Brothers (2009)

With film release dates set months in advance, it was mere coincidence that Brothers was released in the same week that the president announced his plan to send more troops to Afghanistan. It's a sad coincidence, given the subject of the film. Even sadder is the fact that Brothers is still timely, even though it is based on a Danish film, Brødre, made five years ago, when the war in Afghanistan was already three years old. Has it really been eight years? Brothers is not a war movie, per se, and not about the Afghan conflict, per se, but is rather a movie about the effects of war on the individuals who fight, and the families who stay at home. It's about the casualties there and here, and after this week, there will, sadly, be more of both.

In the Cahill family, Sam (Tobey Maguire) is the good son, and Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal) is the ne-er-do-well. Tommy is released from prison a few days before Sam is set to be deployed to Afghanistan. Their father Hank (Sam Shepherd), a retired Marine, makes no secret of his pride in Sam, or that he can barely stand to look at Tommy. When Sam is reported killed in action, Tommy tries to straighten up and help Sam's wife Grace (Natalie Portman), and her two young daughters (Bailee Madison and Taylor Geare). That Sam is not really dead is no secret -- the movie reveals early on that he is taken prisoner by the Taliban, and tortured, and forced to do things he would not ordinarily do.

Brothers, directed by Jim Sheridan (*In the Name of the Father*) uses this war -- but it could be any war -- as a vehicle for a somber family drama with some heavy themes. There is the sibling rivalry between Sam and Tommy, and the father who clearly plays favorites, perhaps to the detriment of both sons. There are second chances and second lives, as the brothers switch roles in the aftermath of Sam's traumatic experience in Afghanistan. There is, of course, the question of Sam's mental health, and the damaging effects it has on his family, and particularly his children.

Although there is melodrama aplenty in Brothers, Sheridan has effectively stripped the movie down to its emotional bones, with little music, and little else to serve as evocative affective signposts. Instead, the film trades heavily on the tensions between characters, and the charged atmosphere that turns the Cahill home into a tinderbox. Maguire and Gyllanhaal look enough alike to pass for brothers, and they do most of the heavy lifting in Brothers. Their roles could have been interestingly swapped, with Maguire playing the reckless and feckless Tommy and Gyllenhaal as the straight arrow who gets shot down. I found Maguire a little implausible as a Marine, but his performance is effectively creepy, and Brothers wrings a fair amount of suspense out of Sam's unstable temperament. Especially noteworthy, however, is Bailee Madison as the older daughter Isabelle. Madison is only ten, but her performance in Brothers is exceptionally good. The emotionally labile Isabelle is a pivotal character, and she tends to overshadow Portman's Grace, who mostly cries, although she does so for different reasons throughout the film.

Except for Sam's time as a prisoner or war, Brothers pretty much steers clear of politics, to the point of being downright apolitical, and it really has nothing much to say on the subject of the war in Afghanistan, or the lives of ordinary Afghans, or military operations there, or US policy. It doesn't *have* to say anything, I suppose, given that any old war would do for the purposes of this film's story. But that sense of nonspecificity, a kind of generic generality, coupled with the specifically traumatizing and extraordinary events that lead to Sam's crisis, make Brothers feel like it's going to some pains to not be about what it's really about. That's too bad, because the ordinary everyday horrors of that war -- the ones experienced by too many soldiers -- are quite bad enough. The movie also ends rather abruptly, which adds to the sense that there's really much more to be said.

What it does say, it says well. Brothers avoids easy sentiment and easy resolution: it is sometimes shocking, frequently moving, and always sincere, quietly observing the noisy, frightening drama of a family trying to keep it together when the center cannot hold.

7Dec2009

Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)

Sleek, slick, candy-colored computer animation is all well and good, but my tastes run kind of old school when it comes to animated films, I guess. Maybe it was all those Rankin & Bass Christmas specials I watched as a kid (and still watch), but I love stop motion animation, with its jerky, felty, tactile, lived-in look. Give me Wallace and Gromit, with their feet of clay, or Mr. Fox with his fantastic, coarse pelt and glass eyes over the shiny, rubbery perfection of pixels any day. The critters in Fantastic Mr. Fox look as if they came out of some toybox full of treasures like pinecones and bits of tattered cloth and very special rocks. They look pliable and playable.

