Film Rolls, Round 5: Luca and Stage Fright

The top row is a weird place, because there's a point where you jump from very early western movies to fairly recent ones, and then soon after you jump from very recent ones to reasonably early. Like so:

That ten gets Mookie right at the end of the first row, which was (at the time) basically "stuff that didn't make it into theaters during the pandemic". And, yes, I bought a copy of Luca even though I've got Disney+ and don't really figure on dropping it any time soon, although it's kind of messing with my thought process on this.

Meanwhile, Bruce was already on the second row (remember Dragonwyck?) and has rolled a seven, so he's just dipping his toe into the 1950 and a Hitchcock I hadn't seen yet, Stage Fright.

So let's see how that went!

Luca

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 April 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)

That Pixar would, to some degree, become simply one of several quite impressive animation studios was probably inevitable, and arguably a good thing overall: We want a lot of people out there doing good work, even if the top dog is not so restrictive in tone and style as one might fear. So it's okay for Luca to be a pretty good movie rather than one which pushes the technology forward or has a brilliantly abstract premise.

And Luca is, in fact, pretty good; the designs for the undersea society are more complete and creative than a DreamWorks "like New York but _____" while the town above the waterline is the sort of period construction that seems beautiful and nostalgic but never quite crosses the line of too good to be true. There's nice chemistry between the three main kids, who are all smart and focused in their own ways but also volatile in the way that tweens can be. There are entertaining adventure bits, the inevitable Terrific Pixar Chase, and an earnest and upbeat feeling even through the sadder material.

Does it have the sort of surprising gut punch that Pixar is often known for, or the ability to sort of get more out of its metaphor through its fantasy elements? Not quite, I don't think: There's nothing like how "When She Loved Me" has a million different ways to gut-punch you in Toy Story 2 and the absence of Alberto's family never quite reveals itself as the sort of hole director Enrico Casarosa seemingly intends it to. The film is ultimately a little glossier than its makers perhaps intend it to be.

Which is fine - Pixar's allowed to make films that are pretty good, if not necessarily special the way their greatest successes have been. I can imagine kids enjoying this and their parents being fairly charmed as they watch alongside, and that's not exactly easy!

Stage Fright

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 April 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)

I was mildly surprised to realize that I hadn't seen this particular Hitchcock when it showed up for pre-order on Blu-ray from the Warner Archive label; Hitch is a staple of the local repertory houses, after all, and I try to camp out there whenever one has a Hitchcock series. This one, though, falls between the silence and early English talkies that get programmed as his early days and the point when he was so well-established that he got big budgets and star-studded casts, everything he did being regarded as a potential classic at the time, both temporally and in feel.

Indeed, it's possible that seventy years later, being directed by Hitchcock works against it; with some journeyman director, a viewer might more easily appreciate how it's got elements of both film noir and a sort of classic British mystery. You can probably draw a pretty straight line between Robert Siodmak's Phantom Lady and this, and if Jane Wyman's amateur sleuth isn't quite the delight that Ella Raines is in that movie, Marlene Dietrich is enough femme fatale to make up for it and Alastair Sim is the sort of cozy character actor whose very presence smooths out some of the film's more convenient contrivances. Not a bad little minor genre film, but the Master of Suspense never really did much in the way of the cozy mysteries this often recalls; indeed, his tendency was almost always to play them as comedy, at least until it was time to put the screws to someone.

Which is why the final sequence is so surprisingly good; no longer worried about having the audience get ahead of Wyman's Eve, he spends the final scenes putting her in genuine danger from a killer freed to be monstrous, setting the whole thing in the bowels of a theater among all the costumes, props, and other materials actors use to create characters for our entertainment and which the killer used to hide in plain sight even as Eve used them to go undercover. After an hour or so of playing nice, we're suddenly in the middle of a psychological thriller where Hitch is playing with people presenting false faces for the purposes of good and evil while playing a vicious game of cat and mouse.

Maybe it's better that he holds back and sort of springs it on us in the last act, plunging the audience into a darkness that lurks behind their safe, comedic murder mysteries, but the fact that the film feels relatively ordinary for so long likely keeps people from really associating it with the classics that appear around it in his filmography (it's a couple years after Rope and one before Strangers on a Train).


So that's a pleasant couple days in April, although they're evenly-matched enough to not affect the standings at all:

Mookie: 20 ¼ stars

Bruce: 22 ¾ stars

Bruce still leads, both in accumulated stars and on the path:

The next round, though, has a pretty major effect…

This Week In Tickets: 11 June 2018 - 17 June 2018

Yes, I enjoy both 35mm prints and 3D movies. They're both a lot of fun.



I wasn't going to do the early show of The Incredibles (and its attached short, "Bao"); I got down to Boston Common for another movie and MoviePass started acting really weird, highlighting every movie in a slot when I selected one and then not reserving any tickets. Didn't look like customer service would fix it in time, so I walked to South Station, got on the Silver Line, and headed for the Icon.

I feel like I should walk back my ambivalence about that place back a little; I've been down there more than I expected, mostly for 3D movies and the main "Icon-X" screen, and if you don't go Friday or Saturday and sign up for their free card/app, the price isn't bad. Still, I expect the prices are that low because I've never seen it crowded, and someone who works in the Seaport mentioned there's never anyone around if he goes there for a movie after work. Will the prices go up if people start showing? Dunno. I'm tempted to see something there opening night to see if it ever gets busy sometime, but I wonder if this premium-ish theater being so quiet has the ArcLight folks nervous about the plex they've got planned for Causeway.

Having somehow never seen Matinee, I went to that at the Somerville at midnight on Friday, and insert your joke about me being too old for that here; it left me wiped for pretty much all of Saturday. Then again, maybe the joke about how weird a time midnight is to show a film called "Matinee" is better.

I was able to get up bright and early on Sunday, though, to catch the cheap (and lonely) screening of Race 3 (not very good) with time to get some shopping done before Ocean's 8 (pretty fun).

Next up, some of the things I've been putting off. Roughs on my Letterboxd account.

