SUTURE SELF

Check out my reviews of Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride!...

...and the Disney/Pixar animated feature Hoppers...

...online at Phoenix Magazine.

A LIGHTYEAR IN THE LIFE

Opening this weekend:

Lightyear--At the beginning of this animated feature from Disney/Pixar we are informed that back in 1995, a little boy named Andy got a toy from his favorite movie. "This is that movie."

The reference, of course, is to Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story, the "Space Ranger," voiced in that film by Tim Allen, who competed for Andy's affections with Woody, the cowboy voiced by Tom Hanks. In this new feature Buzz, voiced here by Chris Evans, is the troubled hero of a far-flung sci-fi yarn. At the beginning Buzz, an intrepid hero in the Roger Ramjet vein, screws up while exploring a habitable but dangerous planet, with the result that a huge, radish-shaped spaceship full of scientists in suspended animation gets marooned there.

In trying to resume the space odyssey, Buzz makes repeated attempts to achieve "hyperspace," always falling short, and skipping ahead years each time. He keeps returning from these failed test flights to find a larger and more settled colony than he left, always seemingly less interested in leaving the planet; his fellow Space Ranger and best friend Alisha (Uzo Aduba) is also grayer and has moved on further with her life each time.

The movie has plenty of humor--the best of it, perhaps, from Buzz's deadpan, blandly capable robot cat Sox, voiced by Peter Sohn (Sox reminded me a little of Rags, Woody Allen's robot dog in Sleeper, though Sox proves far more useful). But Lightyear doesn't really have the tone of a comedy; it's surprisingly ambitious and surprisingly poignant. It's about the pain of living with our mistakes, and about the speed with which our lifetimes seem to get away from us.

Like so many of the Pixar films, it's an impressive, thematically complex piece of work. But despite a second act in which Buzz and his band of pals, voiced by the likes of Keke Palmer, Taika Waititi and Dale Soules, battle invading robots, this isn't a rollicking space opera, and it's a little hard to imagine it being Andy's favorite movie.

Culturally, what may be most significant about the film is that it includes a same-sex marriage, complete with a kiss. The significance isn't so much in the relationship itself, which is peripheral to the story, but rather in the splendidly matter-of-fact manner with which it comes across. Again, it belies the supposed conceit of the movie; it's hard to imagine the intensity of the reaction this element would have stirred up in 1995. But it's cheering to note how commonplace it seems today.

EXTRA! (ORDINARY!) READ ALL ABOUT IT...

Check out my reviews, online at Phoenix Magazine, of the delightful Irish horror comedy Extra Ordinary...

...of Greed (not Von Stroheim's masterpiece but a satire starring Steve Coogan)...

...and Disney-Pixar's Onward...

TAKING A BAO

Check out my "Friday Flicks" column, online at Phoenix Magazine, featuring reviews of the Oscar-Nominated Animated Shorts program playing this week at FilmBar, including the winner, Pixar's charming Bao...

...as well as of the old-school thriller Bullitt County...

 
...out this week on VOD.

Also, check out my short article on the 55th annual Phoenix Scottish Games...

 ...Saturday, March 2, and Sunday March 3 at Steele Indian School park.

RIP to the magnificent, sexy, hilarious, lovable Katherine Helmond, departed at 89.

Have a great March everybody!

BRIAN'S SONG, & THE PER-FISH-TENCE OF MEMORY

Opening this weekend:

 

De Palma—For all the faults of his movies, even for all the supposed great faults of his character, I’ve always had a soft spot for director Brian De Palma. This isn’t always easy to defend—while the frequent charge that he’s a misogynist can’t, I think, be proven from his movies, the general smarminess and arrested adolescence that many of them give off is hard to deny.

But his filmmaking mastery is even harder to deny. There’s a lot of schlock and silliness on the list of his credits, but there are several enduring classics, too, and I find that scenes from even his worst misfires remain in my memory in a way that plenty of better movies don’t. This is because, of course, he’s a true cinema stylist, lavishing so much craft and obsessive care on even the most absurd or ugly content that it ends up charged with vivid atmosphere.

Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow apparently share this admiration. The documentary they made about him comes across, more than anything, as an act of obsessive fandom. The only talking head is the title character, sitting in front of a gray fireplace. First he talks about his background, a little, and then he talks about his films—every one of them, I think, at least briefly—and the films that influenced him. As he talks, clips and stills are mixed in. That’s pretty much the whole movie.

The austerity of Baumbach and Paltrow’s approach is shrewd, because the material on which they draw is so cinematically rich. The biographical material is fascinating—I certainly didn’t know that De Palma’s father was a famous osteopath, or that the director himself had been a science whiz as a kid—and the straightforward progression through his works gives a bird’s-eye view of his development. The clips offer some intriguing treasures, too, like the unused deus ex machina ending of 1998’s Snake Eyes that’s more interesting than anything that made it into the finished film.

As for his own psychology, the ruefully chuckling De Palma seems candid enough, in a general sort of way. But although he shares some eyebrow-raising autobiographical subtext to Dressed to Kill, overall he seems unwilling to go very deep. Unlike, say, 1994’s Crumb, this movie doesn’t strip its subject naked for us. He’s evasive about his sensibility toward women, for instance, saying only that it “always made sense” to him, in the context of the genre in which he was working. And indeed, adjusting for generational differences in the degree of graphic violence acceptable in a movie, it’s hard to see how Hitchcock, for the most obvious example, is less vulnerable to this charge than De Palma.

In any event, De Palma can lay claim, at least for me, to the highest praise a documentary about a moviemaker can earn. Like last year’s movie version of Hitchcock/Truffaut, it left me with an appetite to re-watch these movies. 

 Finding Dory—Pixar’s 2003 animated ichthyological smash Finding Nemo is one of the most beloved of all kid movies. But I think I enjoyed this sequel focusing on Dory, the cheery titular blue tang with the unreliable short-term memory who helped in the search for the title fish in the first film, even more.

This time Dory, voiced by Ellen DeGeneres, is trying to find her home and parents (Diane Keaton and Eugene Levy), from whom she was separated as a kid, and the worrywart clownfish Marlin (Albert Brooks) and his little Nemo are helping her. Once again they have to cross the ocean, this time to a marine center on the California coast. And once again they have to depend on the kindness of strangers, notably an octopus named Hank (Ed O’Neill), as well as a whale shark and a beluga. Dory is also amusingly guided by a voice from above—specifically, the voice of Sigourney Weaver.

The imperturbable, doggedly polite optimism and geniality of DeGeneres is center stage here, and deeply endearing. Her off-the-cuff, throwaway delivery, along with the mild kvetching of Brooks, is central to the movie’s balance. The theme, along with the Pixar/Disney standard of separation from loved ones, is the preciousness and vulnerability of memory, and the light touch of DeGeneres makes this moving, but not exhausting.

To Mesa Arts Center this Sunday, June 19…

 …comes a different iconic American filmmaker of the ‘70s and ‘80s: John Carpenter. The auteur plays a concert of his own music, both from his films and from a couple of recent studio albums. Check out my interview with him, on New Times blogs.

BRAIN/BIRD

Opening this weekend:

Inside Out— This animated feature dramatizes the workings of the human mind by personifying the emotions, in this case those of a 12-year-old girl named Riley. Working in a NASA-like mission control is our heroine Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler), a radiant Tinkerbell-like sprite determined to keep Riley happy; she’s supported by Fear (Bill Hader), Anger (Lewis Black), Disgust (Mindy Kaling) and frumpy, blue-skinned Sadness (Phyllis Smith).

The team’s job is to create memories, here seen as tiny transparent globes glowing with their emotional coloring—gold for Joy, red for Anger, and so forth. Joy tries hard to keep Sadness from touching Riley’s memories and tingeing them blue, but when Riley moves from Minnesota, where she has a best friend and plays hockey, to San Francisco, Joy finds it much harder to suppress Sadness.

Eventually the emotional crises that come with a move during childhood cause Joy and Sadness to get separated from the headquarters, leaving Fear, Anger and Disgust in charge. The rest of the movie concerns their Bunyan-esque journey through Riley’s personality to take over again in headquarters.

