Gateway Cinephiles

The Wyrm and His Boy

How to Train Your Dragon
2010 (USA)
Directors: Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders
Viewed: April 18, 2010
Format: 3D Digital Theatrical Projection (Wehrenberg Ronnies Cine)

For over a decade now, Dreamworks Animation has been churning out Shreks, Madagascars, and various other talking animal mediocrities (anyone remember Shark Tale?), jousting with Blue Sky Studios for a distant second-place slot behind American animation’s reigning champion, Pixar.  In 2008, Dreamworks managed its first genuinely good film, Kung-Fu Panda, a charming, marvelously designed bit of fluff in the underdog sports movie mold.  Lacking contemporary kiddie animation’s characteristic risible pop culture references and cheap scatological humor, Panda hinted at better things to come from the studio in terms of feature animation.  And, lo and behold, here we are, two years later, and Dreamworks has delivered the exhilarating, dazzling How to Train Your Dragon, a film that should by all rights be nothing more than disposable entertainment, but attains something much finer.  No doubt this is at least partly due to the men at the helm, Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders, who were the minds behind that oddball late Disney Renaissance marvel Lilo & Sitch.  However, it’s undeniable that Dragon feels like the progeny of a studio that has finally found its stride and resolved to aim high.  The story is simple, the design breathtaking, the action rousing, and the humor mostly warm and sweet.  While Dragon lacks the grace and thematic sophistication of a Pixar film, it is by any measure a damn splendid animated feature.

Read the rest…

Things Fighting Bigger Things

Clash of the Titans
2010 (USA / UK)
Director: Louis Leterrier
Viewed: April 14, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (AMC West Olive)

Let’s be honest, here.  Desmond Davis’ 1981 swords-and-sandals-and-stop-motion fantasy epic Clash of the Titans is not a particularly good movie, and the affection that it engenders flows from nostalgia born of endless Saturday-afternoon telecasts on UHF stations in the decade after its release.  To be sure, the original Clash introduced Gen-Xers (your truly included) to special effects master Ray Harryhausen’s unreal creations, and served as a gateway drug for the discovery of his earlier works, such as Mighty Joe Young, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.  Today, stop-motion has essentially vanished from big-budget live-action films.  (Although not from film altogether, thankfully, as it has recently given us wonderful features such as Coraline and Fantastic Mr. Fox.)  Accordingly, French director Lois Leterrier’s remake of Clash can be properly regarded as neither a tribute nor a slap to Harryhausen’s creations, although it is rife with winking references to Davis’ film. This Clash is strictly a diversionary actioner for the era of computer-generated beasties, one that owes as much to the original Greek myths and post-Lord of the Rings blockbuster norms as it does to the 1981 film.  Of course, the force that really sired this update is the almighty dollar, and its target audience is composed of money-flush adolescent boys who can’t be bothered to seek out the original Clash.  So why bother?  Well, because Leterrier, his reputation as a flashy hack notwithstanding, knows how to direct a thrilling action sequence. And because sometimes an old-school fantasy quest is just what the doctor ordered.

Read the rest…

Uffish, But Not Frumious

Alice in Wonderland
2010 (USA)
Director: Tim Burton
Viewed: March 5, 2010
Format: 3D Digital Theatrical Projection (AMC West Olive)

Any film treatment of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books must overcome a conspicuous stumbling block: How does one adapt a pair of Victorian nursery stories, consisting mainly of a succession of absurdist dialogues, into engaging cinema?  A literalist, scene-by-scene recreation of the Alice tales would make for an unconventional film, but also a wearisome and distinctly un-cinematic experience.  Given his gothic fairy-tale sensibilities and enduring fascination with outcasts defined by their hyperbolic physical and emotional qualities, Tim Burton would seem a comfortable fit for Carroll’s brand of amusing dementia. However, the director’s track record with big-budget adaptations has been woefully mixed, with Exhibit A in the negative column being his misguided, excruciating Planet of the Apes remake.  Happily, Alice in Wonderland, while hardly the rich, cerebral adaptation that Carroll’s works deserve, proves to be a solid little adventure tale that traipses through a deliciously gratifying Burton-esque landscape. In Wonderland, the director discovers an expansive sandbox for the funhouse impulses he favors in his most inventive works. Unfortunately, Alice never remotely achieves the madcap vigor of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Beetle Juice, or Batman Returns (all exemplars of Burton’s vision at its most fiendish and uninhibited).  The story is little more than a boilerplate Hero’s Journey, but coiled within are both the sensory splendors we expect from Burton the Fabulist, as well as some welcome jottings of subversion.