"Bao"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 14 June 2018 in Showplace Icon at the Seaport #10 (first-run, RealD 3D DCP)

This year's Pixar short that is almost a shoo-in for an Oscar nomination because it's the one that the most people will see is, as per usual, clever and visually impressive, but I suspect that it will raise a lot of eyebrows about three quarters of the way through as viewers watch it and think something along the lines of that not really fitting in with what the short seemed to be going for up until that point. Writer/director Domee Shi has made a short that packs a lot of feeling into a few minutes, visualizing the sort of love you can put into food, how it can be a substitute for what's missing otherwise, with plenty of visual comedy as it goes awry.

And then something happens which works a lot better if you're assuming that the fifty-ish lady making the bao is an empty-nester but not so much if (like me) you thought she'd never had kids, and even if you had... Well, I don't know. It's kind of tricky, and I don't think anything after that is really quite so effective as what led up to it. There's still plenty to love - the animation style is beautiful, especially as it leans into the bulk of the cast of characters being ethnically Chinese in a way that could look like bad caricature but never does.

(Funny projection aside: Incredibles 2 is a scope movie, but was being shown on a 1.85:1-ish screen, and "Bao" is a 1.85-ish movie, but since it's "attached" to Incredibles 2, it's centered within the scope picture. Since Icon doesn't mask its screens, "Bao" winds up showing with black space all around it, which is not ideal!)

Incredibles 2

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14 June 2018 in Showplace Icon at the Seaport #10 (first-run, RealD 3D DCP)

Man, it's good to see Brad Bird back doing animation, where he can do basically anything. One understands his forays into live action - nobody goes to film school with the dream of sitting in an office, managing a bunch of guys working on computers in cubicles - but to watch him set huge action pieces up with a dozen characters, each with different powers, doing their thing is to see a master at work; despite the strides Marvel has made, the only time this sort of big comic book action has really reached its potential outside of animation is the climax of The Avengers, and Bird manages that three or four times here.

It props up a pretty darn straightforward story, in that there's not really a turn that you don't see coming (everything from the Mr. Mom gags to the identity of the villain is awful familiar), but sometimes a well-told story is more about execution than surprise; though I still don't love the character design, the retro-styled world these folks live in is gorgeous, the action is great, and the three-D pops like in few other movies. The returning voice cast is just as good, and Michael Giacchino's score is still fantastic, if more bombastic than sly this time around.

It's a long time since the first movie, but also just a minute, which is kind of the way superhero stories work, struggling to be both timeless and of the moment. For Bird, that means continuing to wrestle with the very idea of these larger-than-life characters; both these movies and his live-action Tomorrowland seem to show a man enthralled by the idea of an elite but also distrustful even as he has a hard time taking the approach of someone outside of it.

Matinee

* * * (out of four)
Seen 15-16 June 2018 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Midnight Specials, 35mm)

Somehow, despite liking Joe Dante and the way he thinks a lot, I haven't seen a lot of his work, and not this specifically. At first, it felt like a pretty good decision; the first act especially plays as nostalgic mush, complete with some of the more obvious needle-drops you can expect.

But it grows on me, in large part because Dante and his writers are tremendously fond of their characters. John Goodman's take on Nick Castle-like film producer Lawrence Woolsey is warm in all the spots where it might have been cynical; it's a smaller, more charming performance than you'd think from the poster. And at the center are Simon Fenton and Lisa Jakub as the two teenagers who fall for each other. Neither really "wins", as often seems to be the goal; they respect what the other is passionate about, and maybe learn a bit more general empathy, but Dante and the cast make it compelling without being antagonistic. But even the sillier characters (notably, Robert Picardo's panicky theater manager) are given a certain level of respect.

It gets pretty darn funny as the actual matinee starts, with a careful combination of intended silliness and chaos, and just enough peril to make things a bit more intense. (Also: I wonder how many of the people who complain about kids and teens in movie theaters now were like the kids shown being monsters in this one at the time!) It may be someone else's nostalgia, but it's earnest and inclusive without trying to label that era any kind of golden age.

Ocean's 8

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 17 June 2018 in AMC Boston Common #10 (first-run, DCP)

Not necessarily the most inventive heist movie ever made, but very fun. It's got a cast full of people who know the ins and outs of their roles almost by instinct, sure hands who make a caper based on sleight of hand as much fun as one based on big effects pieces, and takes just enough time to tell the story and get out but still have moments to play.

Sandra Bullock slides right into the lead role like she's been waiting for it all her life, and I'm sure that I'm not the only person that thinks Cate Blanchett is playing a partner in more than crime in a role whose sharpness plays well off Bullock being smooth - kind of the opposite of the dynamic George Clooney & Brad Pitt had in the previous three movies. The ensemble is great from top to bottom - good enough that I was kind of delighted to be reminded that Sarah Paulson was in the movie when it got to her - but it's especially delicious to watch the likes of Anne Hathaway and Helena Bonham-Carter in parts that aren't quite winking self-parody, but aren't quite not. The Ocean's movies have always has a sense of the genre conventions they're playing with, and this one perhaps embraces them with less fuss than the rest, right down to how they are not quite teasing a possible cameo all the way to the last moment, by which point it doesn't really matter because director Gary Ross and co-writer Olivia Milch have managed to use that hook to get the audience more interested in what's actually in front of them.

The Good Dinosaur

I probably shouldn't have been able to get to this particular screening of The Good Dinosaur, what with it being downtown at 4:15pm, but I baked on work about a half hour before the 3pm early close. Everyone else in the office left at noon to "work from home" for the rest of the day, and there have been several pre-holidays where I worked am extra half hour because the bus out of Burlington passes my place of employment at half past the hour that time of day. I've banked it.

I was kind of surprised that there weren't more 3D showings to be had - of the two theaters spewing it on the way home, one was 2D-only and the other only had 3D at fairly inconvenient times. It's a shame, because both The Good Dinosaur and the short that played before it are some of the best 3D work Pixar has done, and it seems a strange pattern that the films which seem to put some work into how the third dimension gets used don't get booked that way quite as much. I wonder if it's a case of Disney having a rep for only using it reluctantly, their audience being less willing to pay extra for am entire family going out, or some interaction between the two.

