PROCESSED HAM

In the multiplexes this weekend:

Animal Farm--Seen in a political and historical vacuum, this new movie is a strange but enjoyable enough animated feature for kids. But it's nearly impossible for many of us to see it in a vacuum.

The film is an adaptation of George Orwell's 1945 allegorical fable set on a farm in which the animals have run off the oppressive humans and set up a new society based on such rules as "ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL." What follows, of course, is the slide into selfishness, corruption and classism that seems to inevitably follow even the most high-minded of revolutions.

It's one of the great works of 20th-Century fiction, and the love that Andy Serkis, director of this new version, has for his source material feels unmistakable. But there's no way around it; Serkis and screenwriter Nicholas Stoller have turned Orwell's hard, unsentimental vision into just another kiddie flick. They've given it a star-studded cast with the likes of Kieran Culkin, Steve Buscemi, Glenn Close, Laverne Cox, Kathleen Turner, Jim Parsons and Woody Harrelson as the saintly horse Boxer.

They've added a character, a young pig named Lucky (voiced by Gaten Matarazzo of Stranger Things) to serve as the movie's conscience. They've filled the story with contemporary elements like cell phones and drones, and added a long action finale in which Lucky and the kingpin pig Napoleon (Seth Rogen; excellent) face off for the soul of Animal Farm.

Giving happy endings—well, not happy, but less dispiriting—to Orwell adaptations is nothing new. The 1956 version of 1984 offered an alternative ending used in some markets, in which Winston and Julia are shot down protesting Big Brother instead of surrendering to their brainwashing. A harsh but visually beautiful 1954 British animated version of Animal Farm (partly financed by the CIA!) ended with a second revolution by the animals, this time to overthrow the pigs.

So it's almost easier to excuse Serkis for offering a less gloomy and cynical Animal Farm, and certainly for adding flatulence jokes and other lowbrow gags, than for flexing Orwell's masterpiece to the standard template of the commercial animated feature. You can look from this Animal Farm to such rural tales as Barnyard and Ferdinand and Rock-a-Doodle and back again, and already it's impossible to say which is which.

BOT WAIT THERE'S MORE

Opening in the multiplexes this weekend:

Transformers One--The Hasbro toy line debuted in 1984, when I was in college; I knew the Transformers only slightly, through my nephews. As with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or the Power Rangers or Pokemon, I never had a personal sentimental attachment to them.

For the uninitiated: The Transformers are elegant anthropomorphic robots capable of folding themselves up into vehicles: a truck, a car, a tank, a drone. Or, are they sleek vehicles that can unfold themselves into robots? It's all rather Zen, but it was also brilliant toy marketing; not only was it two toys in one, it took kids beyond the childhood power fantasy of having a truck or a tank to being a truck or a tank.

Along with the toys, the franchise has spawned comics, cartoons, novels and several previous feature films, some animated, some live action. I haven't seen them all, but the couple I did were overstuffed and silly, though they also offered some gorgeous imagery.

This new animated feature is an origin story for the two central figures in the Transformer pantheon, Optimus Prime, leader of the good-guy Transformers, and Megatron, leader of the bad-guy Transformers, or Decepticons. It follows the pair, then called Orion Pax and D-16, as young mining robots, without transforming powers, on their home planet of Cybertron.

Pax is forever snooping around old archives, looking for clues to the whereabouts of some McGuffin that will give him and his overworked comrades equality. D-16 resents his oppression at least as much as Pax does, but he's less of a daring, chance-taking sort. Eventually they end up, along with a couple of other allies, on an adventure on the planet's bleak and mercurial surface.  

I couldn't always follow all this, not just because I was unfamiliar with the references but because the movie, directed by Josh Cooley from a script by several hands, is presented in the Michael Bay manner, with scenes so rapidly cut that you sometimes have to take the dialogue's word for what's happening onscreen. That said, it's a great-looking movie, not quite as beautiful as the recent Ultraman: Rising, but close. Along with the strangely passive harlequin faces of the robots, there are lovely planetscapes and herds of cybertronic deer and vehicles that generate their own roadways and tracks before them as they sail along and other magical sci-fi flourishes.