The conceit of this movie isn’t new. It wasn’t new as the premise of the early-‘90s Fox sitcom Herman’s Head, and wasn’t even new as one of the funnier segments of Woody Allen’s 1972 Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) or the 1970 movie of Norman Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth. It goes back through the Good and Evil Angels that appear on the shoulders of cartoon characters, and Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, through medieval morality plays to the Psychomachia of the Roman poet Prudentius.

But it’s possible that no one’s ever done this idea quite as well as Inside Out. One’s expectations for Pixar’s features tend to be pretty high, but even so I wasn’t prepared for how deeply imagined this movie is, or how emotionally potent. Or, for that matter, how wise: the theme is emotional gestalt, and the role of sadness in a healthy personality.

I walked out of the theatre feeling like I’d seen a masterpiece, and a few days later this doesn’t feel like an overreaction. It may be the best movie I’ve seen all year. My only concern is that Inside Out is so fast and complex that some of its subtleties may get past smaller children—the gags about abstract thought could leave a college kid studying for a psych final feeling confused. But even so, the movie is so full of color and comedy that kids will likely enjoy it even if they don’t entirely get it.

Opening today at FilmBar Phoenix:

I Am Big Bird—Well, maybe it isn’t quite as soul-stirring a line as “I Am Spartacus.” But only maybe. Certainly the title avian has had a longer and happier career than the hapless gladiator.

Subtitled The Caroll Spinney Story, this documentary chronicles the life of the puppeteer who has given soul to the towering, yellow-plumed fowl, the long-beaked, guileless face of Sesame Street. A soft-spoken Bostonian with a narrow, goateed hippie’s face, Spinney has performed both the childlike Big Bird and, for a bit of Hyde to go with that Jekyll, the curmudgeonly Oscar the Grouch for more than forty years.

Directed by Dave LaMattina and Chad N. Walker and partly funded via Kickstarter, the film is smoothly made if fairly conventional as cinema. It's helped along because Spinney’s life, even before his Sesame Street days, seems to have been unusually well-documented, first by home movies and later, after his marriage to Debra Gilroy in 1979, by home video. It’s the content, however, that makes this the most fascinating show business documentary I’ve seen since, at least, Andrew Leavold’s The Search for Weng Weng.

I’ve been a Sesame Street fan since the show started—I clearly remember watching the first episode, and I watched it religiously for years even though I was too old for it, educationally speaking (I already knew how to read and count). I loved the show simply because it was genuinely funny, and had richer characters than almost any live-action show aimed at kids (or, for the most part, adults) at the time. Oscar was a special favorite of mine from the first.

Even so, I Am Big Bird was full of stuff I didn’t know. It covers everything from Spinney’s difficult relationship with his father to Big Bird’s visits to China to Mitt Romney’s backfired shot at PBS in the 2012 election—probably an attempt, tactically idiotic, to throw red meat to that part of the reactionary Right that hates Sesame Street for being multicultural propaganda (which it certainly is)—to Spinney’s startling near-miss with another historical moment.

But probably nothing in I Am Big Bird is as astounding as the technical explanation of how Big Bird works, and what that has meant, for Spinney and his apprentices, over the years. As a physical acting challenge it makes, say, a DeNiro weight gain or a Christian Bale weight loss look like a walk in the park.

ACASCREAMIA

The animated fantasy Monsters, Inc., from 2001, operated on the premise that blue-collar monsters cross over from their dimension and really do haunt the closets of children in ours. They don’t do it to be mean, but rather to collect the energy of the kiddies’ screams for use as a power source.

Like most Disney-Pixar flicks, it was funny and imaginative, but I like the new prequel, Monsters University, even better. As the title suggests, it’s a campus comedy, in which we see the initial meeting between studious freshman Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal) and lackadaisical BMOC James Sullivan (John Goodman). Their rivalry causes them both to run afoul of the haughty centipede-like Dean (Helen Mirren), and their only chance to stay at MU is pure Harold Lloyd: They must lead the misfit team from the school’s lowliest frat to triumph in the school’s “Scare Games.”

Ingenious set-pieces ensue, but amusing and well-paced as the film is, it’s also, in its lighthearted way, a real exploration of a painful, rarely-treated issue—what happens when our talents simply don’t line up with what we most want to do with our lives? Mike, you see, is determined to become a “scarer,” actually entering kids’ rooms and frightening them. The trouble is that the poor creature—a cyclopean green sphere with spindly limbs—just isn’t scary.