At any rate, I liked this one a lot, and was gratified when it got applause at the end. Clasping for a movie is a weird thing to do unless you know the folks who programmed it (and took a risk in doing so) or cast/crew are in the house, but both times is happened in a multiplex screening this year, it seemed instructive: It was interesting, at least, to hear that people really enjoyed Jurassic World rather than it being propelled by nostalgia and saturation advertising, and that this one worked for parents and kids. A lot of what I enjoyed was its eccentricity, and I didn't know if that would translate.

Then again, maybe people just like dinosaurs that much.

"Sanjay's Super Team"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 25 November 2015 in AMC Boston Common #15 (first-run, RealD DCP)

As much as "Sanjay's Super Team" is a delightful little animated short - which it is - there seems to be something significant about it playing in thousands of theaters right before a major release on a holiday weekend as opposed to as part of an animation program at a film festival. If it's not quite something that doesn't feel the need to explain a specific culture to its mainstream American audience, it's awfully close.

It's also plenty entertaining praise of that sort of context, telling a simple sorry of a boy watching a superhero cartoon on television while his father attempts to worship and meditate on the other side of the room, only to insist young Sanjay join him. It's a cute little second-generation culture clash, put together with plenty of charm and giving impressively subtle personalities to both father and son. It would be easy to exaggerate either, but instead they're quietly different enough that their not connecting is sort of sad. If that were all the movie was, it would still be impressive.

But it's got a big segment in the middle that's equally inspired by American superheroes and Hindu mythology, and it's a grand, colorful bit of action, genuinely surprising and kind of tense in how it plays out, in part because of how it reflects Sanjay's childish fears of upsetting his father or even doing real damage by extinguishing a candle, and in part for how it's impressively choreographed and put together, using the fact that the shrine is a box to create natural bounds for a 3D presentation. The contrast with the real world is great, but the two halves of the short strengthen rather than distract from each other.

The Good Dinosaur

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 25 November 2015 in AMC Boston Common #8 (first-run, RealD DCP)

I'm not sure at what point during The Good Dinosaur I started leaning forward, eagerly anticipating whatever was going to appear on screen next, but it happened, and by the end, I was as delighted with this movie as any I'd seen all year. It's a rare combination of visually stunning, creative, and surprisingly heartfelt. Given that those are words that could also be used to describe Pixar's other exceptional film this year (Inside Out), it almost seems like an insufficient description. This movie delighted me, pure and simple.

It posits a world where no mass extinction occurred 65 million years ago, and given a few million more years, dinosaurs were able to evolve into a variety of intelligent species including a pair of brontosauri (voiced by Jeffrey Wright & Frances McDormand) whose farm soon welcomes three hatchlings. Libby & Buck are high-spirited, but Arlo (voice of Raymond Ochoa) is timid, and even backs down when charged with stopping the proto-human "critter" making off with their grain. It leads to a pair of calamitous events at the nearby river, with Arlo and the critter he eventually names "Spot" (voice of Jack Bright) swept far downstream with the frightened Arlo facing a long walk home.

It's odd that there has been little talk of the Disney company's year-2000 release Dinosaur as this movie approached release; not only do both feature young dinos of similar varieties on an incredible journey through real or extraordinarily realistic environments, but both had fairly tortured production histories on the way there. Pixar has, of course, earned a fair amount of trust with its original productions and in that case the trust is warranted, even though the script certainly shows signs of having gone through many hands - from original director Bob Peterson to another four people with story credit (including eventual director Peter Sohn) to screenwriter Meg LaFauve. This isn't always a bad thing - although there are a few run-of-the-mill moments, there are also some decidedly odd ones, and LaFauve and Sohn are mostly able to connect the work of all these different voices into something that runs fairly smoothly from start to finish.

Full review on EFC.

This Week In Tickets: 18 June 2012 - 24 June 2012

Another summer week with more reading than watching. I got through Greg Rucka's Alpha and started Keigo Higashino's The Devotion of Suspect X around the couple of movies I saw:



A good chunk of the weekend was, happily, spent at my cousin Sarah's wedding. I naturally managed to leave everything until the last minute, which led to me sleeping on the couch in my father's hotel room because I hadn't booked one of my own in time, which is the sort of thing I really should look into growing out of. But, hey, I was far from the only disorganized person, from the stories I heard about the rehearsal dinner. I doubt them, because the involved my Uncle Dick actually raising his voice, which I do not believe is something he is equipped to do.

Epic toast by the best man, though, and my nieces are just dancing fools who were able to keep going well into the night. I bet they crashed hard, though, because I was pretty sluggish the next day and I didn't do much of anything.

That's why I cut my planned movie-ing for Sunday down to one movie from two and chose Your Sister's Sister on the basis of "hey, it combines with the grocery store for a single trip". Which isn't quite the only movie I saw that way; Friday night had me choosing Brave over Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter based on when the bus would drop me off after work.

"La Luna"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 June 2012 in the Arlington Capitol #1 (first-run, RealD 3D)

Is it okay to admit I was a little disappointed with the two "Toy Story" shorts Pixar gave us before Disney movies last year? I mean, I love the characters and all, but they came on the heels of the amazing "Day & Night", just revisitations of familiar characters compared to something new and exciting

"La Luna" is a trickier beast in a lot of ways. It's great-looking, really cutely designed and smoothly animated - and it does its cartoon-style gags a lot better than most CGI shorts do - with Michael Giacchino contributing a nice little score. It's frequently playful, although it's somewhat unusual in that it hoards that whimsy until the very end. A lot of films, even short ones, will have more little payoffs of the concept it sets up than "La Luna" does, whereas this one doesn't seem to want to spill until the last shot.

Which is fine, because it's a really terrific last shot that is not over-built. "La Luna" at various points teeters right on the edge of not getting away with it, but winds up doing just fine.

