Criticwire Survey: Should You Look Down on YA Movies?

Posted on June 14, 2014 at 8:00 am

The folks at Criticwire have a weekly survey of questions for movie critics. This week’s question is especially important.

Q: Many of the positive reviews for “The Fault in Our Stars” boil down to either “It’s good for what it is” or “It gets the job done.” But in an essay at Slate that deals in part with John Green’s source novel, Ruth Graham says that one of the reasons more adult readers have turned to Young Adult novels is because it offers the pleasures of literary fiction without its challenges: “Adults,” she writes, “should feel embarrassed about reading literature written for children.” So, as a critic, what’s your feeling about measuring a movie—whether it’s “The Fault in Our Stars” or “X-Men: Days of Future Past” — against what it sets out to do as opposed to what it could do? (Likewise, do you damn “Orange Is the New Black” for not being “Oz”?) Do you take it on its own terms, or do you set your own?

My answer:

One of the reasons more adult readers have turned to Young Adult novels is that they are so damn good. There is a reason that YA and graphic novel sales are flourishing while what is considered traditional “literary” fiction is collapsing on itself, smothered by its preciousness, pretension, and neurasthenic post-modernism. It is often said that if “The Catcher in the Rye” was published today, it would be categorized as a YA novel. And yet it is still read with thoughtful appreciation for its art and depth, even by those who believe they confine themselves to work with literary aspirations.

This is not to say that best-selling YA books are all literature, any more than best-selling books for adults meet that standard. But too often books are put in the YA category just because they are about teenagers. Well, so is “Romeo and Juliet.” Stories are about teenagers for the same reason that stories are about war and death and vampires and zombies and MacGuffins that have to be found or the world will explode in 24 hours. As Augustus says in “The Fault in Our Stars,” it’s a metaphor. The heightened emotions and discoveries of that time of life intensify the elements of a story to provide a dramatic framework.

Graham should be ashamed by trying to embarrass anyone who is moved by a work of fiction. One of the most liberating discoveries of my life was learning that no one’s childhood is long enough to read all of the great books written for children and teenagers. I reread my favorites with increased pleasure and deeper understanding. I read new authors with great appreciation, and keep in mind that one generation’s low culture is quite often understood to be literature by the next.

That said, all movies should be measured against their own aspirations and the expectations of the intended audience. Otherwise, all movie reviews would read: “Well, it’s not ‘Citizen Kane.'”

Movies Get Wiser About GLBT: How To Train Your Dragon 2 and 22 Jump Street

Posted on June 13, 2014 at 11:25 pm

This week’s two big national releases are both sequels featuring Jonah Hill. But they have something more important in common: Both reflect a wiser, kinder, more just treatment of GLBT characters. It was only a few years ago that I wrote an article about the disturbing prevalence of gender and sexual orientation “jokes” in movies for families that ranged from insensitive to insulting to downright offensive.

These two films show that that Hollywood has made real and gratifying progress.

The very R-rated “22 Jump Street” has some fun with the idea that the two main characters have the dynamics of a romantic couple, and are seen that way by at least one other character. The current cover of Entertainment Weekly reflects that theme as well. This is a core element in many other comedy teams, from Laurel and Hardy (who even played each other’s wives in one film) to Martin and Lewis and Hope and Crosby. As in their last film, “22 Jump Street” has explicit portrayals of characters being schooled about use of anti-gay epithets. In real life, Jonah Hill has recently made a sincere and heartfelt apology for his own comment along those lines when he was provoked by an intrusive photographer. There is still more progress to be made, but this film shows significant and meaningful improvement.

The family film “How to Train Your Dragon 2” has a brief, understated comment by a character that the difficulty of dealing with women is just one reason he isn’t married, reportedly an ad lib by the actor who plays him. Given that nearly half of today’s children live in states where marriage equality is the law, it may be that most of those who pay attention to this line will not recognize that as an indication that the character is gay. It is unlikely to be noticed at all by most children. Even The Catholic Register’s Steven D. Greydanus says it is not intrusive enough to recommend skipping the film in a piece showing admirable respect, though he can’t resist saying that he questions his earlier description of the character in question as “an old-school man’s man.” Movies like this one will help the next generation understand that what makes a man a man is not who he loves but who he is.

