providing to the film with a little TLC.

Please, though, let me be absolutely clear: at its very worst, The Incredible Shrinking Man merely repeats the sins of any given '50s sci-fi movie, and it repeats them at a higher level or sophistication. At its very worst. At its best, you can count on one hand the number of its direct peers that match or top it. Even before Scott ends up in the basement there are several individually terrific sequences that stress the helplessness and weariness of the Careys' situation, or the awkwardness and dysfunction of Scott's condition. In the latter case, there's a scene with Scott's brother (Paul Langton) talking to Louise in front of a chair, and it's only belatedly and thanks to a blunt cut that we realise Scott has been sitting in that chair the whole time. In the former, the best of the film's many exemplary forced-perspective shots (it's every inch as good as the famously ambitious forced perspective in The Fellowship of the Ring, 44 years later), Louise and Scott are having a difficult time talking, and she refuses to make eye contact, thus not only further selling the illusion but also turning a visual effect setpiece into one of the best character moments in the movie.

It's in the basement, though, where the film shines, in every way. The effects work is peerless, with close-up photography of a tarantula seamlessly married to footage of Williams, and the sets and props are impressively convincing simulations of the quotidian world at several times the magnification, an exciting change from the usual chintzy foam objects populating the era's sci-fi. And Arnold stages the action from acute angles that emphasise the size and peril of these routine objects: a scene where Scott tries to use a paint-stirring stick to cross a deadly crevasse of a foot deep or more is my personal favorite part of the movie, finding a way to make the laughably common (dude can't even throw away his spent paint supplies) into something alien and nightmarish. The translation of the banal domestic world of cats, junk in the basement, and crappy water heaters into an endless chain of danger is the purest kind of horror, and it's what gives The Incredible Shrinking Man so much of its brutal punch. It's a more immediate, visceral surrogate for the thoughtful introspection of the book, which crops up only in the last scene and, to lesser effect, in the film's annoying reliance on voice-over; but it's a worthy trade-off, since it means this is also one of the most immediate, visceral sci-fi thrillers of its generation, on top of being one of the most technically audacious.

Read More

SIDEKICKS: THE MOVIE

Bad movies are one thing. We know how to deal with them. But Minions isn't bad, exactly. It's perfectly neutral - the most impressively flavorless movie in many a long age. I've found preparing to review it has been something of an exciting race against the clock: would I be able to finish writing before every last memory I had of the experience of watching it had evaporated away? Given how hard it was to remember the beginning of the movie by the end of it, dear reader, I was not optimistic.

The film is a point-missing prequel to 2010's Despicable Me and 2013's Despicable Me 2 that contradicts the back-story heavily implied by the first of those movies, on top of the greater sin of fundamentally messing up the tonal balance that drove both of them. Basically, this is what happens when you put the comic sidekicks in the driver's seat. Instead of the little yellow capsule-shaped, gibberish-spouting minions serving as a enjoyably wacky, old-school cartoon way of leavening the slightly more sincere A-plot (as in DM1), or threatening to overwhelm the A-plot entirely and sort of making the whole thing a bit of a screechy annoyance (as in DM2), here they're the whole show. It's exactly like the difference between having a few cookies in between bites of a not-very-healthy mill, versus just straight-up unlocking your jaw an pouring a whole fucking bag of sugar down your throat, right down to the jitteriness and the headache at the end of it.

Minions opens at the dawn of life on Earth, with one of its very best sequences: the minions evolving from yellow unicellular organisisms clinging with enthusiasm to a bigger, meaner unicellular organism, and so on through the early history of evolution. It's in a style that looks like chalk drawings, skipping through time in a series of fluid "in-camera" edits, a great piece of mixed-media playfulness that of course descends into standard-issue CGI the second that the opening credits stop, and Geoffrey Rush pipes up on the soundtrack to narrate how minions evolved to pursue and serve the cruelest villain alive at any moment in history, eventually finding their true calling when mankind came into existence. And I will say this: to hell with narration (and the sequence would definitely play better if it were told entirely through images and editing), but there's absolutely no better choice than Rush for the slightly acidic warmth that gives the narration a sense of stately authority while also indulging the rampant silliness of the humor.

