CRATE PERFORMANCES

New this week:

The Boxtrolls—The title characters in Laika’s new stop-motion fantasy are, um, trolls that wear boxes. They take their names from whatever’s on the sides of these packages: Fish, Shoe, Clocks, Wheels and so on.

The trolls live deep beneath Cheesbridge, a hilltop city of vaguely European and late-19th-Century character. They’re harmless to humans—they’re insectivores, and their nighttime raids on the town are aimed at its trash, which they like to repurpose. But they’ve been demonized to the Cheesebridgians by Snatcher, a scurvy exterminator, and his entourage of Dickensian henchmen.

It’s true that the Boxtrolls are raising a human boy, the “Trubshaw Baby” whose disappearance Snatcher uses to terrify the locals. But we soon learn that this is a case of foster care, not abduction.

Adapted from Alan Snow’s novel Here be Monsters! by Irina Brignull and Adam Pava and directed by Graham Annable and Anthony Stacchi, The Boxtrolls is one of the odder children’s movies to get a big release since The Pirates! Band of Misfits, another stop-motion kid flick. But Pirates! was overtly (and excellently) silly, while The Boxtrolls, though very funny, takes a more lyrically weird, fairy-tale tone. Ben Kinsgley hams it up grandly as Snatcher, leading a cast that includes Jared Harris, Nick Frost, Simon Pegg, Toni Collete, Richard Ayaode, Elle Fanning and Tracy Morgan.

The theme of the movie is pretense—Snatcher is trying, through his campaign against the Boxtrolls, to get a “White hat” making him one of the cheese-sampling city fathers. This despite his severe lactose intolerance. The trolls also react with horrified propriety whenever one of their boxes is shed, or even opened. It’s a wonderfully crazy, generous-hearted movie, though its pungency and gleeful gross-outs won’t appeal to all kids, or all adults.

The Skeleton Twins—The celebratory lip-sync. Among the tropes of comedy-drama, it’s not my favorite. You know the sort of scene I mean—characters mouth along to a song, maybe using a hairbrush or something as a microphone, sometimes solo, like Tom Cruise in Risky Business, sometimes in a group.

It’s not that I think such activities don’t happen in life, or even that I don’t think they’re fun. But they’re usually an annoyance in movies, because it seems like a lazy way to establish bonding between characters or the breaking down of a reserved character’s defenses, to get a popular tune on the soundtrack, and to kill a few minutes. It’s taking a free ride on someone else’s art.

But right in the middle of The Skeleton Twins, troubled brother Milo (Bill Hader) and troubled sister Maggie (Kristen Wiig) perform a lip-sync, to “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” by Starship. And something about the lustiness of Hader’s pantomime and the hilariously wary, reluctant acquiescence of Wiig to that appallingly effective piece of ‘80s schlock got to me. It’s a potent dramatization of how even the cheesiest pop culture can be a source of strength and a balm to the spiritually wounded.

And Maggie and Milo, differently damaged by tragic childhoods, certainly are wounded. Milo, a failed L.A. actor turned waiter who drinks too much, makes a half-hearted suicide attempt. Word of this interrupts Maggie as she’s contemplating ending it all herself. She hasn’t seen Milo in a decade, but she heads to the west coast and drags him back to their upstate New York hometown to recuperate in the house she shares with her cluelessly decent husband (Luke Wilson).

This guy wants to have a baby with her, but she’s secretly still on the pill, perhaps partly because she doesn’t want to perpetuate her family craziness, but also because she’s an unhappy serial adulteress. Milo makes himself at home, and tries to reconnect with the disgraced English teacher (Ty Burrell) with whom he had an affair back in high school.

There’s really nothing very funny about any aspect of the plot of this small film, directed by Craig Johnson from a script he wrote with Mark Heyman. The comedy arises not from the bitterly sad situation but from the resigned gallows humor with which Maggie and Milo deal with it. They’re deeply exasperating people, even to themselves, but as The Skeleton Twins progresses—partly because of that stupid lip-sync!—I started to root for them. Hader and Wiig have a rapport that does, indeed, seem fraternal.

