Polisse (Monday, May 28, 2012) (50)

Movies and TV shows about cops make it clear that police work is really hard. Totally unrelated to that is the fact that kids are really cute. If you could somehow combine these two elements (kids and cops) you'd have a movie about how hard it is for cops to help kids (particularly those who are being molested and raped). Well, there is such a movie and it's writer/director/actress Maiwenn's Polisse.

This cinema-verité-style look into the Parisian police's Child Protection Unit (that also deals with the white slavery part of Vice) feels very much like a number of cop shows we've seen for years on TV (Homocide, The Wire, the "law" part of Law & Order) and doesn't have any more through-line plot than six episodes of any of those shows strung together one after the other.

The structure of the film basically has a child or parent visit the police station to introduce a case and meet with some members of the CPU team (there are about eight officers in the unit, a very diverse group of men and women). We then see how the team takes down the perpetrator or organization that's doing whatever it's doing to the innocents. Each of these sequences ends with the group of cops going out to blow off steam as a group, in bars and clubs or at the homes of one another.

They each battle small demons of their own (one is anorexic, one is getting a divorce, one is already divorced, although she regrets it, two are interested in dating, despite the fact that one of them is pregnant with her husband's baby) and seem to take the interactions with the kids very personally and hard. Maiwenn herself plays a photojournalist who is documenting the team for an art project... and trying to stay objective as she falls in love with one of the cops.

There are some wonderful moments of comedy (dark comedy, but funny) and tragedy, supported by some really wonderful acting. Karin Viard plays Nadine, one of the senior members of the team, is particularly good, although she's helped by her character being the most deeply developed. Frederic Pierrot plays Baloo, the leader of the group, and does it beautifully. Still, the film feels much more like a list of situations than a single particular story. There no connection from one episode to the next and kids who we get to know briefly and seemingly deeply vanish once their situation is solved.

Clearly this is a commentary on cinematic plot structure and a way of getting the audience to identify more with the cops. Maiwenn is specifically putting us in the position of the cops who can't totally remain connected to any individual kid because they will be gone soon and a new case will come up. The main problem with this is the the cops do seem to connect deeply to the kids, forcing us to connect in a rather forced situational way. Kids being cute make us immediately love them -- they're total proxy emotion devices. That the cops in the film connect to them is not really the same thing as when we connect to them. In principle they're connecting to the human being, while we're connecting to the idea of a "kid in trouble". This dissimilarity in our relationships to the children only goes to shed light on a major flaw in the film.

I am predisposed to hate movies about "kids in trouble" because they're cheap and emotionally insincere. This, however, is a good movie with some great stuff in it. I wish it had more structure to help guide our connections and feelings in a more purposeful way. What we get is really just a substitute for deep relationships that makes everything annoyingly superficial.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

First Position (Wednesday, May 9, 2012) (46)

Yet another documentary about amazing things cute kids do... Oy vey! Yes, First Position shows how teens (and pre-teens) from around the world compete in an annual New-York-based ballet competition to get scholarships to some of the premiere ballet theaters of the world. 

You have your high-strung girl from California who is pushed harder and further by her Japanese mother, your young American boy, the son of an American Naval officer based in Italy, who now trains in Milan, your affable teen adopted by Philadelphians from her home in war-torn West Africa who is fighting to disprove the industry concept that black women don't have the body shape to be ballerinas. It's all very sweet with tons of built-in drama based on the inevitable falls, injuries and egos. 

Most annoying about the film is that what director Bess Kargman shows us is mostly what she has access to. The fact that she focuses on these kids is because they are the best in their relative age groups and divisions, so their success is relatively guaranteed. That we only see one competition is simply a matter of it being the one that she was allowed to shoot. That the competition we see seems to jump around through the various rounds in an inconsistent and sometimes confusing way, is only a matter of the end (their ultimate success) being more important than their stories.

It's all a bit too banal for my taste. This really isn't an examination of kids who do ballet or the weird world of junior ballet (the crazy schedule, the weird diets, the psychological trips the kids must go through), but rather an small glimpse of these few, hand-selected dancers for this short period of time. 

This is a nice movie, but nothing really special. It's probably more worth it for dancers to watch and reminisce about their youth than it is for dancing novices like me.

Stars: 2 of 4

Tomboy (2011) (January 16, 2012) (139)

Writer-director Céline Sciamma's previous film, Water Lilies, was a great, simple and beautiful film about teen sexuality and power. In Tomboy, she makes another film that rests on the edge of Western cultural mores about children and sex, this time with younger, pre-sexual kids.

The film opens with a prepubescent child with short hair riding in the car with his/her father. It is not clear if this is a girl or a boy, but he/she looks about 10-years old. The family has just moved to a new apartment in the Paris banlieue. Right after moving in, the child goes outside to walk around and meets a young girl, Lisa. The child says his/her name is Mikael and is then introduced to the other kids as the new boy in the building. Later, in a bath with his younger sister, it becomes clear that Mikael is not who he says he is, but rather is a girl named Laure. Now Laure/Mikael has to pass as a boy, despite her sister finding out about the situation.