Anyway, the film posits that after accidentally killing Napoleon, the minions fled to the arctic to build their own society, and eventually found themselves on the verge of death by boredom, without any bad guys to serve. So in 1968, one of the wisest of them all, Kevin (voiced, like all the minions, by co-director Pierre Coffin), decides to go on a mission to find a boss, accompanied by the childlike moron Bob and the snotty Stuart - and before I completely get out of the habit of complimenting the film, kudos to writer Brian Lynch, to directors Coffin and Kyle Balda, and all the animators for creating three totally distinct personalities, instantly readable and flawlessly distinctive despite the fact that all three are identically-dressed yellow tubes with googly eyes.

The three minions arrive in New York, and travel thence to Orlando, amusingly sketched out as a pre-Disney hell of swampland and barely visible roads, and here they attend Villain Con. A spot of good luck puts them in touch with Scarlett Overkill (Sandra Bullock), the world's first female supervillain, who takes them on as her henchmen for a plot to steal the crown jewels of England. And somewhere in all of that, Minions burns off all the charm of its characters, and its brightly colored, highly angular design, and the way that design fits neatly into the stylistic ethos of the 1960s, and pretty much every other damn thing that gives it an ounce of personality. In essence, the film has no momentum of any sort: scenes happen, we hear one of the many incongruous celebrity voices studded into the movie (Steve Coogan, Allison Janney, a totally wasted Michael Keaton), some gags modeled on the slapstick MGM animation of the '40s or the absurdist Warner animation of the '50s. Then the cycle restarts. At no point does a sense of inevitability take over; there's barely even a sense of continuity about things, especially in the astonishingly arbitrary middle section when the minions wander around trying to find the crown and then- but even a barely-plotted collection of wacky shorts tied together more by proximity than anything else deserves better than to be spoiled, I guess.

The most annoying thing about Minions is that it has just enough individual pieces that are terrific in isolation that it's really not possible to discard the whole. The opening credits are on obvious place where the animation takes such a swerve that I can't help but love it, and the same is true of a mid-film bedtime story in faux-claymation with appealingly goofy character design and an acerbic, abrupt sense of humor. There are moments in which the even the bog-standard CG animation is suddenly and powerfully beautiful and detailed in texture and lighting.

And there are comic highlights throughout, one or two minutes of a stretch where the ludicrous illogic of the storytelling turns into something close enough to the classic cartoon shorts that are plainly never far from the filmmakers' minds that you can see them if you squint. The same lack of cohesion or building momentum that makes the overall movie a slog is, in fact, something of a strength at the micro level: the villain convention, for example, is such an odd and off-putting narrative element, but it's responsible for some of the most effective dashes of zany jokes in the whole movie.

But I'm hunting for nice things to say towards a movie about which it's hard to feel anything at all. Uncharitably, I'd say that Minions is a film that expects its viewer to have a stunted attention span. It jumps around so much in search of loud, simple gags that you never have to worry about paying attention. Were I being kind, I'd say that it simply knows its target audience: little kids who want to be dazzled for 90 minutes while laughing at straightforward jokes. Still and all, "it does a good job pandering to children" is hardly the stuff of praise and even if I aged out of the right mindset to really meet the film where it lives a solid quarter-century ago, I like to think that I still know profoundly mediocre filmmaking when I see it.

5/10

Read More

BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: TALKING ANIMALS AND THE WOMEN WHO LOVE THEM

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: the plot of Ted 2 touches on the sex life of a human woman and a talking animal brought to life with top-end effects. How nice it would have been if I couldn't come up with another such creation.