Read the rest…

Smoke and Mirrors

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
2009 (UK / Canada / France)
Director: Terry Gilliam
Viewed: January 17, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Theaters Tivoli Theater)

When it comes to Terry Gilliam films, I wouldn’t say that the only attraction is their design, but I’d be kidding myself if I denied that the essential allure of a new Gilliam feature is the look of the thing.  Those occasions when Gilliam has mated his distinctive mode of fantasy—part Victorian / Edwardian stagecraft, part comic strip zaniness—to a compelling set of characters, the result is tongue-in-cheek gold, as in Time Bandits and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.  (His two dystopian science-fiction films, Brazil and Twelve Monkeys, are equally great, but vibrate to an entirely different frequency.)  Gilliam’s new feature, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, is a weird bauble that fits snugly into oeuvre, yet like all of the director’s weaker efforts, it’s also a mess from a storytelling perspective.  It’s debatable how much of that can be blamed on the regrettable death of his leading man, Heath Ledger, and how much on Gilliam’s own hand, but it’s also telling that Imaginarium is disjointed tonally and narratively.  At its worst, Imaginarium plays out less like a film and more like a book of concept art that has been inelegantly cobbled together into a film.  There’s something more than a little perverse about a film-maker with such palpable thematic interest in myth-making but who nonetheless has a hard time finding a foothold in his own tale.

Read the rest…

Late to the Game: 9

2009 (USA)
Director: Shane Acker
Viewed: January 10, 2010
Format: DVD – Universal (2009)

Shane Acker’s talent for nimble, evocative world-building is on full display in 9.  It’s telling that even at a lean 79 minutes, the film still feels a bit padded and sluggish on the story front, given that all the satisfying setting crunchiness is delivered swiftly and efficiently.  Acker deftly establishes the essential traits of his post-apocalyptic world and the clan of burlap-skinned homunculi that inhabit it, while leaving plenty to implication and imagination, including the precise mechanics of the setting’s steampunk-tinged alchemical magic.  Perhaps unexpectedly, the nine little doll-folk are quite distinctive, both visually and as characters, but the real draw here is not the simplistic story—a hero awakens evil and then defeats evil, etc., etc.—but the richness of the blasted landscape, the uncanny menace of the monsters that stalk it, and the thrills of numerous small-scale battles and escapes.  Even the vague, unnecessarily drawn-out ending doesn’t markedly detract from 9’s guiltless visceral appeal, which is that of a novel, densely detailed world sketched with precision and enthusiasm.  Acker gratifyingly demonstrates that not only aren’t the fantasy, science-fiction, and dystopian genres dead, they’re often found in the same film, and a gorgeously animated one at that.

Mr. Cameron Wants You to Be Comfortable While He Does His Thing

Avatar
2009 (USA)
Director: James Cameron
Viewed: December 22, 2009
Format: 3D Digital Theatrical Projection (AMC West Olive)

I was only one year old when Star Wars was released in 1977, which means that for all practical purposes, I’ve always lived in a post-Star Wars world.  While I later participated quite enthusiastically in the broader consumer phenomenon often summed up as simply “Star Wars,”—encompassing sequels, toys, comics, and card games, to name just the few products I personally devoured—I was too young to catch Star Wars: A New Hope in its original theatrical release.  Even if I had been a few years older at the time, I obviously wouldn’t have been able to appreciate it as anything other than an entertaining tale of adventure.  Accordingly, when older generations speak of the revolutionary nature of Star Wars as cinema, of how it blew their minds and opened up previously undreamed possibilities in terms of the places movies could take us, I’ve always nodded along without ever truly understanding what they were saying.  How could I?  Subsequent cinema has been irrecoverably altered—or tainted, depending on your point of view—by the existence of Star Wars and is phenomenal commercial success.

Perhaps the highest praise I can bestow on James Cameron’s mind-bogglingly expensive 3D science-fiction epic, Avatar, is that I can now understand how my forebears felt when they first settled in to let Star Wars wash over them.  There’s nothing particularly nuanced about Avatar, which is essentially a standard science-fiction adventure, straight up, no chaser.  Thematically, emotionally, and structurally, its ambitions are modest, even pedestrian.  However, like Star Wars before it, Avatar is a revolutionary film.  You’ve heard it a hundred times before, but this time is indisputably true: This Is Like Nothing I Have Ever Seen.  It is fitting that it has been birthed by James Cameron, a technophilic film-maker whose finest works tell simple stories with relentless energy and discreet intelligence.  It’s a cliché to insist that a movie must be seen in the theaters to be appreciated, but Avatar is the first film in memory than positively demands that it be experienced in its full glory, and that means 3D digital theatrical projection.  This is a film that will be a shadow of its former self on even the most elaborate home theater system.  Trust me on this: cough up the funds for that overpriced multiplex ticket, and prepare to see a new world unfold before your eyes.

Read the rest…

Once Upon a Time, In a Place Called “Crescent City”…

The Princess and the Frog
2009 (USA)
Directors: Ron Clements and John Musker
Viewed: December 13, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print (AMC West Olive)