This is a very simple film in narrative. There is one falsehood presented early on and it leads to a few situations that are totally uncomfortable for the audience and difficult for Laure. Much of the tension in the film relates to Laure's "secret" coming out and how the viewers generally root for her to pass as a boy. Sciamma beautifully plays with this idea, however, as she puts Laure in positions that bend gender, and make the audience squirm. At one point, Lisa puts makeup on Mikael the way two 10-year-olds might play. For us, this is a very disconcerting moment as it feels like a boy is being forced to look like a girl... though, of course, it's really just a girl getting makeup on her face. At another moment, Laure's mother insists she put on a dress, which feels very much like she's a boy wearing a dress.

This brings up all sorts of interesting stuff about how society prejudges kids with regard to gender and who once we think a kid is a boy or a girl, they are put into categories in our minds. Girls wear pink and play with makeup; boys wear blue and wrestle. (Laure's mother mentions offhandedly that her bedroom was painted blue.) Even when we know Laure is a girl, her wearing a dress still feels uncomfortable. This also leads to questions about our feelings of childhood sexuality and presexuality. It's very easy to just to the conclusion that Laure is a pre-lesbian, but she's really pre-sexual and this experiment has much more to do with being a new kid in the building, wanting to fit in and her feelings about her parents and sister.

There's something about French directors that they direct kids in amazingly and naturally, unlike most English-speaking directors. Sciamma is working mostly with non-actor kids or kids with very little experience and most of the scenes in the film involve kids running around and playing or talking and arguing as kids. Throughout the film, everything feels totally natural and honest. Some scenes could pass as unscripted documentary footage (much of it is probably unscripted). Zoé Héran, who plays Laure/Mikael, is particularly great in this role, though with kids it's always hard to compliment acting because it's not clear how much of a stretch they're making or how aware they are of what they're doing.

This is easily one of the best films of 2011. Much like Lucia Puenzo's fabulous film XXY from a few years back, it examines childhood gender roles in an elegant, non-exploitative fashion. It is straightforward with an uncomplicated plot, it has a beautiful realistic quality and interacts with the audience in very interesting ways that force reflexive analysis and more consideration.

Stars: 4 of 4

Hugo 3D (Friday, December 2, 2011) (111)

Martin Scorsese's Hugo is supposed to be a family movie, but I don't think it really is at all. In fact, I think it's pretty freaking boring for adults and kids alike. Based on the book by Brian Slznick, it tells the story of Hugo (Asa Butterfield), a preteen boy who lives in secret in a Paris train station in the 1930s. He's effectively an orphan and spends his days winding the dozens of clocks in the station. His main passion, though, is the nonfunctional automaton his father stole (!!) from a museum that he was trying to get running again before he was killed in a fire.

Between his winding duties in the station, he runs around the stores in the station, which seems a bit odd considering he's always being chased by the station master (Sacha Baron Cohen). One place he loves to go is the toy maker (Ben Kingsley), where he can steal mechanical parts and wheels that will help him rebuild the automaton. One day he meets the toy maker's young ward, Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz), and the two find that she wears a heart-shaped key (oh - how magical!) that will turn on the automaton. When they get it working they find that it draws a picture of the Man in the Moon being hit in the eye by a rocket... a still from Georges Méliès' 1902 film A Trip to the Moon. They then spend days researching early movies - because kids love reading books and doing research in libraries, of course.

I think I like what the film is getting at in general - that a fascination with mechanical stuff in the hopes of connecting with dead daddy leads a boy to discover the wonder of cinema, but it feels cold and stale. The case isn't helped by the fact that the plot plods along with no particular direction for most of the way. At first it's a film about an orphan boy, then it's about a broken automaton, then it's about the life of an old man, then it's about the history of cinema. It's slow and boring, and, although I love movies about movies, I would rather just watch a documentary about Méliès rather than seeing this inelegant tribute to him.

The whole thing feels much more like the sort of history lesson you'd get from someone who reads a lot of books and has a lot of facts available to them, but presents it in a showy rather than a structured way. I get that Marty loves old movies (he talks about them all the time), but why waste time with the kid and his father, who is almost totally forgotten by the end of the film? (And this is to say nothing of the automaton, which is just a silly MacGuffin... but a fake-magical one. Pardon me while I throw up in my mouth.)

The connection between clocks and mechanical stuff (a toy mouse, the station master's mechanical leg) and early movies is thin at best. Yes, early cameras shared a lot of moving parts with clocks, but that's sorta missing the point. Why not connect internal combustion engines to early cameras and movies too? (OK, fine, Méliès was some sort of clockmaker... but still, the connection seems forced.)

I'm sure screenwriter John Logan and Marty wanted to stick close to the book, but I think cutting a lot of the boy's journey, as well as some totally flaccid romantic material involving secondary and tertiary characters, would have greatly improved the story. The only reason the station master is in the film is to create chase scenes - because kid audiences need chases. But these chases are not very exciting and ridiculous when Hugo keeps going back to the same station where he'll inevitably get chased out again.

I paid extra to see this in 3D and I will say that it's totally not worth it with this film. There's an elegant meta explanation for why this would be Marty's first foray into 3D - that the movie is about technology and mechanical stuff, so he's flexing his technological muscles here - but he didn't do enough with it to make it worthwhile. I don't know why he, a lover of cinema, wouldn't have done some grand allusions to de Toth's House of Wax or Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder. Instead we get a movie that would totally work in 2D, but just wants to fool people into paying more.