Fantastic Mr. Fox wouldn't be the first film by Wes Anderson to look and feel like it was set in a dollhouse -- both The Royal Tenenbaums, with its vast, colorful, shabby brownstone, and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, with its fantastic cutaway ship, call to mind miniature worlds that could be occupied by puppets. Anderson's people have something of the puppet in them too -- they move through the world tentatively and with strings attached, and they speak in hesitant pauses, the spaces between their words sometimes saying as much as the words themselves. Fantastic Mr. Fox takes all those tendencies and quirks in Anderson's films and makes them just a tiny bit less lifelike, which makes them so much more... real.

Fantastic Mr. Fox is based on Roald Dahl's book, and as adapted by Anderson and Noah Baumbach, it features a rascally, irresponsible, morally ambiguous hero in Mr. Fox (voiced by George Clooney). Fox, being a fox, was a successful chicken thief until Mrs. Fox (Meryl Streep), expecting their first pup, made him give up his life of crime. He settled into a quiet life as a newspaper journalist, but always longed for one final heist. He cooks up a scheme with his possum pal Kylie (Wally Wolodarsky) to steal from the three biggest, meanest farmers in the area: Boggis, Bunce, and Bean. Bean (Michael Gambon) lives on hard cider and is "the scariest man currently living." The other two aren't any nicer. The farmers don't take kindly to fox's pilfering, setting in motion an escalating war that threatens every animal in the valley. If one were so inclined, one could read into this fable an environmental message, or a message about the futility and mutually assured destruction of war. Or, one could just see a fox trying, as always, to outwit a farmer who is armed with a gun, a backhoe and dynamite. Anyway, Fox, being a fox, isn't especially repentant about starting a war.

The animation in Fantastic Mr. Fox is terrific, full of wit and imagination, with a scruffy, cartoonish ingenuity and handmade beauty. The puppets don't look anything like real animals, and yet the characters are so richly conceived, and the voice work is so nuanced and full of life that the movie does what any good animated movie (regardless of the method) should do: it imperceptibly engages the imagination and makes you forget that you're looking at simulacra. The critters in Fantastic Mr. Fox look and act like they just *are* -- as if, even when you're not watching them, they're going about their lives, doing foxy and badgery and rabbity things. I also love the movie backgrounds and sets, which look just like storybook illustrations and scale models -- which is basically what they are. The movie fully embraces artifice, although no more so than Anderson's live action films.

Fantastic Mr. Fox is as fully realized as any of Anderson's films, and like his other works, it revels in the odd and quirky, in the idiosyncratic beauty of misfits, in the dissatisfaction and loneliness of the brilliant. It also shares Anderson's preoccupations with irresponsible, irrascible father figures and difficult, eccentric families. To that end, the main narrative about the escalating war between Fox and the farmers sometimes moves to the back burner (to simmer a while) as the movie burrows into Fox's friendships and family dynamics. Fox's son Ash (Jason Schwartzman) has an intense rivalry with his visiting cousin Kristofferson (Eric Anderson), who is more athletic and less quirky, and is possibly favored by Fox (who, lest there be any doubt, is not exactly a model father). Fox and the missus have a less than perfect union, and indeed, all of Fox's relationships are tested by his rash, devil-may-care ways. His lawyer and friend Badger (Bill Murray) is especially vexed by Fox's recklessness.

Fantastic Mr. Fox might vex parents too, as the movie is likely to raise a lot of questions for any youngsters who see it. I'd hazard a guess that young children aren't typically part of Anderson's fanbase (although teens surely like *Rushmore*), and despite its provenance, Fantastic Mr. Fox isn't especially more kid-friendly than Anderson's other films. Some kids will like it, if they catch on to the way the puppets embody and enact psychologically complex thoughts and feelings (just the way kids do with their own toys). Other kids won't get it at all (and might be frightened by the violent death of one character), and won't find the movie funny or charming or, for that matter, very interesting. All of which is to say that kids will react to Fantastic Mr. Fox just like anybody else will. Some will love it, some won't. I found it charming, warm, engaging, funny, and challenging, and all around fantastic.

The Blind Side (2009)

The Blind Side is based on Michael Lewis's nonfiction book *The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game*. It tells a remarkable story: a homeless, neglected, uneducated African American teenage boy is taken in by a wealthy, white Southern family. He thrives in a stable home, his latent athletic talents are released, and he goes on to a career in the NFL. That's the story of Michael Oher, now a left tackle for the Baltimore Ravens. 