Howard the Duck isn't as bad as you've probably heard, but since you've probably heard that it's bad enough to melt the polar ice caps and give puppies cancer, that's not much of a defense. Still, let's run with it a little bit: as a story, it's neither more convoluted nor more contrived than any other '80s big budget creature feature and sci-fi romp (a bigger subgenre than I've just made it sound), and it has mostly the same strengths and limitations of any given superhero origin story in the three intervening decades. Jeffrey Jones dives right into a chewy, garish role, and makes a splendidly creepy voice as the family-friendly adventure bad guy. And I think that taps me out pretty much. There's nothing else good here; the best to cling to is that some of the elements are merely insipid and not actively rancid.

The film's origins stretch back to 1973, when Steve Gerber and Val Mayerik created a cynical, sarcastic three-foot tall anthropomorphic duck from another planet for Marvel Comics. Howard the Duck quickly found a spot in the Zeitgeist, ushered by Gerber into a potent force of comic book satire, running the character for U.S. President in 1976 among several less-showy examples of the character mocking society, pop culture, and the comics medium itself. He was as close to an underground comic book sensation as a character owned by one of the two big publishing concerns could get.

By the early 1980s, following Gerber's acrimonious split from Marvel over issues of creative control with the character, Howard wasn't quite the sensation he'd been in the previous decade. There was still enough there there for the character to attract the attention of the man who was, at that point, perhaps the most powerful individual in the American film industry: George Lucas, producer and overseer of the Star Wars trilogy, and the power behind Steven Spielberg's throne on the two Indiana Jones movies. In 1984, a year after Return of the Jedi, Lucas was in a position to do anything he could possibly have wanted, and what he wanted was... Well, the generous reading is that he just wanted a version of Spielberg's E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial to call his very own. I much prefer to believe that; it makes everything strictly a financial transaction. The alternative is to assume that Lucas was so infatuated with the Howard the Duck that he wanted to bring the creature to life, and so profoundly misunderstood the material that this ungainly display of ugly visual effects and nonsensical action sequences was in some way aligned with his actual vision. And that's just sad.

That being said, this is not a Lucas movie even in the sense that the Star Wars sequels that he didn't personally direct still count. Instead, it was a gift that the super-producer made to his longtime colleagues and friends, the married couple Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz. The thing to know about them is that they helped shape Lucas's 1973 breakthrough American Graffiti into a screenplay, and after its enormous success opened every imaginable door for him, he remembered them and what they did for him. As the intervening years made it clear that the Huyck/Katz magic was something nobody wanted much to do with, Lucas swept in and revived the couple's fading fortunes by offering them screenwriting duties on the heavily anticipated Indiana Jones and the Temple Doom; and once that was wrapped up, he blessed them with Howard the Duck, their seventh screenplay and Huyck's fourth movie as a director. It would turn out to be his last, as will happen when you direct a movie whose title quickly inserts itself into the cultural dialogue as a particularly mean-spirited synonym for "one of the highest profile bombs in the history of commercial cinema".

Huyck & Katz weren't the first filmmakers of limited talent to be given the reigns to a project because of their connection to a producer, and they weren't the last; but they might be the ones who got in over their heads the most. Howard the Duck was enormously expensive: some of the many 1986 releases that were made for less money include Top Gun, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and Aliens. Something else those films all have in common: they were big hits. Not so for poor Howard, which made less than half of its production budget back at the domestic box office, and became so tainted by the reek of failure that it was feebly re-branded as Howard: A New Breed of Hero for the rest of the world's markets, where it still came nowhere near turning a profit.