Brave

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 June 2012 in the Arlington Capitol #1 (first-run, RealD 3D)

Brave is certainly a nice enough movie, one I'd recommend to my brother with the five-year-old daughter without much reservation. It's heroine Merida even has a full complement of parents, something which has bothered them in the past where Disney princess movies are concerned. And for a kid Dagny's age, I'll bet it's pretty darn magical, especially if you're not comparing it with other things: As Disney princess movies go, it's not Beauty and the Beast; as Pixar goes, it's no Toy Story; as movies about rambunctious kids dealing with dangerous animals in medieval Scotland go, it's no How to Train Your Dragon...

The movie had a somewhat more publicly tumultuous history than many productions - I believe it was originally set to by Brenda Chapman's movie (and titled "The Bear and the Bow"), but by the time it was done, two others also had directing credits and there was a fourth writer credited as well. Though many productions have more hands involved than the single auteur the credits suggest, there are two ways having several people pulling in different directions can go. Sometimes, a movie will go all over the place, which gets a bad rap but which I think is preferable to having the various voices cancel each other out. That's sort of what happens here - there's never the point where the movie feels big and ambitious; it's timid, never going off on the grand adventure that all the movies listed in the first paragraph have.

If there's one factor that exemplifies this smallness, I'd say it's the witch that sets the second act drama in motion. As amusing as bits of her scenes are - and her character shtick actually dovetails pretty nicely with what happens to move the plot forward - she exists not just as a plot device, but one that withholds information for no good reason (having just watched the latest Torchwood series, I had Eve Myles's voice in my head disdainfully saying "oh, you're cryptic"), and has other problems. One of the movie's themes is that "legends are lessons", but having this goofy magic-user pop up diminishes the grandeur of those legends. Plus, she's the source of anachronistic gags that Disney overdid badly after Aladdin's Genie proved so popular.

(Aside - for a movie with the Pixar name on it, this really feels like the lesser Disney features of ten or fifteen years ago, both in how tone and execution. It's the sort of thing that putting John Lasseter in charge was supposed to sweep out of Disney Feature Animation, which is sort of ironic.)

Fortunately, none of these issues make Brave actually bad, just mediocre story-wise. I love its core characters enough to want them to be in a better movie, especially Merida with her tomboy streak that borders on selfishness (she is a teenager), awesomely-rendered wild hair, and voice-acting from Kelly Macdonald. King Fergus (voiced by Billy Connolly) and Queen Elinor (voiced by Emma Thompson) are pretty terrific too. The movie is also just gorgeous, full of nifty character designs, beautiful scenery, and wonderful composition - or whatever you call the animated equivalent of cinematography. The 3D is very much a double-edged sword here, though: For as much as it seems to be the film's native format and it is used very well, the projection struggles pretty badly with the number of scenes that take place at dusk, even at a theater with a decent reputation for presentation. I suspect it will look amazing on a 3D TV with active-shutter glasses.

Kids, of course, aren't going to care much about the structural stuff, and likely most adults won't either. Combined with the Wreck-It Ralph trailer and the "La Luna" short, it's a couple hours that entertains its audience pretty well, and there's nothing wrong with that.

I like IMAX 3-D: Cars 2, "Under the Sea", and "Born to Be Wild"

For just the second time ever, it seems, the MBTA has adjusted their schedules in a way to make getting to and from Jordan's for a movie relatively painless (the first was when they decided to actually run the 136/137 bus tandem on Sundays). Even cutting things a little close on the Orange Line, the bus dropped me off at 55 Walker's Brook Drive just in time to climb the hill and get my tickets, and it wasn't more than a 15 minute wait on the other end. I was able to just tear through my book that day, too, so that was satisfying all around.

Especially since, despite all the negative reviews I've seen, the movie was darn good. It doesn't transcend the "kid's cartoon" genre the way many of Pixar's other recent films do, but it's an exciting adventure that can bring a smile to an otherwise sour puss if accepted as such. By that I don't mean to lower one's expectations of quality, but to judge it for what it is rather than what one wants it to be (especially if what one wants it to be is "nonexistent, because it's a sell-out sequel to a movie I didn't much like anyway!"). There are bits that put a big, stupid grin on my face - the black humor of Finn McMissile being presented with a crushed cube of metal, the toy airplanes that scatter when cars drive through a park in Rome, and Bruce Campbell showing up in a Pixar flick are just a few - and they don't feel like pandering.

Without walking back how much I enjoyed the movie, one thing that surprises me upon reflection is how my perception of John Lasseter has changed upon looking at the Cars movies. Back when Toy Story popped up, it was easy to place him aside Windsor McKay, Walt Disney, Usama Tezuka, and Hayao Miyazaki as animation pioneers who not only revolutionized animation as a medium but were also brilliant storytellers; now, seeing what sort of brilliant and emotional movies Pixar is making with him in a supervisory role (and how the "main" animation department at Disney has improved ever since he was placed in charge), the perception is a little different - he's still a very good storyteller, but he's arguably an even better mentor and developer of raw talent.

One more amusing thing - with the IMAX theater at Jordan's gaining another new sponsor (this time, Posturepedic), Elliot recorded a new pre-show teaser, this one taking pains to point out that they project using 70mm film. I don't know if that's necessarily a reaction to the recent wave of dissatisfaction at how digital projectors equipped for 3D can create a sub-par experience (with Boston cited at a specific example), but I kind of like to think it is.

The next day wound up being about using my tickets for the IMAX shows at the Aquarium up. I kick myself a little for not using one earlier and seeing Hubble 3-D again, but both movies I did see were solidly enjoyable science documentaries, worth the $5 I paid and probably the $9.95 full price. I may not wind up using the ones for the Museum of Science, depending how this weekend lines up, but if I don't, it will because I'm doing something else that's cool.