A left tackle -- a very rare and specialized kind of athlete -- is a kind of protector, a massive, unstoppable force, a wall between the quarterback and the opposing team. In The Blind Side, there are two left tackles: Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron), who is a gentle giant, and Leigh Anne Tuohy (Sandra Bullock), the multitasking little spitfire who takes the lad under her wing after literally finding him walking the streets. She protects him from rich snobs, redneck racists, and drug dealers. Leigh Anne's about a third the size of Michael, but with her fierce maternal instincts and larger than life personality, she can steamroller over the opposition just as effectively.

As written and directed by John Lee Hancock (The Rookie), The Blind Side is more about Leigh Anne than Michael. Michael's a bit of a blank slate, and the movie suggests that he managed to survive a horrific childhood, and a drug addicted mother, by remaining a blank slate, and shutting out all the bad (and it was all bad) that happened around him. His past is revealed only in vague flashbacks, and a few visits back to the slums he grew up in. His personality is almost nonexistent -- he's shy and reticent, and despite his massive size, unimposing. He's a shrinking violet. Leigh Anne is a steel magnolia: loud, insistent, self-confident, and a woman who is used to getting her way, as her affably compliant husband Sean Tuohy (Tim McGraw) likes to remind everyone. She's got a couple of perfect kids to go along with her perfect house: teenage daughter Collins (Lily Collins), and son S.J. (Jae Head), a talkative, spunky little sidekick -- clearly his mother's son -- for Michael. 

The Tuohys are good Christians, but what they really worship is football, and The Blind Side is part sports movie, part inspirational slums-to-suburbs, foundling-finds-family story, with an emphasis on the latter. Neither aspect of the story is especially suspenseful or surprising -- there's a kind of inevitability written into Leigh Anne's personality. There's just no doubt that she's going to get her way, that she's going to mold Michael into a functioning, successful young man and a great football player, and whip a few conservative Southerners (among whom she counts herself) into shape while she's at it. A few other good Southern women help out: Michael's tutor (Kathy Bates), and a teacher (Kim Dickens) at the private Christian academy the Tuohy kids -- including Michael -- attend. They both see that Michael, despite his poor academic performance, is no dummy.

Bullock, with her teased blond tresses and twangy accent carries the movie on her shoulders. Her performance is lively and likable, but not especially complex -- The Blind Side doesn't dig very deep into its characters, nor tell us much about them that isn't apparent on the surface. They have big lives full of big emotions and transformational events, but their inner lives are more or less neglected. We're left to imagine what traumas and misfortunes led Michael to the sorry state he was in, and what prompted a big-hearted woman to take him home, set him on his feet, and give him wings. It's not deep, but The Blind Side is quite likable, and plucks all the right heartstrings -- it's warm and funny, and uplifts with all the subtlety of a linebacker. 

23Nov2009

2012 (2009)

Before the start of 2012, I predicted that at some point early in the movie, there would be some guy holding up a sign that reads "The End Is Near." I must be psychic. You'll be comforted to know I'm not getting any tingles telling me that the end is, in fact, near. But boy, oh boy, does the world go out with a bang in 2012.

The title comes from the alleged Mayan prophecy that some kind of cosmic, planetary alignment would cause the destruction of the world in 2012. The movie doesn't do much with the prophecy -- a few cursory mentions here and there. The action starts in 2009, when a couple of scientists figure out that the earth's core is rapidly heating up as a result of solar flares, which will destabilize the earth's crust, or some very scientific thing like that. Once geologist Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) realizes that the end is near, he alerts presidential aide Carl Anheuser (Oliver Platt), who is just the sort of cold-hearted politician to make the hard choices about who lives and who dies. The president (Danny Glover) isn't quite so hardhearted, and he and other world leaders cook up a plan (involving big boats, naturally), to save a few remnants of humanity from extinction. Well, Noah had to make some hard choices too, I suppose. 

Meanwhile, out in California, Jackson Curtis (John Cusack), a struggling novelist, takes his kids (Liam James and Morgan Lily) camping at Yellowstone, where they run into a nutjob (Woody Harrelson) who tells them that the end is near. Jackson once wrote a worst-selling novel about the end of the world, of which, it turns out, doomsaying geologist Helmsley is a big fan. I'm sensing a pattern here.