CIRCUIT TO THE CHASE

In the political thriller Closed Circuit, opening today, a truck bomb explodes in a London market, killing dozens. The surviving terrorist is assigned two lawyers—one, Martin (Eric Bana), to defend him in his public trial, the other, Claudia (Rebecca Hall) to advocate for him during the closed hearings involving classified evidence, which is kept secret even from Martin.

Claudia and Martin have an illicit romantic past—his marriage broke up over his affair with her. This creates the teeniest conflict of interest, but the lawyers, eager for the high-profile assignment, neglect to tell the judge this. Before long both of them, working separately, become aware that they’re under a near-Orwellian level of surveillance, and then that their lives are in danger, as they discover a secret at the heart of the case that the Government is willing to kill to protect. Sadly, nothing seems very implausible about any of this.

Directed by John Crowley from a script by Steven Knight, Closed Circuit hurtles forward with almost unseemly speed and economy. There isn’t a shot or a line of dialogue in the picture that could be called digressive, and the tension rises with metronomic precision, driven along by Joby Talbot’s ominous orchestral music. The atmosphere of humorless, frightened suspicion is palpable and oppressive, and the movie grips.

As usual, the acting has a lot to do with this. Bana’s charm has always been elusive to me, but here he’s supposed to be a bit of a cold fish, so he’s effective, and Hall is engaging as ever, even in this less-than-warm role. From the supporting cast comes creditable work by Ciaran Hinds, Anne-Marie Duff, Julia Stiles, Riz Ahmed and especially Jim Broadbent as a mild-mannered yet almost satanic Attorney General who drops into the movie now and then to level a threat in the most pleasant manner possible.

When Closed Circuit was all over, I did find myself wondering why Claudia and Martin didn’t make a point of shoving their at-risk witness in front of the TV cameras outside the Old Bailey, or why they didn’t simply say in court, in a tattletale-ish sort of voice, “M’lud, MI-5 has been trying to kill us all night.” But Closed Circuit wouldn’t be the first thriller that pulls you along so skillfully that you don’t think about its gaps in logic until after the end credits roll.

As in 1812, the British seem to have re-invaded the States—but this time they’ve targeted our multiplexes. Over the course of the week, along with Closed Circuit, at least two other movies from, by or about Brits have landed wide Yank release: the boy-band documentary One Direction: This Is Us and the Simon Pegg comedy The World’s End. The former will be discussed when it opens here Friday, so let’s talk The World’s End here…

The third entry in the “Cornetto Trilogy” of comedies written by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, directed by Wright and starring Pegg and Nick Frost is now in theaters. The first, 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, is a classic both of the zombie genre and of Brit comedy; the second, the 2007 cop-movie spoof Hot Fuzz, started out perhaps even more brilliantly than Shaun but ran out of steam toward the end.

World’s End resides somewhere between the two—not quite the homerun of Shaun, but ultimately more satisfying than Hot Fuzz. The main character is Gary King (Pegg) who is trying to reunite four old school friends (Frost, Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman and Eddie Marsan) to have another go at a legendary but unfinished pub crawl from 1990 in their hometown of Newtown Haven, whose major claim to fame is that it’s home to Britain’s oldest roundabout.

Gary’s a scruffy loser who never grew up, while the other four have moved on to relatively mature lives—and one, Andie (Frost) bears Gary a bitter grudge. Nonetheless, all four of his friends show up for the 12-pub crawl, their sights set to finish with a pint at the pub called The World’s End.

This middle-aged outing alone might have provided enough laughs for a movie by itself, whipped forward by the snappy comic punctuation of Wright’s editing. But about midpoint, The World’s End suddenly takes a strange sci-fi twist, as the lads realize that something has changed in Newton Haven.

Really, it’s just roughly the zillionth variation on Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but it’s an amusing one, and the motivation of the invaders links up thematically with Gary’s personality. As with Hot Fuzz, the movie is a little overambitious—it goes on a smidge too long, and not every scene works. But there are plenty of laughs, and a few touching moments, and the performances are fine, especially by the feisty, stouthearted Frost.