The film generally looks good (though very storybooky and a bit like the early Harry Potter movies) and the acting is good, but the story is dull and meandering. I think there's material here for a good movie written and cut differently, but the way it all rolls out is totally banal.

Stars: 2 of 4

The Muppets (Thursday, December 1, 2011) (109)

I was very worried that The Muppets would be just another Muppets movie with not much going for it (can you say Muppets from Space?). Happily I was totally wrong about it. It's fantastic. It's funny and fresh and has all the warmth a joy of the gold-age Muppets with a very clever contemporary flair. It feels much more geared toward Muppets fans who grew up with them in the '70s and '80s than for kids today. Happily that's not my problem.

In the world of the film, puppets of all shapes and colors live among people and that is totally normal for everyone. Walter, a boyish puppet, lives in the mid-American town of Smalltown and is the biggest fan of the Muppets, a group of puppet performers he knows from the Muppet Show and several movies from his childhood. His brother and best friend Gary (Jason Segal) and Gary's girlfriend Mary (Amy Adams) want to go on a vacation to Hollywood and agree to bring Walter along so he can visit Muppet Theater, where the Muppet Show was produced a long time ago.

When they get there, they find that it is closed to the public and in terrible shape. Walter overhears oilman Tex Richman (Chris Cooper) buying the theater and talking about how plans tear it down and drill for oil there. Walter, Gary and Mary have to find Kermit the Frog to get the Muppets back together to perform a telethon and raise the money to buy back the theater back from Richman. In grand Muppets style, they all go around the country picking up the old gang (Fozzie is working in Reno with his band, the Moopets; Gonzo is a plumbing and toilet bowl magnate; Animal is in anger management rehab; Piggy is in Paris working for a fashion magazine).

I love that the story is silly but generally simple enough to hold together. It's very, very funny and filled with some of the wonderful double jokes that work for kids and adults on different levels. There's lots of Muppet-centric humor and lots of very clever and timely jokes. There are great songs, including some of the old favs like The Rainbow Connection, Moving Right Along and the Muppet Show theme song. The tone is very fun and silly and it's constantly winking at us as ridiculous stuff happens. The film was co-written by Segal and Nicholas Stoller and the script is great.

There's really nothing to criticize about the story or the production. There are a few fantastic moments that I still laugh about now when I think about them. This is a warm, wonderful movie that I hope to watch again and again and fits in perfectly with early Muppet films like The Muppet Movie, The Great Muppet Caper and Muppets Take Manhattan. This is an instant classic in my book and totally wonderful.

Stars: 4 of 4

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 - 3D (a.k.a. HP7P2-3D) (Sunday, July 17, 2011) (56)

So here we are. We've reached the end of the Harry Potter movies. The seven books, having been stretched out to eight films and nearly 20 hours of screen time and are now totally over forever (until J.K. Rowling writes a new book that is turned into a new movie). It's one of biggest, longest, most profitable film franchises ever. It's also a lot of fun. (If you haven't seen any of these movies, or none since the first, ignore the rest of this post as you will be bored miserably, I'm sure.)

HP7P2-3D is basically the second half, or really the last third, of the seventh and last Harry Potter book. It begins with a running start with the Harry, Ron and Hermione trio on the hunt for more of Voldemort's horcruxes (small things into which he injected parts of his soul to make it harder for him to be killed). They go to Gringott's to get one of them, and then realize one of the last ones is back in Hogwart's, from which they have been truants for the whole school year (no comment on how in a book about seven years at a school, they only spend about six there, with the last one a year of non-lesson-based Evil Lord-fighting. But J.K.R. wants kids to stay in school, or something).

When they get to Hogwart's they find the school in dark lock-down, now run by Snape, where the professors teach the kids all sorts of terrible magic to inflict pain on others. There are Death Eaters all about and all sorts of people in black leather (hot, if you're into that sorta thing). Harry gets a little help from his friends (students and teachers) in Dumbledore's Army and what's left of the Order of the Phoenix. They fight a massive knock down, drag-out fight with the bad guys before Harry's final one-on-one with Voldemort.

I think the movie smooths over some rough patches that I never liked in the book, particularly with Snape. I always felt like the 'Snape is a good guy' thing that we're told near the end was a bit too hard to swallow in the book. Here, however, director David Yates and writer Steve Kloves do a wonderful job of showing how Snape was always massively conflicted about Harry, about his eternal love for Harry's mom, Lilly, and his deep hatred for Harry's dad, who was probably a total douchebag who deserved to be killed by dark magic. The last 20 minutes of the film are particularly wonderful. The epilogue especially always felt forced and precious, but here feels totally natural and necessary. It's a lovely ending to a great epic story.

What I particularly like about this last film is how it brings in traditional themes from human existence and classical art: the idea of one person doing something alone versus someone working with their friends and allies to get a job done. It is very reminiscent to me of the classic story from Hollywood lore that after seeing Fred Zinnemann's High Noon (a story about a marshal who can't get help and is forced to defeat a bad guy singlehandedly), Howard Hawks decided to make Rio Bravo (a story about a sheriff who gets all the help he needs from his friends to defeat the bad guys) in response.