It takes mere minutes for the sheer forcefulness of how repellent Huyck & Katz's script is going to be to make itself manifest: it opens on a tour of the apartment of one Howard T. Duck (voiced by Chip Zien and operated by several puppeteers and six different suit actors, though Ed Gale did it the most), a duck living in a city on Duckworld. It's like our world, only with ducks. And to demonstrate this, we see several duckified versions of our own world, like a poster for My Little Chickadee starring '30s duck superstars Mae Nest and W.C. Fowls. The apartment is also decorated with posters for Breeders of the Lost Stork and Splashdance, and at this point I was done with the movie. We still haven't seen the protagonist's face or heard a single word of dialogue, by the way. But "Splashdance" makes sense only vaguely in that ducks like water, and "Breeders" is just fucking nonsense. "Brooders" is at least bird-related. "Breeders" just means "the ducks like to have sex". Though that is a useful piece of foreshadowing for the remainder of Howard the Duck, which for a dippy talking animal movie with all the satire and nuance sanded off and replaced with shticky jokes for a family audience, is remarkably smutty. For example, the scene that immediately follows, where Howard is caught in a tractor beam of yet-unknown provenance and sucked through several apartments in his building. One of these apartments includes a lady duck taking a bath, and for reasons that I am anxious to learn nothing more about, the filmmakers wanted to make sure that she had preposterously detailed naked breasts, with pink nipples poking through her feathers.

On the backside of that tractor beam, Howard ends up in an alley in Cleveland, where he crosses paths with punk rocker Beverly Switzler (Lea Thompson), who decides to help him figure out what the hell is going on. This first involves visiting a science lab janitor named Phil Blumburtt (Tim Robbins), who can do nothing at all but flail around crazily. Dejected, Howard fights his way into the Cleveland night, discovering that he can do nothing, and returning to Beverly, at which point they play-flirt and come about thiiiiis close to having sex, in a scene that should have been set on fire the moment it was written, and then set on fire twice when they actually went to all the work of filming it. Apparently, the mechanism to have the feathers on Howard's head stand up erect when he becomes aroused was the one of the most complicated effects involving any of the duck suits. This was a waste of Industrial Light & Magic manpower that borders on a moral crime.

Anyway, Beverly and Howard are interrupted by Phil, this time with a real scientist, Dr. Walter Jenning (Jones), who knows how Howard got to Earth, because it was his laser beam that brought him. Upon returning to his device, it malfunctions and warps another space being to our planet, this one a member of the Dark Overlords of the Universe, who inhabits Jenning's body and prepares to bring its allies here to eliminate humanity and take over. Naturally, only Howard, Beverly, and Phil are in a position to save the day.

That is a mercilessly stramlined version of the plot, which includes a lengthy side trip to Howard's job as a handyman at a sex club, and and even lengthier sequence at a diner that theoretically isn't more than a few minutes from Jenning's lab, but is also so far that it takes all night to drive back and requires commandeering an ultralight aircraft to fly back in time to save the day. Which is also a lengthy narrative digression that finds the movie stopping everything to lavish energy on a setpiece that is alarmingly flaccid and anti-exciting.

But while the script is a structural disaster and clunky at almost every line of dialogue, those are the least of the film's problems. The tonal mismatch present in the indecision between the blithe kiddie fantasy of most of the film and the unadulterated filthiness of a few key scenes is worse, exacerbated by Huyck's flat-footed direction. And it's not the only tonal imbalance in the film: Howard the Duck is, among its other sins, a comedy, and a particular wretched one with only one joke to speak of - he's like, a duck, but he acts like a person. Repeated ad nauseam, which only takes a few minutes. Certainly, the duck tits are about as nauseam as it gets. Mostly, the film tries to put over a playful, zany tone by getting really, really loud and broad, abetted by Zien's self-conscious delivery of almost everything he says in the arch tones of a sitcom catchphrase. The humans are much, much worse: Robbins's performance is a humiliating cartoon of '80s nerdiness, and Thompson plays a ditsy screwball character with such flighty detachment from anything going on in the plot or individual scenes that she appears to be the victim of some kind of terrible head injury. We know from the evidence of her nimble, insinuating comic performance in Back to the Future, just a year prior, that Thompson is not, in fact, the worst actor of the 1980s; but Howard the Duck certainly puts in a strong piece of evidence for the prosecution.