Cars 2

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 25 June 2011 at Jordan's Furniture Reading (first-run, IMAX 3-D)

There's no getting around the fact that Cars 2 exists because of Disney's merchandising machine, and unlike the Toy Story sequels, which also exist in large part because the stuff on the shelves could use a refresh and a boost, the original Cars wasn't well-received by critics. As a result, there's less anticipation and more cynicism where this one's concerned, as few are saying "well, I don't like sequels as a rule, but I really love Lightning and Mater" the way they did with Buzz and Woody. For as clear as the mercenary motives behind it's creation are, though, Cars 2 succeeds at being an entertaining adventure.

Somewhere in the South Pacific of the Cars world (where cartoon vehicles live without human drivers), British Intelligence operative Finn McMissile (voice of Michael Caine) has come upon a secret base where a colleague has disappeared, and he barely escapes from the clutches of Professor Z (voice of Thomas Kretschmann) himself. Meanwhile, back in Radiator Springs, stock racer Lightning McQueen (voice of Owen Wilson) was planning on some R&R after another successful season, but the goading of open-wheel racer Francesco Bernoulli (voice of John Turturro) has him sign up for the World Grand Prix, this time with his new friends from the first movie as his pit crew, including his loyal but far-from-worldly best bud Tow Mater (voice of Dan "Larry" Whitney). Things get hairy, though, once they arrive in Tokyo - Mater's cornpone antics are kind of embarrassing to McQueen, while McMissile and his assistant Holley Shiftwell (voice of Emily Mortimer) mistake Mater for the American spy they were sent to meet, sweeping him into a world of intrigue.

Cars 2 is kind of an odd duck compared to other recent Pixar movies, and even its own progenitor. It's the first feature from the studio that really doesn't have an emotional gut-punch since, well, Cars - even the moment where Mater recognizes that others often see him as a buffoon is muted, either not looking or not succeeding in getting the audience to cry like Up and the Toy Story sequels managed. Even without bringing those into the picture, it's in many ways the inverse of director John Lasseter's original Cars. Lasseter and his co-writers move McQueen from lead to supporting and Mater in the other direction, crafting the story around Mater at odds with big international cities rather than McQueen in small town America. The tone is completely different; where Cars was often quiet and pastoral, the sequel is loud and packed with action.

Full review at EFC.

"Under the Sea"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 June 2011 at the New England Aquarium (repatory, IMAX 3-D)

I saw this one about a year ago, and wound up giving it somewhat higher marks than I do today. Of course, the movie itself hasn't changed; I just didn't find myself reacting quite so strongly as I did. It could be the audience, it could be that I was using a coupon up before it expires and thus seeing it more out of obligation than enthusiasm, it could be that I was sitting in the second row and that's really too close for this sort of giant-screen presentation. Or because it's a science doc aimed toward young children and while the picture was still dazzling, the information wasn't new.

One thing that often amuses me with some of these things they show at the Aquarium is just how much hot fish lovin' gets into them. I'm half-kidding, of course, but I remember seeing one with my brother and joking afterward that one of the centerpieces of the movie was a squid orgy. This one makes audiences go "aawwww!" at the sight of two cuttlefish kissing (no small feat, because the cuttlefish is a supremely grotesque creature, almost certainly the visual inspiration for many depictions of Lovecraft's Cthulhu, whose very visage is said to be enough to drive men mad), while narrator Jim Carrey jauntily points out that this is all it takes to fertilize the females eggs. The implication is clear enough that when we return to the cuttlefish later, and Carrey talks about how it is trying to avoid the claws that pinch as it stalks its crab dinner, I have a hard time not shouting out that you would too, if nature had decided to place your reproductive organs in your mouth! I mean, avoiding spicy foods would be the least of your concerns.

And with that thoroughly inappropriate detour amid reviews of G-rated movies, let's move on...

"Born to Be Wild"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 June 2011 at the New England Aquarium (first-run, IMAX 3-D)

Even the coldest, meanest of people has a soft place in their hearts that wants to see this movie. After all, it's about orphaned baby animals and people who have made it their life's work to raise these cuties and return them to their habitats; who can argue with that. The filmmakers are banking on an immediate emotional reaction to the lovable animals followed by appreciation for the nobility of the cause, and once you've got those, dissecting it as a film is beside the point.

Director David Lickley presents us with two women doing this good work in parallel: In Kenya, we meet Daphne Sheldrick, who grew up on the grounds of a national park and now rescues baby elephants whose parents have been killed, mostly by poachers for their ivory. On the other side of the Indian Ocean, in Borneo, Dr. Birute Galdikas tends to orangutans, who are seldom hunted as such but have been crowded out of their habitats by expansion and deforestation. Both are intelligent women with dedicated teams, and neither aims to domesticate their charges; these animals will remain in their care only until they are able to fend for themselves in the wild.

Lickley and screenwriter Drew Fellman tell the story in a reasonably straightforward manner; we're given an introduction to each of these women, shown a rescue, some scenes of how the orphans are cared for, and a return to the wild. The details are interesting and informative, whether it be how these elephants require a lot of sunblock for their ears (normally, they would be shaded under the females of the herd or how orangutan "graduates" will often come back to visit Galdikas's camp. Narration (by Morgan Freeman) is used sparingly, mostly to set up a scene which plays out on its own.

Full review at EFC.

This Week In Tickets: 14 June 2010 to 20 June 2010

Normally my previews stick to the Boston area, but let's define that very liberally because...

• The New York Asian Film Festival begins today! Someday, when I find an employer who will pay me to travel from film festival to film festival and write about what I see, I'll be able to spend more than a day there on any given year. As usual, NYAFF focuses on popular asian entertainment, although it's not all action. The big three award winners in town this weekend, though, all hail from China/Hong Kong - up-and-comer Huang Bo (a stitch in Crazy Racer), ubiquitous Johnnie To favorite Simon Yam, and legendary martial arts star Sammo Hung.
  