Voldemort is Marshal Will Kane and Harry Potter is Sheriff John T. Chance. We are constantly reminded here about how Voldemort (né Tom Riddle) is one of the greatest wizards ever, for better or worse, and how Harry is really only an average wizard who excels at making friends and having them help him. (There is even an suggestion, posited by Snape, that Harry is a proud prima dona and somewhat of a talentless jerk.) When Harry goes searching for the missing horcruxes, he does find a few on his own, but also needs help from his associates to find the others. Meanwhile, Harry is told that Voldemort found all of them on his own. I guess the idea that this Lincolnian leadership style is more effective, at least less demagogic and less evil.

I'm also very interested in the revisionist look at Snape as a reluctant collaborator. In this film, he's Maréchal Pétain, a stooge put in a position of power and told to stay quiet while terrible things happen inside his domain (the school). Unlike the general understanding of Pétain, however, Snape is hiding the fact that he's really on the side of good and not evil. Was Pétain trying to work against the Nazis and destroy the Reich from the inside? It's a very hard sell.

(Of course, we shouldn't forget that Snape did witness lots of evil things happen at Hogwarts and his Death-Eater days and it's hard to forgive him for those things. I don't care that Colin Powell didn't believe in the testimony he gave at the UN Security Council in 2003, he said it and it sent us to war and thousands of people to their death. He should have resigned if he was so morally torn. I won't forgive him now.)

The 3D worked really well in this film, probably better than I can remember in any Hollywood picture where I've seen it used. Some of the scenes play very well with the depth of focus and the disorienting quality of the enhanced image, like Gringott's sequence at the beginning. In other scenes, where there is little action, the 3D is used gently to simply show us how basic things recede into space. I would hope in years to come, directors use 3D more in this way than they do with some movies where it seems that dumb tricks are inserted into every shot to make sure we know we're seeing it in 3D and make sure we feel like we're getting our money's worth (we never get our money's worth as it's still way too expensive).

As with the last film, there is no need to see this movie if you haven't seen all the other ones, and particularly if you haven't seen the first part of this one. It is, however, very solid, much more interesting than I would have expected and a lot of fun from a sheer entertainment point of view.

Stars: 3 of 4

Colors of the Mountain (Sunday, June 5, 2011) (39)

I can see why some people would really like the Colombian film The Colors of the Mountain by Carlos César Arbeláez: it has a bunch of cute kids (including two albino kids!!), they play soccer and their lives are being upset by FARC-like guerrillas. It's all sorts of sentimental claptrap that many go in for. Sadly, the film is just these things and had no real emotional movement and not much of a plot either.

Manuel is a 9 year-old boy who loves playing soccer with his friends in his remote village in the Colombian mountains. His father is a poor, apolitical farmer, a good man and a careful, concerned parent. One day when the boys are playing soccer, the ball gets kicked far away to another hill where the guerrilla group in the area (something just like the FARC, though the name is never really mentioned) has placed a bunch of land mines. The boys are very sad that they won't be able to play anymore because they're not allowed to go retrieve the ball.

Meanwhile, Manuel's father is trying to avoid the guerrillas who are recruiting in the area. They demand that he show up at their meetings, but he always finds a way of avoiding them. He's worried that if he joins their militia he will be a target of the government army's raids into partisan villages.

All these politics fly over Manuel's head, and all he's concerned about is getting his ball back. As more and more of his classmates are pulled out of his one-room-schoolhouse school, he seems entirely oblivious to the pain and worry the adults are going trough.

There is some nice, subtle style that Arbeláez puts into the film, like how the colors of the mountains (see: title) are rich and beautiful at the beginning of the film and turn to gray and dull as the military conflict intensifies. This elegance doesn't really come through in the narrative, where we see things from Manuel's point of view, so details about the situation are totally obscure.

I appreciate that this is what Arbeláez is going for - rural guerrilla war from the point of view of a kid who can't be bothered by such things - but as a story-telling technique it's very frustrating. Considering I know there's a conflict, I would like to know who the players are in it. Are both sides, the guerrillas and the army, equally bad? Does Manuel's father prefer one side or the other? Why are they fighting?

It's very hard to watch a movie where we know important things are happening in the background, but the main point of interest is a kids lost soccer ball. I don't think it's a very effective way of showing the misery of living in the midst of a guerrilla war. It's just precious and treacly.

Stars: 1.5 of 4

How to Train Your Dragon (2010) (Monday, February 21, 2011) (183)

It's a sad thing for How to Train Your Dragon that no matter how good a movie it is (it's a good movie) it will never be as beloved as Toy Story 3. I guess that's the luck of the draw for any animated film these days - that the year you are released there's always a chance there's a bigger and glitzier Pixar movie that takes all the attention. Still, Dragon does a wonderful job and is still a very fun and delightful film and deserving of lots of praise and attention.

In the film Hiccup is a weak, dorky boy living in a small island town of vikings (who speak with Scottish accents). His father is the chief of the town and because he's not very strong, Hiccup works as an assistant for the town blacksmith making weapons and swords that the warriors use to fight the dragons that pester the village. He seems totally inept at doing anything physical aside from grinding blades and is a shame to his loving father.