It should also be noted that the final decision of the aliens with regard to humanity—pronounced by Bill Nighy as the voice of “The Network”—is basically the same as that of The Pods in Jack Finney’s original novel The Body Snatchers.

ALTERNATE ENDING

The new sci-fi comedy The World’s End, from the team of screenwriter/stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost and director Edgar Wright, opens this weekend, so…

Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s give the nod to this mutant, designed and performed by peerless Paul Blaisdell…

…from Roger Corman’s 1955 The Day the World Ended. The movie may be watched in its entirety, here.

GRUE MOON & BLOCK PARTY

As Barry Graham points out, this month marks the 109^th anniversary of the premiere of A Trip to the Moon, the pioneering sci-fi film from the great Georges Melies (Turner Classic Movies shows a collection of Melies shorts Monday at 7:45 am Phoenix time). September also marks the release of Apollo 18, a less charming lunar excursion.

Apollo 18, like Cloverfield & Trollhunter, uses the Blair Witch conceit: The premise is that we’re seeing classified footage of an Apollo mission, supposedly scrubbed for budgetary reasons but actually conducted in secret under the auspices of the Department of Defense. The stolid astronauts who land at the lunar south pole soon discover that—gulp—they aren’t alone…

Apollo 18’s opening was rescheduled several times, & Dimension didn’t screen the film for critics (in Phoenix, anyway), so I confess I wasn’t expecting much. The studio’s caution was understandable. I’d be surprised if it became a hit with a wide audience—even at less than an hour and a half, it’s too claustrophobic, oppressive & one-note. But on its own narrow terms, it works, for me at least. The two lead actors (Lloyd Owen & Warren Christie) even though they’re Welsh & Irish, respectively, flawlessly capture the aw-shucks machismo of American astronaut cadences, & the look of ‘70s-era film & video footage is lovingly recreated.

There’s nothing remotely new about the film in terms of sci-fi content, but the director, Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego, generates a strong atmosphere of desolation & dread, & there are some pretty well-timed jolts. There’s even a whisper of political disillusionment worked in.

On the other hand, maybe you’d prefer an earthbound alien invasion…

“Pardon my French,” says the nice middle-aged lady, “but they’re fucking monsters.” She’s speaking of her neighbors, the teenage street punks who haunt the title block in Attack the Block. “Fucking monsters,” echoes the young nurse (Jodie Whittaker) who’s just been mugged by the misunderstood lads in question.

The judgment may seem fair enough, but when literal monsters—shaggy, ferocious quadrupeds from outer space, with blue luminescent fangs—unwisely choose this same block of council flats in South London to drop onto out of the sky, the street kids turn out to be the planet’s first & possibly most effective line of defense. That’s the joke of this headlong, highly exciting sci-fi/horror comedy, written & directed by Joe Cornish.

The alien landing takes place in the middle of Bonfire Night, & goes unnoticed among the fireworks, except by the kids, who arm themselves with ninja swords & bottle rockets & the like, & take to their bikes. The nurse is eventually drawn into a truce with her muggers to fight the common enemy.

Whittaker gives a fine performance, as do Nick Frost as a weed dealer & Nick Treadaway as an upper-crust stoner, but the movie really belongs to the young ne’er-do-wells. Once their faces are out of their hoodies, they’re an engaging, even endearing rabble, & the most glowery of them, Moses (John Boyega), is a born leader. The actors are terrific, but Cornish doesn’t sentimentalize the little sods too much; he even lets them indulge in maudlin sociological self-pity when the nurse challenges them on their criminality. Their fast chatter—unsubtitled & sometimes unintelligible but comprehensible by context—& their swiftly-formed alliances give Attack the Block some of the quality of The Thing From Another World.

The creature effects, though extensive, have a minimalist quality that’s spookily effective—you haven’t seen these aliens before—& the musical score, by Steven Price, Felix Buxton & Simon Ratcliffe, is wonderfully old-school. With Attack the Block, Brit cinema does for the alien movie what Shaun of the Dead did for the zombie movie: Take an American form back to basics &, in a lighthearted but by no means unemotional way, reinvent it.