It has a voice cast of stars, too; along with Chris Hemsworth and Brian Tyree Henry in the leads we also hear from Scarlett Johansson, Keegan-Michael Key, Jon Hamm, Steve Buscemi and Laurence Fishburne. And somewhere amidst the fan service, along with a hard-to-miss Christ allegory, the plot probably carries a pretty nuanced and complex parable of radicalization and the manipulation of media.

DAVIDSON'S ISLAND

Streaming this weekend:

The King of Staten Island—Although undeniably funny in the right dosage, the Saturday Night Live comedian Pete Davidson never struck me as a having a broad range. But playing the semi-autobiographical title character in this, his first star vehicle, he shows the ease and emotional accessibility of, well, a star.

Working from a script he co-wrote with director Judd Apatow and Dave Sirus, Davidson plays Scott, a twenty-four-year old stoner and aspiring, though not very promising, tattoo artist, living with his weary but doggedly upbeat widowed Mom (Marisa Tomei) in New York's persistently unglamorous Fifth Borough. The son of a firefighter who died in the line of duty—Davidson’s real-life dad died in the 9/11 attacks—Scott is funny, intelligent, likable, even charismatic, but also traumatized, stuck in adolescence, and quietly, almost unconsciously desperate.

Even for Scott, though, change is of course inevitable. His younger, better-adjusted sister (Maude Apatow) heads off to college, and soon his Mom has started a relationship with another firefighter (Bill Burr). Scott responds to it all with bursts of edgy anger—something like Adam Sandler without the mannered eccentricity—offset by a peculiar gentleness that suggests self-awareness and the potential for growth.

Like many of Apatow’s works, the film meanders around at a dawdling clip, exploring subplots and secondary characters, setting up gags that will pay off far down the road, if at all. Not everything works, but it’s a natural approach for a movie about an aimless hero, and we keep rooting for him.

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.

PRO AND CONJURE

The opening minutes of The Incredible Burt Wonderstone are a pretty convincing depiction of how, very probably, most show-biz careers are spawned.

The title character, though he hasn’t yet given himself that grand moniker, is chased down the street by a gang of bullies on his 10th birthday, in 1982. Their gift to him is a punch in the stomach and a blunt reminder that he’s a loser who no one will ever like.

His gift from his mother, however, is better: a Rance Holloway magic set with an instructional videocassette in which the great prestidigitator assures him that everybody loves a magician. Burt and his only friend Anton build on what they learn from this basic stuff, and soon they’re partners in a stage act.

Burt and Anton are played, in this prologue, by the excellent Mason Cook and Luke Vanek, respectively. Steve Carrell and Steve Buscemi take over when they hit adulthood, and their Vegas act, full of elaborate sets and huge hokey props, is a fixture at Bally’s, with its own theatre. Ten years into their run there, Burt has been turned by boredom and repetition into a hateful jackass, snarling contemptuously at everyone who works with him, including the long-suffering Anton. He lives in joyless luxury in a casino penthouse, where even his nightly seductions of comely volunteers from the audience have become a carefully-rehearsed routine.

But like any other star, Burt finds himself in decline, threatened by the newfangled stylings of the insufferable Steve Gray, “Brain Rapist” (Jim Carrey), who wows the crowds with extreme “street magic” stunts, often involving revolting abuse of his own body. Burt and Anton’s act—and friendship—fall apart when they try to compete with this approach, and Burt finds himself unemployed, broke and at the reluctant mercy of his disgusted assistant Jane (Olivia Wilde), herself an aspiring magician.

The rest of the movie, rather snappily directed by TV veteran Don Scardino from a script by several hands, including John Francis Daley of Freaks and Geeks, is about Burt’s attempts to resurrect himself, both as a performer and a person. It’s a perfectly legitimate template for a showbiz story, and The Incredible Burt Wonderstone entertained me, and made me laugh quite a bit.

But it’s marred, for me seriously, by a high degree of cloddish, heavy-handed shtick of what I suppose might be called the Hangover school: mean-spirited slapstick and obvious, telegraphed jokes. There are lengthy set-pieces, like Burt and Anton’s stunt in a suspended booth, or Anton’s imbecilic charitable efforts, that seem meant to convulse us with hilarity. But they just go thud, like a failed a magic trick.