One day, after designing a catapult that shoots dragon traps (he's very clever and is good at engineering), Hiccup catches what turns out to be the notorious Night Fury dragon, the most dangerous beast in the world. When he goes to find the thing, he realizes that it's a very loving creature. He works with it, calling him Toothless, and learns all about dragon ways, figuring out the dragons are not nasty beings but just unhappy with their horrible reptile master and very misunderstood. He then has to prove to his village what he knows - and prove to his father that he is a strong man worthy of respect.

I watched this film on DVD and not in the theater in 3D format. I'm sure this affected my overall experience, but I still think it was a visual masterpiece. One scene in particular, where Hiccup finally has a breakthrough in training with Toothless and they go for an elaborate flight, is absolutely magnificent even in standard 2D - and I imagine it would be even more spectacular in 3D! This is one of the first times I've found animators use the 3D format to truly bring you inside the picture rather than just showing off with elaborate gimmicks.

The story is nice for kids and for adults and very funny and well written. I like that the vikings are all Scots and that details like the score are done with rather celtic-inspired themes. There's a rather poignant bit at the end of the film where Hiccup is injured in the ultimate battle and comes away missing a foot, as if he was an injured war veteran. This is done very well, not fetishized and could easily be understood by kids that war has real consequences, even for the victors. At the same time we are not beaten over the head with the emotional ramifications of this (Hiccup gets back on his dragon and flies away).

This might not be as fancy and elite a film as Toy Story 3, but it is a very good film and well worth watching - even in 2D!

Stars: 3 of 4

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 (a.k.a. HP7P1) (Sunday, December 5, 2010) (153)

So this is the continuation of the Harry Potter tale. It's the first part of a two-part final book... and it's very, very long. This is the seventh year of school for Harry and his friends - but the whole book takes place with the kids not in class. I guess when you're fighting the Most Powerful Wizard in History and trying to stop him from destroying the world, you get a hall pass or a doctor's note and are excused from school. Whatever.

Harry, Ron and Hermione are on the hunt for the remaining three (or four) horcruxes - objects in which Voldemort put part of his soul so he be sure to not die easily. They basically move around, mostly in the wilderness, though sometimes in weird small towns, trying to avoid Death Eaters (bad guys) and solve a few riddles (like the mysterious gifts left for each of them by Dumbledore in his will and what the next horcruxes are).

As with some of the previous films - but probably more so here- this doesn't totally work as a movie without a book and wiki easily at hand to explain some of the more obscure details or general sweeps of the story. This film mostly moves along on the steam of the books, rather than it's own internal engine. It's a bit difficult to follow at times and some things happen in rather magical ways, leaving us scratching our heads in bewilderment.

This movie has some very dull moments and overall plays much longer than its 150minute run-time. I think the idea here is to have the entire seventh book, so it was divided up into two gigantic halves. I think it would have been better to cut some of the less critical material and make the film more 120-minutes or so. It would have been better for figuring out the overall feel and keeping a nice, efficient story moving along. There is a lot of stuff here with kids sitting in the woods thinking about stuff and reading.

The overall look of the film is dark, gray and foggy. This is very nice and gives a great feeling to the tale. Just like the book was, this is not really a movie for little kids. It's a movie for teenagers and older people... it's spooky and rather frank about sex/love and death.

This is a good movie, though not a great one. The script should have been cut a bit, sacrificing perfect re-creation of the book for a more enjoyable, easier film viewing experience.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Toy Story 3 (Sunday, June 20, 2010) (56)

I am a fan of the Toy Story movies. I liked the first one and loved the second one. For me they are fantastic buddy movies that smartly pull from film history to make wonderful, contemporary stories. There is a ton of John Wayne and Dean Martin from Rio Bravo in them (they are basically Westerns) and I love that.

Toy Story 3 fits in beautifully with tho previous two. This film is funny, sad, poignant, scary and exciting. I was surprised by how frank and adult some of the characters are and how death and loss was dealt with.

Since the last time we saw Woody and Buzz, Andy, their kid owner has grown up and stopped playing with them as much. He is now about to go off to college, but his mother makes him clean his room before he goes. Most of his toys are put in a box to be donated to the local preschool and once they get there, they think they're in toy heaven with tons of kids looking for hours of playtime all day long. There are hundreds of toys there, all happy to have this second-life as toys for new youngsters.

It turns out the preschool is run by a mad purple bear, Lotso, who is bitter because his owner abandoned him. He takes out his rage on the toys he doesn't like, forcing them to work the room with the very young kids who play rough. Lotso has a posse of enforcers, including Ken (Barbie's boyfriend), Big Baby (a big baby doll), Twitch (a big Alien insect) and Chunk (a rocky tough). They reset Buzz's memory so he becomes one of them and forgets his friends from Andy's house. It then becomes clear that the group has to escape, but to where? Andy has given them away and they have no other home.

Like the ones before, this is a very funny and fresh film with some great jokes that work for adults as well as kids. There's a whole love story between Ken and Barbie, suggesting that Ken is a clothes horse and rather vein. There are several great action/escape sequences that keep you on the edge of your seat.