Jackson's ex-wife (Amanda Peet) has a new husband, a successful plastic surgeon named Gordon (Tom McCarthy). Poor Jackson drives a limo to make ends meet, but he's one helluva driver, which comes in handy as he and the family escape the cataclysmic inferno/abyss/earthquake that destroys California in just the first of several close scrapes. There are also narrow escapes from disaster via small airplane, RV, big airplane, and really, really big boat. It's just one damn thing after another.

Thing is, director Roland Emmerich (who co-wrote 2012 with Harald Kloser) knows how to destroy the world. He's done it often enough (*Independence Day*, *The Day After Tomorrow*, *Godzilla*), and the terrific CG effects in 2012 enable him to rain quite convincing destruction upon the planet in the form of earthquakes, tsunamis, nuclear force volcanic eruptions, crumbling skyscrapers, fireballs, clouds of ash, and city-swallowing fissures. Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice... Emmerich says why not both? And why stop there?

And surprisingly, it's a pretty good time, the end of the world. Quite watchable and more entertaining than you might think. It goes on for far too long -- the movie clocks in at over two and a half hours. Granted, it takes time to destroy the world, but 2012 has too many characters and too many subplots, which makes it pretty hard to get very invested in any of them. A cute dog, a Russian oligarch, his obnoxious kids and his floozy girlfriend, a Buddhist monk and his family, the president's daughter (Thandie Newton), a couple of old jazz musicians on a cruise ship (George Segal and Blu Mankuma), geologists in India... They all come together in the end -- well, the survivors do -- but it's a butt-numbing experience. 

The only person in the whole movie who seems to be having any fun is Harrelson, who bites into his role as a long-haired, wild-eyed conspiracy theorist who's just pleased as punch to be right for a change, (although, you know, the death of billions is kind of a drag). Kind of a drag, but not so much that you can't enjoy all the mayhem. There's nothing subtle or deep or emotionally engaging about 2012 -- you know what's coming, and you can pretty much tell who's going to survive this thing (at least you can if you're psychic like me). Emmerich knows to keep the disaster front and center, and most of the death at an emotionally safe distance and free of blood and gore -- there are lots of falling bodies about which we can feel bad in principle, but then Boom! Crash! Another narrow escape! Phew! Aw man, there goes the Sistine Chapel!

16Nov2009

The Men Who Stare At Goats (2009)

If you believe the official denials, the US military has not been engaged in paranormal research, and specifically, has not been training psychic soldiers, for decades. The program allegedly known as "Star Gate" did not begin as a response to rumors that the Soviets were also engaged in psychic military research, and did not train soldiers and civilians (including spoon-bender Uri Geller) in the ways of psychic warfare. In The Men Who Stare at Goats, this goofy history (or fiction) is uncovered by a reporter named Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor), who tags along with a top (former) psychic supersoldier on a mysterious mission in Iraq. The supersoldier -- they call themselves Jedi warriors -- is Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), and he just might be every bit as crazy as he seems. Or not.

Cassady is a master of such paranormal techniques as "sparkle eyes" and "cloudbursting" (which are just what they sound like), as well as various highly effective martial arts moves. He leads Wilton on a rambling road trip beset by the usual travails of an extended car ride in war-torn Iraq: kidnapping, IEDs, shootings. Their mission? Not even Cassady knows. Presumably, he'll know it when he sees it, or "sees" it.

Cassady is a member of the defunct New Earth Army, a New Age-y, pantheist, experimental army unit developed by a Vietnam vet named Bill Django (Jeff Bridges) with the aim of winning wars through peace, love, and understanding. Bill's recruits are zealously devoted to their guru. Lyn is Bill's star pupil. Bill's most dedicated follower is wild-eyed General Hopgood (Stephen Lang). Then there's Larry Hopper (Kevin Spacey), the snake in this new Eden.

The movie is based on the nonfiction book of the same name by Jon Ronson. "More of this is true than you would believe," announces an opening title of the movie. What you believe, or what anyone believes, is precisely the point. Or maybe it's the joke. At any rate, the movie presents everything as if it could be true, or at least, as if someone like Lyn Cassady could plausibly believe it to be true. He did, after all, once stare a goat to death. (The goat made the mistake of staring back.)