M. Knight Shyamalan at the National Press Club

Posted on June 13, 2014 at 10:16 pm

Writer/director M. Knight Shyamalan (“The Sixth Sense,” “Unbreakable,” “The Last Airbender,” “After Earth”), appeared at the National Press Club this week to talk about his side project, an intensive assessment of American schools and proposals for reform, as described in his book, I Got Schooled: The Unlikely Story of How a Moonlighting Movie Maker Learned the Five Keys to Closing America’s Education Gap. He became interested in the issue after he visited two schools just four minutes apart. In one, the students were vitally engaged and excited about all possibilities. They gathered around him, asking if they could be in his next movie. In the other, they recognized him but assumed that it could not possibly be the same man who made Hollywood films. They had already internalized the idea that no opportunities would come to them.

Shyamalan is the son of doctors. He was raised to believe in evidence and data. He spent years trying to figure out the elements that separated effective schools from failing schools and found that there were a lot of passionate adults and a lot of “heated, accusatory” arguments but very little quantifiable, replicable data. He had his own studies done and he found five core elements that were necessary for schools that made students excited about learning so that they would achieve at or beyond grade level. All five were required.

First is: principals who spend 80 percent of their time teaching teachers (“the norm is 8 percent, like a coach not coaching the players”) and the creation of “an incredibly loud and consistent culture.” He spoke frankly about the racism that is still a toxic force in the lives of children today. “They’re getting a message shouted to them outside of the school and we’re going to shout one louder.” That’s what school culture can do, especially in communicating a sense of community and possibility.

He also emphasized the importance of teachers. A good one can sustain a student despite subsequent years of mediocre teachers. But a bad one will make students lag for as much as three more years. Data must be available for continuous assessment and feedback and to create a highest common denominator by making best practices replicable. More time with the students is essential. The school day and especially the school year do not provide enough time and kids who do not have access to resources at home fall too far behind over the summer to catch up. And schools must be smaller. By itself, keeping the school to 350 or fewer raises the graduation rate 17 percent.

Shyamalan was engaged and engaging, self-deprecatory (“celebrity advocates make my stomach cringe”) but passionate. It was good to see his willingness to take on this complicated problem and be a constructive part of the solution.

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Interview: Dean DeBlois of “How to Train Your Dragon 2”

Posted on June 13, 2014 at 7:00 am

Writer/director Dean DeBlois is one of my favorite people to interview and it was delightful to talk to him about the wonderful “How to Train Your Dragon 2.”

Just give me the basics just to set the stage. Tell me how much time has gone by since the first film and where we start off.

This is the second installment of a planned of trilogy. It has our characters now 20 years old instead of 15 year olds that were in our first movie. We wanted to introduce Hiccup and the gang at a different crossroads in their life where they are now stepping into adulthood with some uncertainty and a sense that Hiccup isn’t quite cut out to take over his father’s mantle as chief. So instead he is expressing his restlessness by being out there on the edge of the Viking map and charting new lands and finding new dragons. That’s where he comes across the conflict that actually threatens the peace back home. He discovers that there is a group of dragon trappers that are trapping dragons for an ambitious conqueror named Drago Bludvist who on plans on amassing a dragon army. And there is also a vigilante who is out there rescuing dragons and whisking them away to safety.

Now tell me a little bit about what has happened in the technology side since you made the first one and how that has affected making the movie. Were there things you were able to do this time that you couldn’t do last time?

Sure, absolutely! This film is actually the first to roll out a brand new generation of software that has been in development for over five years. And it just reinvents the way that we approach our work and makes it very intuitive and real time so that we don’t have to wait for renders which always impairs creativity. The big improvement is that the software is much faster so you can work with lots of characters on screen but the results are immediate and so animators now work with their hands again. They get to use the stylus and they can manipulate characters instead of using spreadsheets, numeric entries and pull-down menus.

It seems to me that there is a lot more capacity for many, many characters to interact with each other.

That’s exactly it! There are so many shots in this movie that increase the scope and scale which is perfect for our ambition for the film. There were shots that couldn’t have been done before, like where we have thousands of characters on screen rushing the beach and the epic battle of the second act or so many different characters riding their dragons even in the opening during the dragon races. It allows us to be really rich and complex and also allows for incredible subtlety with the animation as well because there is so much going on under the skin with every one of our character.