One thing that was a big surprising to me was how Lotso is a very dark, angry character with almost nothing good going for him. He comes off as gregarious and bright at the beginning, opening his school to the new arrivals. But this is an act - and he is really an unfriendly, unloving character. I think this would be hard for kids to understand or deal with, especially because he comes off as a friend to begin with and then turns bad. Beyond this, his meanness seems to come from deep down inside him and he is unable to grow or change - even when it means the imminent deaths of the gang of friends. I guess he gets his just desserts in the end, but I'm not sure his punishment (which is basically a life of torture... also sorta dark, by the way) fits his crimes.

There are a few moments that seem more like a kids movie than an adult movie (like how Andy drives himself to college, which I don't buy considering his mother is so over-protective), but overall this is a sweet and fun movie, good for basically all ages.

I liked it a bit more than the first one and a bit less than the second one, but it was great overall. I did not see it in 3D, because I don't like the format very much and didn't want my feelings about that hurt my enjoyment of the film. Regardless, it worked well in a "2D" version, nonetheless. I guess there's a chance for a 4th one in the franchise... and I'm sure that one will be wonderful too.

Stars: 3 of 4

Furry Vengeance (Saturday, May 1, 2010) (39)

I saw this movie mainly because I was surprised and delighted by the title and the poster. In the world of urban legend underground sex fetishes, furry loving is a thing where people get turned on by and have sex with people dressed up in full-body animal costumes - like high school bear suits and whatnot. I'm not at all sure that this is a real thing, but it is a recent meme that comes up a lot on The Daily Show and e-mail forwards. The poster for this movie shows star Brendan Fraser being attacked by a big bear - but it almost looks like it could be a person dressed up in a bear costume. That this was also supposed to be one of the worst movies of the year made this all the more enticing to me.

Well - it was really neither of these things. It was not a movie about weird sex fetishes that nobody has (to paraphrase Roger Ebert's great line about David Cronenberg's film Crash) and it was also not the worst movie of the year. It was a nice family film with a nice message and basically totally harmless. Surprisingly it has one of the biggest casts in recent memory for such a weird family film.

Dan Sanders (Fraser) is a nice family guy with a wife, Tammy (Brooke Shields) and a son. He works for a company that is building a housing sub-division in the middle of a big forest. As he begins to tear down some of the trees to put up houses, the animals in the forest turn against him and begin to torment him for his anti-enviro business. Dan is just a middle-man, though, and the real villain is his boss and company owner, Neal Lyman (Ken Jeong - who is everywhere these days). Dan's family begins to think he's crazy as the animals torment him more and more.

Other the the main actors, the cast also features lots of cameos from actors (some of whom are recent parents): Angela Kinsey, Samantha Bee, Rob Riggle, Patrice O'Neal, Jim Norton and Wallace Shawn, to name a few.

The story is perfect for kids and easy enough for adults as well. There is nothing really challenging here and it ties up nicely with a good happy ending message about loving nature and animals.

It feels like a 1980s comedy with John Candy or Chevy Chase - but in the best possible way. Like a PG version of The Great Outdoors or The Money Pit. There is no reason to hate this movie - it is exactly what it says it is - a sweet family comedy that is safe for all ages.

Stars: 2 of 4

The Princess and the Frog (Tuesday, December 22, 2009) (203)

As a tribute to their classic 2D animation history, Disney made The Princess and the Frog, its first animated film to focus positively on primarily African-American characters (no comment on Song of the South here). The style is indeed reminiscent of classic Disney films, like Cinderella, Snow White and Beauty and the Beast, however this one lacks almost all of the charm and magic of those.

Tiana is a poor daughter of a New Orleans seamstress who dreams of opening a Cajun restaurant when she grows up. Her friend is Charlotte, the white daughter of the richest man in town (I'll clearly ignore the racial undertones here). Prince Naveen, a mysterious dark Europeanish royal, comes to town and meets with a voodoo witchdoctor who swindles him, turning him into a frog. Tiana meets the frog and is convinced that if she kisses him, he will become a prince again, but instead she is also turned into a frog - voodoo's a bitch, ain't it! The two frogs have to go into the woods to find another voodoo witchdoctor lady to turn them back to their human forms.

Typical of Disney animated features, the film has a bunch of music and songs in it (composed and written by Disney mainstay Randy Newman). Sadly none of these songs are memorable at all, even though there is a nice effort to include New Orleans styles of zydeco, jazz and blues. As I watched these songs, I think I mostly felt that they were a nice efforts, but just not as good as recent Disney fare (Under the Sea, Be Our Guest, Hakuna Matata).

Mostly, the story is pretty dull and stretched out way too far. Froggy Naveen and Froggy Tiana spend close to half the movie in the woods on the way to the good voodoo lady with almost nothing important happening. There is so much set-up to the story (Tiana's dream of a restaurant, Charlotte's greedy family, Naveen being swindled) that when the story finally kicks off, it's almost over.