  I'll be heading into NYC Sunday for Storm Warriors, Bodyguards and Assassins, Echoes of the Rainbow, and Ip Man 2. Certainly, many of these will play Fantasia (for me, NYAFF is partly a dry run in seeing multiple films in a day and handling a long bus ride), but since I'll be working some while there, this will give me flexibility. And it's a great show on its own, spearheaded by Grady Hendrix, a New York writer whose Kaiju Shakedown blog for Variety is sadly defunct, but whose weekly previews of Asian films in New York (Subway Cinema News) is hugely enjoyable even for those of us who only get to NYC once or twice a year.



• The Brattle kicks off a two-week tribute to the late, great Dennis Hopper with Blue Velvet and River's Edge tonight and tomorrow (25-26 June 2010); also playing are Giant and Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (Sunday the 27th), True Romance (Monday the 28th), a double-feature of Hoosiers and Rumble Fish (Tuesday the 29th), and a double feature of Night Tide and Witch Hunt (Wednesday the 30th and Thursday the 1st).



• More SF-1970 at the Harvard Film Archive. I'm actually planning on getting to most of this weekend. The MFA continues with Fellini and Videocracy, and if that's not enough Italian cinema for you, a run of Antonioni's The Girlfriends begins Wednesday.



• The Coolidge opens Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky on the big screen, with midnight screenings of Troll 2 Friday and Saturday night. Shockingly, George Hardy will not be on-hand... as far as I know.



• Kendall Square also opens the Chanel/Stravinsky movie, as well as Colin Farrell in Neil Jordan's Ondine. The Cremaster Cycle pops up for the first time in a while, with the notation that it will never be released on DVD. I'm always tempted to see it, because the stills look gorgeous, but it's a big commitment for something that only runs a week and whose publicity talks about it being art about art and creating art, which makes me wonder how far up his own rear end Matthew Barney really is.
  
  The three programs will be bouncing around the Kendall's schedule, which should also be watched carefully because Love Ranch with Helen Mirren and Joe Pesci (apparently, neither dead nor retired) opens Wednesday the 30th, compressing Solitary Man and Please Give to half-screens for a couple days. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is now down to two shows a day, as well, which is still amazing staying power for a movie that opened back in March and whose sequel comes out in two weeks.



• Cyrus, Grown Ups, and Knight and Day open at the mainstream theaters. Well, the Harvard Square Cinema for Cyrus, but the IFFBoston alum is on two screens there. Speaking of IFFBoston, Micmacs migrates to the Somerville Theatre, which also has Wattstax on Tuesday and Wednesday as part of its rock film series, and an indie comedy by the name of Wah Do Dem opening in the digital screening room (American, despite the odd name; I suspect it will be explained as something from Jamaica, where the movie is set).

Awesome ballgame; it was Manny Ramirez's first visit to Fenway Park since his trade to the Dodgers (and all the soap opera that led up to it, and although I could have done with fewer people booing the man - I tend to think that someone who can boo the MVP of the 2004 World Series has no business being a Red Sox fan - the Dodgers fans made up for some of it. (Tangentially, I suspect that even with the down economy, the Fenway sellout streak isn't going to be in any danger anytime soon; it's too much a destination on its own, so that even when the locals aren't buying, the visitors and tourists are) A highly-touted prospect made his big-league debut, the Dodgers' bullpen got taken to the woodshed in a crazy inning, and the whole thing ended with Josh Bard striking Manny out to seal the win.

I picked up a couple "free" tickets for Toy Story 3 for buying the previous films on Blu-ray (quote because even for kids, $8.50 isn't going to get you a whole movie ticket for something released in 3-D/IMAX), but didn't check to see if they offered them for the furniture stores. It probably wouldn't have mattered, as it would have been tough to use them when ordering online, and that was a necessity - when I arrived at Jordan's for the 1:20 show at 12:30-ish, there were signs saying that they were sold out all day, with maybe an 8:30pm show available. And to think they're only showing it for 12 days, so that The Twilight Saga: Eclipse can take over the screen. I half-expect it will be showing up at the Aquarium after that; this movie is just too good (and popular) to stay off the gigantic screens.

Toy Story 3)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 June 2010 at Jordan's Furniture Reading (The IMAX Experience)

Toy Story 3 is Toy Story 2 redux, but that's setting sights high rather than cashing in - after all, they did wait over ten years to go back to that well. And while there is something a little disappointing about treading the same territory twice, it sets up a finale that pays off the questions raised in the second film.

As Pete the Prospector said back then, kids grow up. Andy (voice of John Morris) is seventeen and heading to college, and his toys haven't been played with in a long time. Andy selects cowboy doll woody (voice of Tom Hanks) to come to school with him, but puts his remaining toys - Buzz Lightyear (voice of Tim Allen), Slinky Dog (voice of Blake Clark), Bullseye, Jesse (voice of Joan Cusack), Rex (voice of Wallace Shawn), Hamm (voice of John Ratzenberger), and Mr. & Mrs. Potato Head (voices of Don Rickles and Estelle Harris) into the attic. A mix-up has them at the curb on trash day, and though they escape, they decide they're better off joining the toys Andy's sister is donating to a local day care center). The senior toys there, Lotso Huggin Bear (voice of Ned Beatty) and Ken (voice of Michael Keaton) seem welcoming, but... Well, what follows is a madcap delight as Pixar spends the bulk of the movie doing the two things that Pixar does best, before getting to their more recent skill.

The first is to introduce a whole raft of new characters - not only at Sunnyside Day Care, but in the bedroom of a little girl who goes there. It's a riot of creativity to rival the first film, every new toy with a fully-realized personality and voice that fits their design perfectly - and not always by being exactly what you expect! One thing that is nice to see this time around is that there are more women and girls in the cast; the previous two films in the series were by and large boy-toy stories, and this really feels like a broader, more varied cast.

Full review at EFC

This Week In Tickets: 5 October 2009 to 11 October 2009

I started looking around Borders at potential calendars for next year this weekend. I'll probably get something with the same basic design, although if I could find something with a little more room, I'd like to. The main issue is that most Saturday and Sunday as smaller than normal, pretty much the opposite of what I need, as you can see below:



Stubless: Summerhood (11am @ the Brattle) and the 7:30pm double feature of The Raven & Tales of Terror at the same place.

