Gateway Cinephiles

Uffish, But Not Frumious

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

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.]

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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.

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The End Is Near

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
2009 (UK / USA)
Director: David Yates
Viewed: July 22, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

It seems safe to say at this late date that pining for a rigorously faithful adaptation of a Harry Potter novel is an exercise in fanboy/fangirl futility.  Devotees of the Potter series–and I count myself among that ubiquitous club–are inevitably better off appreciating each new cinematic incarnation as a freestanding indulgence of a dense and often daring fantasy aesthetic.  More substantively, and with varying success, each Potter film has attempted to evoke a distinctive tone and set of themes, an endeavor that has always been constrained by the fact that each film is but a small segment in an epic saga.  The visual excitement that Alfonso Cuarón brought to Prisoner of Azkaban has not yet been matched, and for a time it seemed as though Mike Newell’s adept juggling of Goblet of Fire’s pubescent terrors–physical, emotional, sexual, and existential–would also prove to be a high point.  Fortunately for the series’s long-term relevancy, director David Yates has bested all his predecessors save Cuarón with the thrilling Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and that includes himself.  Although Yates rose to the occasion in delivering a satisfactory Order of the Phoenix two years ago, the result was in some ways disappointing. Phoenix often seemed a hodgepodge of scenes that lacked both cohesion and dramatic propulsion, with the notable exception of the terrifying climactic battle in the Department of Mysteries.  As a storyteller, Yates exhibits a significant evolution with Prince, evincing a clear understanding for the source material’s most affecting narrative arcs: Malfoy’s torment, Slughorn’s shame, and the overdue germination of love between Ron and Hermione. At the same time, the director demonstrates a deft handling of mood, alternately evoking giddy joy and chilling horror without subjecting his audience to whiplash.  In other words, Half-Blood Prince does fantasy adventure exactly as it should be done.

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You’re Lost, Little Girl

Coraline
2009 (USA)
Director: Henry Selick
Viewed: March 8, 2009
Format: Real 3D Theatrical Print

When Henry Selick delivered the ambitious, whimsically prickly The Nightmare Before Christmas in 1995, I doubt that he had any inkling that his little fable–rendered via the exhausting, old-school technique of stop motion animation–would become a cultural touchstone for a generation of nostalgic goths and wannabe goths, who grooved on the film’s mashup of Jules Bass Christmas specials and Tim Burton’s droopy sensibilities. (Not that I’m speaking from personal experience of anything. *Cough.*) In the years that followed, Selick made a blander stop motion follow-up and a rather notorious flop, but with his new film, Coraline, the director has come blazing back to the front lines of both feature animation and “mature” children’s storytelling. Here is a film that dares the viewer to resist its enchantments and terrors, boasting some of the most dazzling design since, well, The Nightmare Before Christmas. However, Coraline decisively surpasses Selick’s previous milestone in both a technical and artistic sense, setting a high-water mark for the sort of intricate, captivating animated stories that seem in short supply these days. And the story! The sooty fingerprints of modern myth-spinner Neil Gaiman are all over this wondrous tale, which borrows equally from Victorian nursery literature, kid-savvy afternoon TV fare, and a Hero’s Journey that would make Joseph Campbell do a double-take.

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