The film's worst element, though, is undoubtedly the title character. There might not have been anyone in the world who could do special effects better than ILM in the mid-'80s, and the Howard puppets are, if nothing else, miraculously well-engineered. There are God knows how many moving parts in the face, and the character is capable of incredibly subtle gradations of expression - we always know exactly what the duck has on his mind, and that's no small achievement. The thing is, though, there is no point at which Howard feels like anything else but a terrific piece of robotics. His textures and his foam rubber beak and the bland overlighting that cinematographer Richard H. Kline dumps on him make it clear, in virtually every shot, that Howard is a device: one that would bowl you over if you saw him at Disneyland, one that would catch your eye as a background character in Jedi; but crucially, critically, one that's vividly off-putting as a movie protagonist. There's no shortage of disastrous missteps in this movie, but what pushes it into the realms of the truly repellent is its amazingly unacceptable lead character, perhaps the only example on record of a live-action figure that falls into the Uncanny Valley.

Read More

NOTHING MORE THAN FEELINGS

The first thing to point out, because it's really amazing the more you think about it, it's a miracle that Pixar Animation Studios' 15th feature, Inside Out, functions at all. It's a feature-length metaphor, in which everything we're watching as the story isn't "actually" be happening, possibly not even within the world of the film. Most of the characters are literally concepts rather than psychological actors in their own right. The driving conflict is "there's a ticking clock and we have to get back before it runs out", or basically the third act that's always the most uninteresting part of Pixar movies stretched out to the full length of the 94-minute film

Regardless, it's Pixar's most effective and most moving feature since the six-year-old Up, and while I think the "Pixar's best!" chatter that you can find here and there is premature, it's very easy to see why somebody would want to promote that opinion. Surely, it's the most ambitious film in the studio's history: it's a feature-length metaphor, after all, which isn't something for the squeamish. Specifically, it's a metaphor about the processes of human memory and emotions in a time of extreme stress both environmental (moving to a new city) and biological (doing so at the very earliest years of adolescence), setting up shop in the mind of an 11-year-old girl named Riley (Kaitlyn Dias) and literalising the concepts of cognitive theory as physical spaces for the adventures had by her five core emotions: Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black), Disgust (Mindy Kaling), and Fear (Bill Hader). Who are also literalised, as color-coded humanoids made out of quantum particles that you can just barely see in close-ups as a mottled, almost fuzzy surface of tiny floating spheres.

The actual "what really happened" plot is that Riley has just moved from Minnesota, where she loves her friends and adores playing hockey, to an old rundown building in San Francisco. Picking up on the extreme frustration and stress felt by her father (Kyle MacLachlan), whose business - the reason they moved in the first place - is hitting a potentially fatal snag, and her mother (Diane Lane), helplessly trying to track down their missing moving truck and clearly none too happy about being uprooted herself, Riley tries to force herself to be the same happy-go-lucky child her parents have always praised her for being, but this quickly curdles into a perpetual state of peevishness marked by bursts of terror, and eventually she decides to run away back to Minnesota. And as she does so, she slides into a depressive state where she can barely feel anything at all.

But ah! the way that Inside Out chooses to tell that story is gorgeous and complicated and crazily imaginative: inside the control room of Riley's mind, which has been the domain of the upbeat, bullying Joy for all of recorded history, an accident has sent her and Sadness spiraling into the recesses of Riley's memories, leaving the ill-equipped Anger, Fear, and Disgust to run the show. Meanwhile, Joy and Sadness journey through Riley's headspace, finding her subconscious, her imagination, and the chasm where all of her lost memories are dumped, never to be retrieved again, escorted by the cotton candy-cat-elephant-dolphin hybrid Bing Bong (Richard Kind), Riley's mostly-forgotten imaginary friend. The film presents all of the mercurial and abrupt shifts of personality that accompany being 11 and thrust into a new life as the results of the emotions' desperate attempts to find a solution to their predicament, with everybody (and especially Joy) anxious to get back to the unmixed state when Joy wouldn't let anybody else call the shots. Though with Sadness's shocking, newfound ability to alter the nature of Riley's memories just by touching them, it's clear to us long before the emotions are willing to admit it that Riley's days of unmixed joy are behind her.