It isn’t just that these scenes aren’t funny. It’s that they’re not consistent with the characterizations. Anton, for instance, is supposed to be the smart, sensitive half of the pair, so the gag about his misguided interactions with Third World people plays particularly dumb.

This side of the material also feels disingenuous in the face of what the movie seems to be championing—corny but comparatively genteel showmanship over shock. It struck me, by the way, that Burt and Anton’s show could still play in Vegas to full houses, and leave them well and unironically satisfied. (I’d certainly go.)

What saves the movie is the sensational cast. Despite the unhilarious nature of the stuff he’s given to do, Carrey isn’t bad at all in his Criss Angel send-up. James Gandolfini is very funny as the dull-souled Bally’s honcho, and Buscemi is always easy to like.

As for Carrell, he’s about as poised a leading man as you’ll find in American movies right now. He has suavity and charm balanced with an accessible everyman quality and a comedic fearlessness. His best moment here is the pleasure Burt registers, quietly but deeply, when he meets his old idol Rance Holloway (Alan Arkin in full curmudgeon mode) in a retirement home—it’s the point at which Burt starts the trudge back from Assholedom, and it gives a hint of the movie that The Incredible Burt Wonderstone could have been.

But then, the potentially touching scene in which Burt and Anton make up is thrown away on overplayed and way overextended mock-sniveling. Carrell and Buscemi both deserve better than this, but alas, they’re complicit in it. It’s a lousy trick they’ve played on themselves.

COP TO BOTTOM

The movie isn’t much fun, but Woody Harrelson is brilliant in Rampart. He plays Dave Brown, an unraveling Los Angeles cop in 1999, the height of the notorious Rampart Scandal. From the outside, Dave looks like a cocksure archetype of the LAPD at its formidable worst: Crooked, vicious, racist, arrogant, obsessively macho, reflexively self-justifying.

But Harrelson also lets us see how Dave sees himself—as a roguish, vigilante hero—& how his intensity & sexual confidence suck others, women especially, into sharing & enabling this delusion, at least temporarily. His smile is both boyish & predatory, & he speaks with a deliberate, jaunty verbosity, provided in part by James Ellroy, who wrote the script with director Oren Moverman. The movie is a bit like a west coast version of Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, with a more specific psychology & social context & minus the Catholic guilt & mysticism. For better & worse, it’s Bad Lieutenant done a la Robert Altman.

Dave Brown feels that his name is too prosaic for a person as remarkable as he thinks he is, but he has a more distinctive nickname: In the department he’s called “Date-Rape,” because he coyly declines to confirm or deny having killed a man known to be a serial date rapist. Early on, we see him bully a (female) rookie & beat up a suspect, then do a full-on Rodney King to a guy who collides with his car & then flees. Later, we’re clearly shown his capacity for murder, not to mention robbery.

He justifies all this brutality with claim that he never hurts any good people. He also uses the familiar line, beloved of racists everywhere, that because he hates everybody he somehow can’t be a racist; he cites his willingness to sleep with black women as further evidence of this.

Some of the most successful scenes in Rampart, however, are concerned not with Dave’s work but with his eyebrow-raising home life. He’s been married, consecutively, to sisters (Cynthia Nixon & Anne Heche), & has one daughter with each, & they all live together, though the exes want him gone so they can get on with their lives. Despite frequent absences for sex with other women, including Robin Wright as a self-loathing lawyer, Dave refuses to move out—his role as paterfamilias is essential to his heroic self-image.

The cast of Rampart is stellar—in addition to the aforementioned, it includes Sigourney Weaver, Ned Beatty, Steve Buscemi, Ice Cube, Ben Foster & Audra McDonald—& they give fine performances, but they have the feel of cameos in a vehicle for Harrelson.

For about half the film’s length, his magnetism keeps it morbidly riveting. But Ellroy & Moverman haven’t shaped the material for a climactic payoff. We’re just expected to stare at the last few loops of this guy’s downward spiral, & it grows very tedious. Even though I felt a certain repulsed pity for Dave, I also began to strenuously wish that someone would put him out of our misery, & his own.