There's another thing here, which is a bit more sensitive, which is the fact that it is the first major feature that Disney has done with primarily African-American characters. To me, it rides the delicate edge of being rather culturally insensitive too closely. That Tiana has to be the poor daughter of a domestic and that her best friend is rich and white might be historically accurate, but feels rather racist considering in a Disney fantasy world people of any color can be anything - why does the one black movie have to be so tied to historic Southern culture?

That the film takes place in New Orleans and features voodoo so prominently is also a bit too much, I think. Again, why can't black people live in a wonderful dream world of castles with good witches and bad witches? I think in an effort to combine political correctness with real-world based fantasy, Disney went a bit too far - or not far enough. I don't know why, after so much success with Brothers-Grimm-esque fairy tales Disney had to turn a story on its head and divert from the traditional Frog Prince story.

Stars: 1.5 of 4

A Town Called Panic (Saturday, December 19, 2009) (196)

What's more snobby in the world of animation than claymation? French claymation, of course - and with subtitles! Actually, this is a cute, film along the lines of a gonzo SpongeBob SquarePants about a small village where toy humans and toy animals live and get into all sorts of hijinks.

For Horse's birthday, his roommates Cowboy and Indian (you see, in French, you can say things like 'Indian' and just be cute and foreign and not culturally insensitive! Bonus!) decide to build him a barbecue pit. They order bricks online, but when the delivery arrives, they realize they have way too many. They stack the thousands of bricks on top of the house, leading, of course, to a gigantic mess when the roof collapses and bricks go everywhere. This is just the opening to a bunch of wild and crazy things that ensue.

The style throughout it playful and funny. The characters move like toys rather than articulated characters typical in most animated films (like the Fantastic Mr. Fox), and the high-pitched voices are hilarious, even if you don't understand the French. We never know what to expect around the next corner - and directors Vincent Patar and Stephane Aubier do a clever job throwing a few curve-balls at us.

The biggest problem with the film is that it's not totally a single storyline throughout. It is adapted from a television show where the scenes are each about five-minutes long. As a result, it's feels like a soup in a can, rather than something totally homemade. That is, the story goes in such bizarre directions (funny but weird) that it is easy to lose track of the thread and get a bit bored. I am not sure if the script was written as one story arc, or if this is just an amalgamation of a bunch of shorts (I could see it either way). In the end it feels like something that would work better as a bunch of shorts - even a few 15-minute shorts, rather than a feature. Still, it's silly and fun all around.

Stars: 2 of 4

The Twilight Saga: New Moon (Wednesday, November 25, 2009) (171)

To begin, I must admit that I have not read any of the Twilight books and really have no interest in doing so. Vampires don't really interest me that much as a genre and teeny bloodsuckers might be worse. I did see the first Twilight movie, though, on DVD (is that one now going to be renamed 'The Twilight Saga: Twilight'?) and was surprised that it was pretty OK. I really liked the photography and the blue-green-gray color palette of the film. The acting was terrible, but I thought the story was passable.

This second film loses whatever charm the first one had and works only as a bridge to the next film. I felt like most of the story was narration catching us up on what goes on in this baroque world and what to expect later on. This film absolutely does not stand up on its own and works only in conjunction with earlier or later stories. It is incredibly frustrating as it has no beginning and no end. There are a bunch of stories in it that go nowhere and it feels like a long episode of a teen serial - like an endless episode of Gossip Girl or 90210.

One thing I can't figure out is why Bella, the protagonist, is so beloved when she's just a dark, bratty, sad girl who makes bad decisions and seems incapable of taking care of herself. There might be two scenes with her smiling in the whole film. She seems like a jerk to her non-vampire friends and buzz-kill to anyone around her. When her toothy boyfriend Edward abandons her (for reasons that don't make sense, by the way, to the unread viewer) she falls into a pit of sadness that seems beneath her 17-or so years.

At any rate, left alone, she befriends a local Native American boy ('Look - an Indian boy,' says Cindy Brady) who doesn't go to school, but is a great mechanic. He falls in love with her, but she still longs for her Eddie. Then there's something about how the Native American boys in her town are all gigantic wolves and change from men to wolves when they sense there is danger around. Then there's something with Bella going before a council of aristocratic vampires in Italy or something.

I wish I could say that the stylistic elements that I liked from the first film remained in this one, but they do not. Director Chris Weitz loses track of the style with too much substance. The story is so choppy that we never really stay in any one place for long enough to see any beauty in it. Also, with the vampires out of town, there is no need for the over-cast skies that dominated the first film and allowed them to be able to go out during the day. These clouds led to the lovely muted color scheme of that movie. Overall, the look is pretty anonymous.

I would say the film is anti-feminist and a bad influence for young women, but that might be too late for such a warning. Bella is a totally passive player in everything she does. She makes no choices herself and needs either Edward or Jacob to guide her. When they're not around, she pouts and waits. I don't know if it was screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg or book author Stephenie Meyer who created such a lame and self-loathing character. (OK, Bella, so your boyfriend left for no reason. Pick yourself up and get back to life. You too can be an active participant in your own life!)

This is not a very fun movie to watch. It feels way too long and totally boring if you don't know what is coming next. What's worse is that there is no real discernible narrative and no beginning, middle or end, so it just feels like a collection of unconnected vignettes with no direction. Why it ends where it does is rather curious to me as there is no real resolution at that point. Why it couldn't have ended three scenes earlier, say, is not clear to me. I wish it had ended a lot earlier.