There will be links to the Edgar Allen Poe movies later in the week or next; I'm planning on waiting until the series is over and the big blog entry can be posted to do that.

Busy week at the movies, as I tried to see as much Poe as I could and wanted to see some favorites while they were hanging around. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I still loved Star Trek - I'd been worrying that my slobbering all over it was more a function of what it represented than its actual quality, but I had a darn good time at the Aquarium. There's a few flaws - with a better seat than when I saw it in May, it was easier to notice that Abrams isn't really a great action director, and the logic is at times iffy - but not enough, and it feels right.

(For the next film, I hope they find a way to say Rachel Nichols's character wasn't killed and is serving on the Enterprise, just because I love Rachel Nichols and it wouldn't hurt if Star Trek re-invented for the new millennium could use a few more women in the cast)

The Toy Story double feature was another great time revisiting old friends. It's kind of amazing to me that Joss Whedon's name in the credits to the first film surprised me, since he's kind of got a fanbase that won't let you forget anything he does well. Also, Woody was sort of a prick at first, wasn't he? Watching them back to back for the first time in a few years, I was surprised by how much better the second one really is, and the first is no slouch. "When She Loves Me" just absolutely kills me as soon as it starts up; it's almost worse than the gut-punch of hearing it the first time, knowing that it's coming.

So, the familiar stuff was as good as I remembered it. The Poe stuff wasn't bad. The rest had a certain "well, nice idea, but..." feel to it:

Jennifer's Body

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 8 October 2009 at AMC Boston Common #13 (first-run)

The nice idea here is doing a horror movie for and about high school girls. A lot of slasher movies are certainly built around nubile your ladies, but that's clearly not the same thing; Karyn Kusama and Diablo Cody are clearly working on something that's about how teenagers treat each other, which is frequently awful. It's fertile ground; during its early, best years, Buffy the Vampire Slayer did very well with it.

The thing is, for all she apparently tries to be, Diablo Cody just isn't Joss Whedon. It doesn't help that most of her more mannered dialog is given to Megan Fox, who just isn't up to making it sound something other than silly. The villains - both the demonic Jennifer and the creepy band guys - are also just not that scary. Loathsome, sure, but Cody and Kusama never manage to get us to think that there's hidden, dangerous evil to them.

Of course, the question of why there's so much obsession over the second-most attractive girl in the film comes up. Megan Fox is a plastic cartoon compared to Amanda Seyfried, and though the crew manages to downplay Ms. Seyfried's attractiveness somewhat, she's still ten times more interesting on screen. That's good in terms of being likable, but Jennifer needs to have more charisma than Fox can supply.

The Invention of Lying

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 10 October 2009 at AMC Boston Common #6 (first-run)

Ricky Gervais and company start off with a concept that seems like its natural state is five minute chunks on a sketch comedy show - an alternate reality where deception is just not part of human nature. Not only are folks truthful, they're almost compulsively so, and when one of these people discovers the ability to say "something that isn't", he wreaks havoc.

On the one hand, it's really only fitfully funny. Though a good many of the jokes are barbed, they're kind of obvious. The fantasy premise sometimes seems like it hasn't been entirely thought through, too - a scene where a guy sends a bottle of wine back to make a girl think he's got high standards, and says he's doing so flat out, doesn't work because it's a bit you'd do with someone who has lost the ability to deceive, not someone who never had it.

On the other hand, though, it's a movie that gets in your head and invites you to consider the concepts that it is playing with. Early on, it's the idea of lies as social lubricant, but the big one comes with the accidental invention of religion as Gervais's character tries to reassure someone in her last moments. It's just a smaller part of the larger point, that we could think through even the things we know to be true. The most important scene, I think, is the one where Gervais's Mark asks Jennifer Garner's somewhat shallow Anna what she sees when she looks at certain people, and she gives glib answers until he prompts her to look closer. It's about how, even if you know something is true, like the people in this world, you should still ask questions and examine your beliefs.

Summerhood

* * (out of four)
Seen 11 October 2009 at the Brattle Theatre (Sunday Eye-Opener)

This print screened had a 2006 copyright at the end, so even though I sometimes feel a little gun-shy about saying too much about movies that might perhaps still be tinkered with, something that filmed over three years ago with child actors is probably not going to have reshoots. There could be re-editing that happens, but I kind of doubt it at this late date.

Why has it been sitting on the shelf that long? Well, in large part, because it's not very good. It's at least in part a comedy, but it was a very quiet audience; you want to hear people laughing. It's got both a ton of "clever" narration and kids who are too self-aware to provide much in the way of contrast. It jumps between the stories of the kids and the counselors without tying them together thematically. It reminds you that it is set in 1984 with a new music cue roughly every five minutes.

It's a nice cast of young actors, and actually looks pretty nice - the art direction guys made the summer camp look fantastically lived in. But I suspect that it will fall flat for most who don't have the same nostalgia for summer camp as the filmmakers.

This Week In Tickets: 25 May 2009 to 31 May 2009

I spent most of yesterday helping my brother and his girlfriend move, and I'm convinced that the next time I have to do that myself (which would be next year at the earliest, and I have no idea why I'd leave my current spot any time soon), I'm just writing a check. Then maybe I'll take the day and hang out with my family at a ballgame or doing something that doesn't involve bringing a ton of boxes down stairs and into a pickup truck.

One sort-of interesting thing I learned from my brother Travis, who is in some business nebulously connected with mortgages and foreclosures and other things a renter like me doesn't have to worry about: The only two cities they won't touch property in are Detroit and Worcester. Now, you hear horror stories about Detroit, but is Worcester quite in that category? I rag on that city a lot, because it is a terribly boring place to go to college with some rough areas - although friends who went to RPI told me that Troy, NY, isn't exactly wonderful either - but is it really as bad a place as Detroit? Or has the economy just hit it especially hard?