The cast plays it all more or less straight. Clooney's got an assortment of bug-eyed looks for Cassady's various psychic powers, and portrays him as a true believer, a man who has seen too much to not believe. That's not to say that Clooney plays it as straight as Bridges, who offers a variation on his acid-etched Dude character in *The Big Lebowski*. The movie's true straight man is Wilton, a desperate fellow cuckolded by his wife and trying to pick up the pieces of his life in a war zone. Tagging along with Cassady, he's more likely to be picking up pieces of his own body.

The Men Who Stare at Goats, as directed by Clooney's producing partner Grant Heslov, is a mild and somewhat scattershot spoof that is not quite as funny as its title. It gets most of its traction from its charismatic actors, all of them playing broken and desperate men in search of something -- redemption? revenge? renewal? The movie does not have much to say about war, or about soldiers, or even, really, about parapsychology -- is there a connection between blind faith in one's own higher powers and the kind of devotion to country and duty that inspires soldiers? Are these guys the real deal, or a bunch of crackpots? The Men Who Stare at Goats is noncommittal -- it looks at the whole business in a semi-skeptical-but-willing-to-be-persuaded way. It all adds up to a lot of transient wackiness and absurdity that's as fluffy, and dissipates as quickly, as those clouds Cassady likes to burst.

9Nov2009

Amelia (2009)

I didn't know all that much about Amelia Earhart before I watched Amelia. I did not know, for example, that she had been married, or that she had an affair with aviation entrepreneur Gene Vidal (Gore's pop). I *did* know that she was a pioneering feminist and aviatrix, and that she disappeared over the Pacific while attempting to fly around the world. As if there was any doubt, that she loved to fly airplanes is a point made again and again in Amelia, a biopic directed by Mira Nair from a script by Ronald Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan. Earhart cared about only two things in life, judging by the number of times she says so in the movie: flying and being free. Aside from having Earhart (Hilary Swank) repeatedly reminding everyone that she loves to fly and wants to be free, the movie offers little insight into her character or personality as it follows the last nine years of her life, and her rise to international fame, in a series of flashbacks intercut with scenes from her final, ill-fated flight.

Swank, looking very much like Earhart with her sandy, cropped hair, does a decent enough impersonation, giving Earhart a Katherine Hepburn-esque voice and manner, and an enormous, flashing smile. Amelia pretty quickly failed my wardrobe test -- the clothes worn by Earhart were far more interesting than anything else in the movie, including her unusual marriage to publisher/promoter George Putnam (Richard Gere). Swank, with her lanky frame and long, androgynous face, was born to play Earhart, but this is not likely to be one of her more memorable roles. It's hardly a role at all, but more a recitation of things everybody already knew about Earhart -- She's spunky! She's courageous! She's a tomboy! She loves to fly! Amelia is a thumbnail sketch that never develops into a fully formed work of art.

The plot follows Earhart's trajectory like a highlight reel: she flies across the Atlantic, is wooed by Putnam, resists his marriage proposals, flies solo across the Atlantic, marries Putnam, flies again, etc. Biographical details get tossed in as fragments of dialogue, bullet points of marital discord between Putnam and Earhart. With its odd emphasis on Earhart's marriage, there's a lot of longing and yearning in Amelia -- Putnam romances her with as much desperation and exasperation as the calm Gere can muster, and Earhart romances the skies, yearning to be free and longing to fly. She charms the world while she's at it, although I imagine she was a lot livelier and more charming herself than the movie lets on.

Amelia is, unfortunately, a long movie that feels abbreviated, not because it moves quickly -- it doesn't -- but because it is so insubstantial and rushed, hurrying through the important biographical milestones without cultivating any genuine sense of the woman. The emotion is drained from this story -- allthough Gabriel Yared's strenuously sentimental musical score works overtime to create feeling. That the score has to do *any* work to generate emotion in a movie in which the heroine dies, leaving a grieving husband and bereft world, tells you all you need to know about Amelia.

1Nov2009

Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant (2009)

Apparently, in addition to the usual travails of being a teenager, these days an adolescent has to worry about vampires. It's only fair, I suppose. Vampires have their own worries in these complicated times. Used to be, a vampire could get by biting a few necks now and then. Nowadays, there are vampire wars. There's the neophyte Good vampires (the unkilling undead) who just want to get along with humans, versus your classic Bad vampires, who view humanity as an A+ buffet (or A negative, if your tastes run that way). In that vein, there's *True Blood* (my personal vampire addiction) and the Twilight saga, and now Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant, the first movie adapted from Darren Shan's twelve-book series Cirque du Freak: The Darren Shan Saga. Yep, an Irish bloke named Darren Shan wrote a young adult book series about a kid named... Darren Shan. Cirque du Freak, the movie, comes across like *Twilight* meets *Harry Potter*, with all kinds of adolescent angst amidst the supernatural goings-on, but true to its name, Cirque du Freak is just a little more freaky.