It’s been five years since Disney Animation Studios has produced a narrative feature that was at least partly hand-drawn, and longer than that since the venerable House of Mouse’s roughly annual doses of animated cheer could be regarded as unique cinematic events.  (1999’s Tarzan being the last triumph by my reckoning.)  It’s not surprising, then, that The Princess and the Frog is being trumpeted by the studio itself as a kind of overdue return to form.  In the wake of forgettable computer-generated mediocrities such a Chicken Little and Meet the Robinsons, there is a steely logic in Disney’s decision to abandon its anemic Pixar apings and instead pursue films created according to the template of its successful Renaissance features.  Indeed, TPatF possesses all the hallmarks of the studio’s 1990s films: hand-drawn animation embellished with dazzling visual effects; Broadway-style musical storytelling; a young, appealing protagonist; goofy comic relief characters; and simplistic moral lessons.  Perhaps it’s the long absence of that Disney Magic(TM)–benign, kid-friendly entertainment executed with stunning visual achievement–that makes that familiarity work so well in The Princess and the Frog.  Certainly, there’s very little that’s unexpected in Ron Clements and John Musker’s Jazz Age fairy tale.  However, there’s also nothing wrong with following a formula when the result is so gorgeous.  Just as Pixar has established itself as preeminent purveyor of children’s fare that is thematically richer and more downright cinematic than most “adult” features, Disney Animation Studio once made unbearably lovely moving picture books, far lovelier than their often crude stories or questionable politics warranted.  Perhaps the highest praise one can offer The Princess in the Frog is that it reignites that latent tradition with enthusiasm and boundless affection for its forebears.

Read the rest…

Crazy, Just Like Me

Fantastic Mr. Fox
2009 (USA / UK)
Director: Wes Anderson
Viewed: November 29, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Chase Park Plaza Cinema)

Wes Anderson’s distinctive authorial signatures—the fussy, nostalgia-rich production design, the playful movements of his camera, the droll labeling of chapters and even shots–has at times been derided as a dollhouse aesthetic, more suited to playthings than real people.  It’s not a criticism I share, but there you have it.  One might say that Anderson’s latest feature, Fantastic Mr. Fox, responds to such objections by taking them at face value, as it was made using literal dolls. Well, stop-motion puppets, to be precise.  A more natural fit between a particular style of animation and a living auteur would be hard to imagine, as Anderson’s propensity for treating every shot as a tableau is given its most ebullient expression yet.  There’s something damn near perfect about the marriage of Mr. Fox’s old-school animation, which heartily embraces its aura of toybox unreality, to the director’s natural affinities.  Anderson is an artist who thrives on meticulous attention to detail and on making every shot count, and animation provides ample opportunity to indulge such impulses.

Read the rest…

It’s All Fun and Games Until Someone Gets Hurt

Where The Wild Things Are
2009 (USA)
Director: Spike Jonze
Viewed: November 1, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print (Hi-Pointe Theater)

To call Spike Jonze’s bewildering, uneasy Where the Wild Things Are an “adaptation” of Maurice Sendak’s trim little bedtime story strikes me as the faultiest use of the term since David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch.  While Jonze’s film co-opts Sendak’s indelible creature designs and the general thrust of his tale—a boy journeys to an untamed island, is crowned king of the resident monsters, becomes disillusioned, and returns home—it contains little else that is familiar, either from the source material or the whole history of films about children and childhood.  This film is wondrous, exhausting, confused, offensive, and deeply affecting, often at the same time.  Above all, it is unremittingly odd.  It is without question one of the most confounding films I’ve seen in the past decade, and I’ve seen INLAND EMPIRE.  The space between a film that says uncommon things in unfamiliar ways and a film that has no conception of what it is trying to say… well, that is a narrow and shadowed gap, and Where the Wild Things Are squats squarely in it.  The adaptation of a beloved children’s book should be a sure-fire opportunity to churn out a crowd-pleasing mediocrity.  Somehow, for reasons that only he likely understands, Jonze has refashioned Sendak’s tale into a challenging, fractured, and often frustrating work of cinema, and for that I still can’t decide whether he deserves some sort of auteur medal or a stint in the time-out corner. [Minor spoilers follow.]

Read the rest…

A Fish That Dreamed It Was a Girl

Ponyo (Gake no ue no Ponyo)
2008 (Japan)
Director: Hayao Miyazaki
Format: Theatrical Print
Viewed: September 17, 2009

Japanese animated film-maker Hayao Miyazaki has an unusual talent for telling stories that are visually and emotionally compelling despite the admittedly murky character of his fantasy worlds.  In films such as My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, and Spirited Away, one gets the sense that fidelity to a coherent mythology is, at best, an afterthought.  Miyazaki’s works operate on the senses and the heart.  That’s not a backhanded complement, but a truism that, once embraced, leads to an appreciation for his unusual and rewarding films.  Ponyo is no exception to this principle.  Trying to decipher every jot of this weird, wild aquatic fantasy is an exercise in futility.  Better to sit back and absorb it, revel in it, and let it weave its enchantments.  As with all of Miyazaki’s films, and in contrast to most works of animated kiddie fare, Ponyo lingers on both the intimate and epic while examining the intersection of the mundane and the fantastic.  Indeed, consistent with the animistic thread that runs throughout the director’s work, Ponyo presents the worlds of flesh and spirit as tightly entwined and ultimately interdependent.  This is underlined not merely through exposition—which is sparing and on-the-nose—but also through the rhythm and emphasis of the film’s scenes.  The steeping of noodles in hot water receives as much attention as a titanic sea goddess drifting through the ocean depths.  Such is the way of Miyazaki, who sees the human magic within the banal details of life and connects them to unrealities that possess a mythic tinge.

Read the rest…