This theme was treated sentimentally in the 1993 football movie Rudy, but it gets a more frank and nuanced dramatization here. And the non-pandering resolution of some of the story points is really surprising—the characters don’t get everything they want, and even finishing college isn’t seen as a must.

THE INHUMAN CENTIPEDE

RIP to the great James Gandolfini, who embodied Tony Soprano among many other vivid characters, passed on too young at 51.

With Disney/Pixar’s Monsters University opening this weekend…

Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s give the nod to the severe centipede-like Dean Hardscrabble in that film, voiced by the great Helen Mirren…

BRAVE REVIEW

The newest Disney princess, Merida, loves to ride her horse and shoot arrows, often at the same time. She has wild red curls and a puckish smirk, and she climbs cliffs in a way that I hope the young audience members of Disney/Pixar’s Brave don’t try to imitate.

Merida, voiced by Kelly MacDonald, takes after her father Fergus (Billy Connolly), a feudal lord in medieval Scotland. He’s a good-natured, boyish braggart who loves to retell the tale of how he lost his leg defending his family against the monstrous bear Mor’du. Merida gets along famously with him, and with her swashbucklingly mischievous triplet brothers, but not so much with her civilized mother Elinor (Emma Thompson), who’s trying to prepare her for a peace-making arranged marriage to one of three princes from neighboring kingdoms.

Said princes are not a very prepossessing lot, and Merida isn’t ready to get married in any case, so she and her mother clash. In despair, and led through the forest by Will-o’-the-wisps to a witch (Julie Walters), she bargains with the old lady for a spell to “change” her mother, and…

Well, you know how trusting witches usually goes, especially in medieval Scotland. The only thing that really irked me about Brave was that Merida seemed too easy a mark for the crone, but I guess she hadn’t read the same stories that I have. Things don’t work out nearly as grimly for Merida and her family as they do for the hero of Shakespeare’s Scottish Play, but they’re still in for plenty of trouble.

Merida’s gullibility aside, Brave seems to me very nearly an instant classic; almost, though not quite, the peer of the peerless Up. Like that film and all the Pixar efforts, it’s a dazzling piece of cinematic showmanship, and is, maybe, a little less antiseptic than the others.

I don’t mean by this that it’s remotely realistic—nobody could suggest that this well-swept environment reflects, either hygienically or in terms of life options, the real medieval world. It’s a modern, middle-class girl’s fantasy of medieval life. But there is, somehow, a richness, an earthiness of color and texture to Brave that the other Pixar films, by design, didn’t have.

The movie’s people seem pungently human as well. The men, with their gnarled, bushy mugs and irregular physiques, have a comic grandeur, and Merida’s round, mirthful face has a real-girl beauty that the other, more generic Disney princesses can’t claim.

The plot of Brave was concocted by veteran animation writer/director Brenda Chapman and fiddled with by several other hands, including director Mark Andrews. It eventually takes a fanciful supernatural turn, involving both Merida’s Mom and the triplets, that seems off-the-wall at first, but in the end is entirely coherent and emotionally satisfying.

It’s often been noted that the heroines (and heroes) of Disney films rarely have strong mothers, if they have mothers at all. But Brave hinges on a difficult, complicated mother-daughter relationship, with fault on both sides, and this conflict leads to a climactic stretch that’s both highly exciting and moving.

For all the skill of its narrative, however, what’s most remarkable about Brave is that Disney finally really did it—finally gave their audience a genuinely independent-minded Princess. Merida isn’t some cookie-cutter cutie who makes a lot of noise about wanting freedom or adventure while the plot hustles her toward some square-jawed Prince. Merida’s motivation is exactly the opposite: She’s trying to keep the Princes away, at least for a while.

Two final notes: First, Mor’du the Bear was a little scary for both the nine-year-old and the ten-year-old in whose company I saw Brave. These scenes didn’t seem at all as harsh as the witch stuff in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves to me, but parents be forewarned.

Second, don’t be late, as Brave is preceded by a short called La Luna that you don’t want to miss.