With every year it seems like technology makes our lives a little bit easier and makes things look a lot better. Five years ago it seems like clouds in particular were very difficult or water, or anything interacting with water was difficult, like ice for example. We have a lot of that in our movie and it was really difficult to light that but now they look spectacular and you can imagine actually what it going to be five years from now. I believe that what we’re doing now which feels very cutting edge five years from is going to look primitive in ten years.

There is a guy name Dave Walvoord who was our head of visual effects who spent a lot of time actually developing the look of that ice. And it really was incredible. They worked really hard, it was difficult but they figured out a formula that seems to allow just the right amount of light to reflect through it and it has just the right opacity and luminosity to it that just makes it jump off the screen. That’s hats off to our effects department, breathing so much life into what lurks beneath the waves has add a really great quality to it

I’m going to try to do this so that we avoid spoilers but we lose an important character in this movie, so what can you say about that?

It was painful but it was a rite of passage and I think that we all knew that Hiccup had a place to go narratively and so long as he had a crutch he wouldn’t step into the role that he needed to step into. So as somebody who suffered a very similar loss as a boy it has a great heroism to it and a nobility to it but also narratively in terms of tracking Hiccup’s coming of age it was a rite of passage that I thought we needed to go through in order to really commit to the person he needed to become.

That was sad but what totally got me was that beautiful song. I cried. So tell me about the choreography and where the song came from.

I’m really happy to hear that because that was the moment I was most afraid of in the movie and as a result I’m maybe most proud of. The risk for a cringe-worthy experience was high I knew I wanted to have this old Viking ballad that would have been passed down through the generations and something that would have been sung at her wedding to bring her back from this place of regret and remorse and feeling overwhelmed by the realization that people can change and she made the wrong decision and all this time her son who probably needed her feeling like a square peg back in Berk, left to feel like he was the only one that was sympathetic to dragons.

So she is carrying a lot of that burden at the beginning of the scene and Hiccup is so enthusiastic, he’s unaware that he is only overwhelming her more but Stoick realizes that there is another approach and so he uses this song that was a duet to remind her of the person she used to be and who they used to be together. So it was made to be carried out in a very clumsy kind of charming way that used music minimally in order to feel authentic and raw and not a burst into song musical moment. And it sounds like we pulled it off if it made you cry.

I should tell you the song was actually written by Jónsi who was the frontman of an Icelandic band call Sigur Rós and he did our incredible song at the end of our first film. He’s a good friend and I made a concert film for them a few years ago. He joined forces with John Powell to write two pieces for this movie and that’s Hiccup’s introduction song and this song. Lyrically I had something very specific in mind. Shane McGowan from the Pogues has always written these really heartfelt tender beautiful moments and beautiful lyrics and so we approached him about it. He jumped at the chance so the lyrics are lyrics are actually from Shane McGowan, John Powell and Jónsi. We even brought in a choreographer to help us with the movements.

The choreography was pretty intricate.

Yes, we used a choreographer from Once, the stage production and America Idiot. I asked him to make it feel like your parents, sort of bumbling parents dancing around the kitchen instead of Dancing with the Stars. And he incorporated a few fumbles as well in the middle of the choreography to make it feel really authentic and unrehearsed.

I thought that was great. Now I want to go back to the beginning for a minute because that dragon race was an incredible way to get you very immediately into the film and with the characters. How do you orchestrate that to keep us on top of so many different things that are happening?

Narratively we had a lot of ground to cover just in terms of recapping it for the audience and helping out the audience who had not seen the first film. So we decided to do it this very kinetic visceral way. Now that the Vikings and dragons are no longer at each other’s throats they needed something to do with all that energy. so they created this obstacle race of sorts that involves finding marked sheep that are all over the island and then returning them to these baskets that contain them. And you have the whole populous of Berk crammed into these stands cheering them on. This way we could see all of our auxiliary cast aged five years later but also reintroduce them in a fun kinetic way paired with their dragons and seeing how they have become symbiotic flyers in these five years that has passed.