Darren Shan (Chris Massoglia) is your typical high school kid: a good student with loving (if somewhat overbearing) parents, and a troublemaking best friend named Steve (Josh Hutcherson). Darren is obsessed with spiders; Steve is way into vampires. The two of them sneak out one night and go to a mysterious show, the Cirque du Freak. One thing leads to another, and Darren is talked into becoming a vampire by Larten Crepsley (John C. Reilly), a somewhat world-weary old vampire. Why does Crepsley want Darren to become a vampire? That's one thing this exposition-heavy movie never quite gets around to explaining. Darren's only half-vampire, anyway -- he can still go out in the daytime. He doesn't want to drink blood, so his various vampire powers are rather dim, too. Add an identity crisis and picky eating to the travails of half-vampire teen life.

There's a villain named Mr. Tiny (Michael Cerveris), who is quite pale and tubby and up to no good. He is trying to instigate a war between the good vampires (like Crepsley) and the bad vampires, known as the Vampaneze. Mr. Tiny recruits Darren's buddy Steve to the side of the Vampaneze, which, needless to say, eventually leads to a Darren and Steve showdown. The showdown, although it is the culmination of this movie, doesn't resolve anything in the big picture, in which the long simmering vampire war continues to bubble. And the big picture -- in which dozens of books become dozens of movies -- is what Cirque du Freak is really about.

There's much to like about Cirque du Freak. It's colorful and kind of goofy around the edges, campy and comical and mildly outré. The cast and characters are a lot of fun: Willem Dafoe (looking quite undead) is fellow vampire Gavner Purl. Crepsley is dating the freakshow's va-va-voom bearded lady (Salma Hayek). Patrick Fugit is Evra, a green-skinned snake boy who just wants to be an indie rocker. Monkey Girl Rebecca (Jessica Carlson) is a possible love interest for Darren. There are all manner of oddballs in the Cirque: a dude with two stomachs, a dude with *no* stomach, a wolfman, a woman with big teeth...

But the movie quickly gets bogged down in the need to explain, and explain, and explain. There is clearly a very elaborate and complicated story within the Cirque du Freak saga about the Vampires and Vampaneze, and the mysterious Mr. Tiny's preoccupation with provoking a war. The role of the circus in all this is rather vague. Cirque du Freak, directed by Paul Weitz, and cowritten by Weitz and Brian Helgeland, goes to great trouble to explain the backstory without giving away too much of the mystery. The result is a movie that's all exposition and set-up, signifying practically nothing because it's just a big tease, a prologue for a sequel that hasn't been made yet. It explains everything and nothing, but not in some enigmatic, brain-tickling Zen kind of way. The goal, I suppose, is to leave the audience craving more. Cirque du Freak promises to satisfy that craving, to tell a good, complicated, compelling story in the future, but there are only hints here that this would-be franchise can deliver on that promise.

25Oct2009

Where the Wild Things Are (2009)

The wild things that stomp and howl and snarl through Where the Wild Things Are are mostly big and furry and ferocious, but, as anyone who has read Maurice Sendak's beloved children's book (and who hasn't?) knows, some wild things are small and wear wolf suits and get sent to their rooms without supper for raising a ruckus.

That's what happens to Max (Max Records), a ruckus-raising, tempestuous, howling, sometimes naughty boy. Max is really good at two things: construction and destruction. Like any kid, Max has good days and bad days, and on one especially bad day, he gets in trouble. In the book, Max was banished to his room, where a jungle grew up around him, and the Wild Things made him king. In the movie, Max runs away, and finds a boat, and sails the wild, frothing seas to the island of the Wild Things. The huge, furry beasts are churlish and childish and prone to tantrums, and they make Max (a great bluffer) their king. It was either that or eat him.