Stars: .5 of 4

Fantastic Mr. Fox (Sunday, November 22, 2009) (167)

Continuing in the rash of ultra-hip young directors who make movies about long-loved kids books, Wes Anderson comes out with this film, based on the classic Roald Dahl book. There has been some press over the past few weeks about how Anderson didn't really *direct* this film in the way an animation director normally does - rather, he instructed deputies about his general will for tone and look and left the details to them. However it was done, though, this is a fun, funny and charming movie.

In the film, Mr. Fox, voiced by George Clooney, is a devoted family man who has a passion for bird and cider robbing from the poultry and apple farms near his house. He gets into a war with the three farmers nearby over his penchant for elaborate heist schemes. When they kidnap his tail, he enlists the help of friends and family (of the animal kingdom, of course) to exact revenge.

There is a lot to love in this movie, but the best part is its stop-motion animation and wonderful texture of the characters. It feels like a warm animated show that one might have seen in the 1970s or 1980s - before stupid, and ubiquitous CGI animation took over. There is a lot more warmth to the footage here and a lot more interesting details than in computer animations. In the close-up shots of Mr. Fox and the other characters, the individual hairs on his face blow in the wind. It is wonderful to look at it and think that you can reach out and touch the characters and settings. Of course, everything looks very much like a Wes Anderson movie - all super-stylized and packed with kitschy specifics. It works here (better, I think than in much of his live-action films), as this feels fresh and new and furry (the stop motion is not just clay, but little hairy dolls).

The script is very good (adapted by Anderson and Noah Baumbach of The Squid and the Whale) - and the dialogue is very snappy and funny. The voice acting, especially by Clooney and Jason Schwartzman (as Fox's son, Ash) is rather matter-of-fact, smart and full of irony (for the adult viewers). However it is recorded, it sounds very much like I remember stop-motion films sounding in the past - like Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer. Almost like the sound is put on top of the images in little drops, rather than being mixed in with the pictures to create a real-ish atmosphere. This is a nice effect. I guess it might be lost on kids, but it worked well to make me feel nostalgic and warm.

It's hard for me to figure out if I liked this movie more simply because it was charming and well done, or because it felt like a Wes Anderson movie without too much Wes Anderson in it. I am pretty tired of his shtick and this felt like a taste of his stuff without being too strong with his style. At the end of the day, it feels like a fun animated film that might be an allusion to Anderson's oeuvre, but not an Anderson film per se. It borrows strongly from Wallace and Gromit, but only in a good way. It is original, keen and very entertaining.

Stars: 3 of 4

Where the Wild Things Are (Saturday, October, 17, 2009) (150)

I have to admit that when I was growing up the Maurice Sendak book Where the Wild Thing Are was not my most favorite book. I was always thrilled by the illustrations, but found the story rather simple. When I first saw the trailer for this Spike Jonze film, I was once again excited by the visuals (and happy with the great use of an Arcade Fire song) and looked forward to the film.

I think Spike Jonze has a really interesting aesthetic and has made and performed in some very interesting movies and shorts. Say what you might about Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, but it's hard to criticize the very unique look of the movies. He has a way of making very mundane and frequently dirty settings look amazing. He relishes 1980s kitsch, synthetic print fabrics and orangey-brown plastics. He's weird - but weird in a good way. Fun and interesting weird.

In the movie, Max is a young pre-teen boy who has a wonderful imagination, but is an outsider in his home town. His best friend is probably his mother, but she is mostly wrapped up in her new boyfriend. One night, when his mother has her boyfriend over for dinner, Max throws a tantrum and runs away to the woods (while wearing a fantasy animal costume). When he wakes up he finds that he's in a world where the wonderful giant Wild Things live. They behave exactly how a 10 year-old boy would expect them to. They break things and build forts and the fight and love one another. They quickly make him their king and he helps to repair their ever-fracturing world.

The themes of the story are rather eternal. The story is reminiscent of the Wizard of Oz or Candide with the idea that the grass is always greener over there - but is ultimately pretty good back home. Max is a universal childhood character that is very easy to understand and identify with.

What I love about the movie is that it really feels like it is seen from the eyes of a child - and not an adult version of what children see. That is, the Wild Things are just big stuffed animals, rather than more realistic fleshy or CGI beings. They are childish, rough and imperfect - and clearly things that could not exist in our world. They only exist in their own world - in Max's world. This world has a wonderful forest and a wonderful dessert with sand dunes - but it totally small enough to be contained in a kids head.

As much as I liked the Wild Things land, though, I feel that the movie ran a bit long at the end of the second act and beginning of the third. I lost track of the story there and think that it should have been cut and tightened a bit.

Still, Jonze amazed me again with a vision that maybe no other director does as well. The art directors and production designer deserve a lot of credit too, as does cinematographer Lance Accord. I think the film is set in the 1980s (at time when I read the book) and I see myself as Max, a bit of an outsider and a bit sad (oh, OK - I'll stop with the boo-hoo). If I had known then that this movie would be made in my future, this is exactly how I would want it to look.

Keep Spike Jonze weird!

Stars: 2.5 of 4