On video: The Sky Crawlers

Yep, that's sparse... I decided I'd pretty much had enough Truffaut after Love on the Run, had work run too late to meet the Chlotrudis folks on Tuesday, and as for new releases, well... Just after I bought my ticket for Up on Saturday, someone tried to use a promotional ticket, and was told that those could only be used for "non-special engagements" - basically, a film has to run for a couple of weeks before they'll let folks in for free, unless you've got the super-premium tickets. Most theaters actually use a ten-day rule, since folks coming in Monday through Thursday generally aren't potentially displacing paying customers and are buying popcorn, but since it was a Saturday, that doesn't apply. How do I know which ones those are, the guy says. The lady at the box office says you can't use it on the ones with a star by the title, pointing up at the digital marquee. The guy steps back to look up, and I turn around in curiosity, and sure enough, every title has an asterisk to the left. Now, as near as I can tell, that shouldn't have been the case - Wolverine, Star Trek, Angels and Demons, and Ghost of Girlfriends Past have been out long enough to lose the star. It just goes to show how, during the early summer, relatively few films will gain a stranglehold over the local multiplexes.

It doesn't just apply to the big downtown places, either - for reasons I can't quite comprehend, Landmark in Kendall Square is showing Summer Hours on two screens, and is on its second week of doing so. Are Juliette Binoche and Olivier Assayas really that popular? For comparison, both Easy Virtue and The Brothers Bloom are singles, although those two seem much more likely to draw an audience (although, to be fair, they are playing at the Coolidge and Boston Common, respectively, which likely draws some business away from Kendall Square).

This week looks a lot busier, though, as I've got things planned for just about every day before Friday.

Domicile Conjugal (Bed & Board)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 May 2009 at the Brattle Theatre (Truffaut: Man, Woman & Child)

Probably my favorite of the Antoine Doinel movies, if only because it gives us the most of Claude Jade as Doinel's now-wife Christine. I don't just say that out of some retro-crush, but because married couples are often portrayed on-screen as conservative or boring, but she is lively and energetic, with a wonderful playfulness that American film/TV writers and actresses seem to lose once their characters walk down the aisle. I especially love how, in the latter half of the movie, she can be furious at Jean-Pierre Léaud's Doinel and very much concerned for him without making the character seem weak or vacillating.

As with all the films in this series, Bed & Board often seems like a sort of spot where Truffaut can put whatever odd or amusing extra idea he has, and some of them are a lot of fun - a random appearance by a M. Hulot-esque character, a Japanese girl who loses the traditional garb once her parents are out of town, Antoine's struggles with her furniture. It comes together fairly well, though, balancing the humorous and sad in an enjoyable slice-of-life story.

L'amour en Fuite (Love on the Run)

* * (out of four)
Seen 25 May 2009 at the Brattle Theatre (Truffaut: Man, Woman & Child)

This is probably the most frustrating of the Doinel films. Some of that is self-inflicted - I haven't seen "Antoine & Colette", which Love on the Run draws a fair chunk of material from. Literally and figuratively; Love on the Run often feels like a clip show episode of a TV series which has run late/over budget and needs to quickly shovel an episode out to make the network's 24-episode order. Everybody hates those - I think the one exception was when Hercules or Xena would go full-on meta - and it's exacerbated here by having seen the previous three features in the past two days (and Bed & Board immediately before this one!). It's useful to remember that back in 1980, you couldn't just go down to the neighborhood video store and pick up the other three.

Still, this is often a pretty weak movie. It seems like half of its very short running time is flashbacks, and the bit that sounds like it could be an interesting story - Antoine finds a torn-up picture, pieces it together and goes off to find the girl it shows - is tossed in as fait-accompli backstory. It's not entirely without charm, but thin and often silly.

Sukai Kurora (The Sky Crawlers)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 May 2009 in Jay's Living Room (Blu-ray)

Mamoru Oshii's latest animated film looks like a more commercial, action-packed thing than the rest of his "recent" output, but a few spiffy aerial battles aside, it's often just as ponderous as Oshii's last couple of science-fiction films. Which isn't to say it's not interesting; the concepts Oshii is playing with are intriguing: A future where war is corporatized and treated as sport by the warring nations, eternally young armies who either lose their memories or watch their children "catch up" to them, etc. The contrast of visual styles is also interesting, with extremely simplified human figures existing in a CGI world where machines are rendered down to the last rivet.

There is not, however, two hours of things happening here, and revelations tend to spur characters to neither action nor particularly interesting introspection. Definitely not tops on the list of movies to throw in the player at 10:15pm (10:30pm by the time one's old and slow Samsung BDP-1000 actually starts the movie); I'll probably watch it again (perhaps in English, this time) before writing it up.

Up

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 30 May 2009 at AMC Boston Common #16 (first-run, 3-D digital projection)

When John Lasseter struck gold with Toy Story, I remember thinking it was really fortunate that this new technology was paired with a great storyteller, someone who really got how to make an animated film that works for everyone. When they hired Brad Bird, that was bringing in a ringer. Looking at the amazing jobs Andrew Stanton did with last year's Wall-E and Pete Docter did with Up, though, one has to become impressed with Pixar as an environment - they've created a system where mentors can bring the next generation in and within a few years have them surpass their own achievements.

In a lot of ways, Up shouldn't work as well as it does. It defies narrative convention - you're supposed to start light and then add weight, but this one opens with a segment that is simply heartbreaking. Then it breaks out the whimsy, with talking dogs, giant chocolate-loving birds, a battle between a blimp and a house held aloft by balloons. But all through that, Docter never lets go of those first ten minutes. He never comes right out and points it out, but everything in the film's last act has a dual purpose. It does something logical for the story, yes, but he's also making a statement about which of the elderly characters has lived a fulfilling or wasted life, or about how hanging on to the past can hold you back.

It's brilliant, really, and it's amazing that Pixar has built a company and a culture where we can expect brilliant, no matter who actually works on the movie. There aren't that many geniuses out there, and Pixar is able to attract, nurture, or create them. Doesn't matter which; that's all hard.