Sendak's book is a simple, slender volume, short on words, and filled with beautiful, feverish visions of frolicking beasts and a boy with a wild imagination. The movie, directed with emotional intimacy and intensity by Spike Jonze, gently stretches Sendak's work into a feature-length film, but without substantially changing it or reinterpreting it. Jonze cowrote the film with Dave Eggers, and notably, this adaptation doesn't turn into a jokey, loud, candy-colored action movie (as so often happens, sadly, to beloved children's books when clumsily adapted for the screen). Jonze maintains the serious tone and muted pallette, and the enigmatic ambiguity of the book. Where the Wild Things Are is a movie *about* a young child, but it's not really a movie *for* children (or at least not for young children). The movie is frequently dark and menacing, and the hard-to-please Wild Things are often sad, angry and confused about what they want. The film takes seriously the emotional and psychological complexity of childhood, but also its simplicity. After a hard day of bickering and moping, hugging and biting, boys and monsters alike enjoy nothing more than the simple pleasure of a big, warm, snuggly pileup.

Occasionally, the whooping, soaring, soundtrack (by Carter Burwell and Karen O) is distracting, but the cinematography by Jonze regular Lance Acord is beautifully textured and richly evocative, and the Wild Things' island is a glorious place of sand dunes, seacliffs, caves, and forests where flower petals fall like pink snowflakes. The Wild Things, with their giant muppet bodies, have wonderfully expressive faces (achieved with digital animation), and voices provided by Jame Gandolfini, Catherine O'Hara, Forest Whitaker, Chris Cooper, Lauren Ambrose, and Paul Dano. They make a delightfully complicated bunch of furry, feathery monsters. They behave like fractious, bickering relatives who, deep down, really love each other even if they can't stand each other. Records is a young actor with remarkable subtlety and a lovely openness and transparency.

Jonze has created a beautiful, rich and satisfying film that is wildly original and genuinely unique. Where the Wild Things Are is warm and scary, touching and thorny, an honest, enthusiastic, imaginative, child's eye look at the world in all its bewildering, astonishing, mystifying complexity. This is a movie that understands that childhood is enough to make anyone wild.

19Oct09

Zombieland (2009)

Zombies are right up there with vampires as the most enduring, most charismatic of monsters. Not charismatic, you say? Sure, vampires bring the sexy, while zombies are pretty messy eaters, and lousy conversationalists. But still, you gotta love the zombies. They're kinda like babies. Big, dumb, hungry, sloppy toddlers with a taste for human flesh.

Now, back in the day, zombies used to be slow and relentless. They'd moan about braaaaaaainnnnnns, and stagger after their victims, who pretty much had to do something stupid like fall down or stand next to a window to get eaten and subsequently zombified. Nowadays, like so much else in the world, zombies move fast. When did that start? 28 Days Later..., maybe. The zombies in Zombieland move fast, but they're still pretty stupid, which makes them hard to outrun, but easy to outwit. And since Zombieland, like any zombie movie, is premised on the notion that humanity is basically little better than zombies in the intellect department, the world is overrun with zombies pretty quickly.

And so, as Zombieland begins, there's one guy, who hails from Columbus, Ohio, who might just be the last non-zombie on Earth. Except that he isn't. Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) soon meets Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), on a lonesome highway strewn with half-eaten corpses and overturned cars. Tallahassee has a big truck and lots of weapons, and a serious jones for Twinkies, which everybody knows is the foodstuff of the apocalypse. Columbus is, by his own admission, a big, neurotic ball of fear, but he's smart, and has devised an extensive set of rules for surviving the zombie apocalypse. Said rules are explained in detail, and helpfully flashed on-screen for your pre-apocalypse edification. Tallahassee, on the other hand, is just really, really good at killing zombies, and killing zombies is something he really, really likes to do, because he really, really hates zombies.

Columbus and Tallahassee mix like oil and water. Columbus is a nervous, chatty little guy who makes wry observatons; Tallahassee speaks little and carries a big bat (just in case he sees any zombies that need killin'). There are complications when they encounter Little Rock (Abigail Breslin) and her big sister Wichita (Emma Stone), but the foursome, thrown together by chance, head off in search of a California theme park rumored to be completely free of the undead. I know what you're thinking -- since when is California zombie-free? They also cruise through Beverly Hills, where all those movie star mansions are sitting there vacant. T'is there they meet a non-zombie Bill Murray.

Columbus, who has never had any luck with the ladies, has to think his odds have improved, since he's practically the last man on Earth. So he tries his luck with Wichita, thus injecting a mildly diverting little nerd-meets-cool girl romance in between the zombie carnage. The rest of the movie is snappy, snarky banter peppered with lively undead action.