The idea that our thoughts and feelings are sentient creatures bumbling around in our heads isn't new, of course: the earliest cinematic version I can name is the 1943 Disney WWII propaganda cartoon Reason and Emotion, and the image of the mind as a person sitting in the body directing it is an ancient one. But Inside Out is as perfect a filmed depiction of that hook as has ever been made, coming up with an expansive, highly creative world of intricately worked-out rules to explore the concepts of cognitive psychology in a simplified, even fabulistic way. It does an extraordinarily good job of establishing its world one piece at a time, so we grasp the basic vocabulary intuitively enough that when the movie starts to use that vocabulary in complicated ways later on, we don't need to have it explained what's going on. Knowing that colors map onto emotions, we can grasp the enormous difference between a day that has produced mostly yellow (Joy) memories and a day that has produced a slurry of green, red, and purple (Disgust, Anger, Fear) memories at a visceral level, both because the colors themselves are unpleasant and toxic all mixed together, but because the film trained us why that's upsetting without having openly told us it was doing so.

Cognitive modeling and inventive visual storytelling aside, Inside Out is simply a great amount of fun to watch. The actors are exemplary: the five core emotions are all obvious but phenomenally on-point casting decisions, especially in the subtle details, like how Poehler isn't just perfect for Joy, but perfect for a specifically bossy, arrogant Joy. And with that handled, the film has already done a huge part of its work, making the emotions appropriately broad, bold personalities to go with the film's searing bright colors and Seussian designs of the spaces inside Riley's head. With those personalities in place, the film can go about the business of mixing them around and working not just as a fun story of two mismatched characters on a journey, but, increasingly, as a deeply effective study of emotions jockeying for prominence, and learning the hard truth that feeling sad isn't always inappropriate and should be embraced when it's the right time for it. Which is a lesson that's not just bold for a nominal children's movie (though not since Ratatouille has Pixar made a movie that strikes me as more geared towards adults), but bold for anything made in American cinema. It's one of the ways that Inside Out feels like Pixar's very own Studio Ghibli film, more emotionally sophisticated and trusting of its audience than even the very best of what we'd normally expect from corporate family filmmaking.

It's also one of the ways that Inside Out is clearly the third film to be directed by Pete Docter, whose two previous films - Monsters, Inc. and Up - already marked him out as the feelingest of Pixar's director stable. His balance of goofy comedy and dumbfounding heartbreak is excellent here, as it would almost have to be; I'll confess that I was promised more robust, devastating tears than I got (the opening montage and scrapbook scenes in Up are both harder-hitting to my mind, as is the incomparable finale of Toy Story 3), but none of Inside Out's feints toward tear-jerking, nor its dumbest, most stereotyped jokes feel at all unearned or unconsidered. It tries to cover the whole range of feelings and it largely gets there.

It has a few rough patches, undoubtedly. Docter and his co-writers never came up with a really interesting idea for Disgust, who feels by far the least consequential of the core emotions, and outside of it main themes, Michael Giacchino's score is disappointingly rote, given that some of his career-best work has happened in Pixar films. And there are other nitpicks and niggles her and there. But the grandness of the film's ambitions and its ingenuity in realising those amibitions, its sheer cleverness and sophistication as a most unique kind of character study, these things eradicate any nitpicks and render niggles the nastiest kind of pettiness. This is at most only a hair shy of top-tier Pixar, and not just the kind of aesthetically adventurous storytelling that all animation should aspire to, it's what all of mainstream American cinema should want to be - funny and meaningfully sad, deeply thoughtful about its world and story.

9/10

(A hedge; I'm not quite willing to commit to 10 yet, though "yet" is the key word there. I can easily imagine liking this more with subsequent viewings, and I cannot conceive of liking it any less)

Read More