Zombieland is a horror-comedy-road trip movie that's light on horror and heavy on the comedy. It's chatty, goofy, dark, and it's pretty darn hilarious. Most zombie movies are not played for laughs, of course, because zombies are no laughing matter (at least when they're trying to gnaw your limbs off). These zombies are no exception. Not funny at all. But killing zombies, well that's something else altogether. The undead are dispatched (can the already expired be re-killed?) in a variety of bloody good ways in Zombieland, with instruments of destruction as varied as machine guns, a toilet, and a banjo. And Bill Murray is so funny you could die laughing.

12Oct2009

The Invention of Lying (2009)

Keats wrote: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." Well, maybe.

The Invention of Lying is about a man who, as the title suggests, invents lying. He lives in a world much like ours, except that humans don't tell lies. In fact, they *cannot* tell lies. More than that, they cannot help but tell the truth at all times, it seems. So it is, in addition to being a world without lying, a world without tact, discretion, or a sense of fellow-feeling, a world in which people are cruel and callous and boorish... but honest. Brutally, unflinchingly, unfailingly honest. They don't even have the words "truth" and "lie" -- the concepts simply don't exist.

Now lest you think a world without falsehood and deception would be paradise indeed (in which case, you must be a Kantian), The Invention of Lying defends the radical thesis that lying is beneficial. A little white lie now and then would spare a poor shlub like Mark Bellison (Ricky Gervais) from hearing what his coworkers really think of him. He wouldn't get Too Much Information from his blind date Anna (Jennifer Garner) about how she gratifies herself, or about how he fails to measure up in the looks, income, and personality departments. He wouldn't be told, repeatedly and by seemingly everyone, that Anna is out of his league. And it would make Mark's job a lot easier. Mark, you see, is a screenwriter, but since there are no falsehoods, nor even embellishments, art simply does not exist. Instead, Mark writes dreary historical documentaries about the 13th century when, lets face it, not much that was very entertaining happened.

And then one day Mark somehow tells a lie, and since no one has ever lied before, no one has any reason to doubt Mark's veracity, and so his lies are wildly successful. Which is how he comes to invent religion, when he tells a beautiful lie about the afterlife, and a Man in the Sky, to comfort a dying woman. Word gets out. Mark has invented God.

So there you have it -- without lies and artifice, there could be no art, and people would be miserable because they would know the honest truth about everything. And without falsehood, fabrication and fiction, there would be no religion and no God. (Also, screenwriters are prophets!) Because humanity is so literal-minded, yet so ingenuous, Mark is forced to explain why the Man in the Sky is so mean. Why does he cause cancer, and burn down houses? Ah, but he also puts out fires and cures cancer! Mark does his best to defend the Man in the Sky against charges that he's a big fat jerk, but theodicy is a thankless job (and it's worth noting that, confronted with theodicies, Kant himself basically punted).

The Invention of Lying is wry and dry, and darkly, philosophically funny. It comes thisclose to being a really radical satire, and it could have been darker, and more philosophical for my taste, but it lazily drifts off into the safe territory of romantic comedy. The romance is funnier because it's completely one-sided, of course, since a world without lies is also a world without romance (take that, Keats!). Loser boy meets girl, girl rejects loser boy, loser boy wins! but still can't get girl, etc. Will Anna stop being such a shallow, callous creature and finally marry Mr. Right, who is both a big fat liar and a *hero*? This is where The Invention of Lying really lays it on thick, but we want movies to lie about love, right?

Speaking of a world without art, The Invention of Lying is, to be honest, a pretty crummy looking movie. Gervais (who invented the British version of *The Office*, and *Extras*) cowrote and codirected the movie with Matthew Robinson, and it looks about as bad and cheaply made as the pompous documentaries filmed by Mark's employers (the aptly named Lecture Films). Every expense was spared, apparently, in the filming of The Invention of Lying, although there's a crackerjack cast filled with topnotch talent (Philip Seymour Hoffman, Rob Lowe, Tina Fey, Louis C.K., Jonah Hill, and Jeffrey Tambor, every one of whom, in some homage to verisimilitude, appears to have done his or her own hair and makeup). The Invention of Lying, like Mark Bellison, is kinda frumpy and dumpy looking on the outside, but on the inside, it's occasionally (if inconsistently) brilliant. No lie.

05Oct2009