And then another thing is we fly be a lot of the updates that have been installed since the first movie so in places of catapults, and battle stations we now have feeding stations, water reservoir, and aqueducts. You can really see the ways that the dragons have been integrated into the Vikings’ daily lives and how it’s become a dragon utopia, which also helps to set up the stakes for the movie. This is what could be lost if Drago Bludvist has his way and conquers their land as well.

Drago is played by Djimon Hounsou. Tell me about selecting him for the cast and what you saw for that character.

One of my favourite movies is Blood Diamond and I thought Djimon was so powerful in that movie, in particular the scene where he is talking to his son who has been brainwashed by the warlords and has a gun pointed at his father. It’s this beautiful scene where he is saying, “This is who you are and these are your sisters and this is your mother” and remind him of sort of the daily life of who he used to be and the tears were running down his face. I thought that was a great reference for the moment where Hiccup was trying to reconnect with Toothless in the third act of the movie. So he was high on my list and I also love the fact that Djimon was born in Africa but raised in France and he has a very non specific accent which is what I wanted for this character. He was from a distant land, a strange land of unknown origin and so it added to his mystique that he is journeyed this long way for this goal of amassing a dragon army. He’s got a great character to his voice that’s really powerful and intimidating but also textured to indicate that there’s more going on than just the arch villain. He has limited screen time in this movie but I think there is a sense of wanting to know more about what makes him tick.

And I also really enjoyed the new character that you added, Eret played by Kit Harington.

I started watching Game of Thrones as I was setting up the movie and John Snow quickly became one of my favorite characters. And I loved that sense of youth in his voice, and there’s a nobility there. Eret is from a completely different land but also in a way a contemporary of Hiccup’s, roughly in that age range. There was a youth and a charm but also playfulness to the voice that Kit brings. And I actually think he did a great job of rising to the occasion because we pushed the character to be much more of an arrogant, cocksure, cowboy of a dragon trapper who loves the sound of his own voice and Kit immediately took to that and packed more accent to it to make it seem even more amplified. I think he had a lot of fun with the role.

What’s next?

I’m about to start writing that script after I take a little break. I have an existing outline already that was part of mapping the trilogy was kind of knowing what threads we would be drawing out of the first film and playing out in the second installment but then also what are we setting up for the third? I love the idea that something that Cressida Cowell had mentioned when she was visiting the studio and she is the author of the books from which the first movie was based. She said, “I plan by the end to explain what happens to dragons and why they are no more.” That was so compelling and I thought “Wow, it is such a powerful idea.” Of course it’s bittersweet but I think it is so emotionally powerful and fitting to be able to close a chapter on this trilogy with history returning to somewhat as we know it and what happened to the dragons and where did they go and could they come back. These are all mysteries that will be unveiled. But I loved that Hiccup learned stand on his own and made the toughest decisions of all for the betterment of mankind and dragons.

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Free This Weekend: My eBook on Movie Dads

Posted on June 13, 2014 at 5:00 am

In honor of Father’s Day, my eBook, 50 Must-See Movies: Fathers is FREE through Monday, June 16, 2014.

What do “Wall Street” and the “Star Wars” saga and, seemingly, about half the movies ever made have in common? They are about fathers. In “Wall Street,” Charlie Sheen plays the ambitious Bud, who respects the integrity of his blue-collar father, played by his real-life father, Martin Sheen. But Bud is dazzled by the money and power and energy of Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas). The movie will up the ante with Bud’s father’s heart attack as we see him struggle between the examples and guidance of these two male role models.

In “Star Wars,” Luke (Mark Hamill) does not know until halfway through the original trilogy that (spoiler alert) the evil Darth Vader is his father. He was raised by his aunt and uncle, who are killed very early in the first film, but the father figures who are most meaningful in his life are the Jedi masters Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda. Like Bud in “Wall Street,” Luke must choose between the good and bad father figures. Like Luke, Harry Potter is raised by an aunt and uncle, but he finds a true father figure later. For Harry, it is headmaster Albus Dumbledore. In opposition is He Who Must Not Be Named. Like Luke, Harry has the opportunity for great power on the dark side, but he lives up to the example set for him by Dumbledore.

The first stories ever recorded are about fathers. The central human struggle to reconcile the need for a father’s approval and the need to out-do him is reflected in the “hero of a thousand faces” myths that occur in every culture. In Greek mythology, Zeus is the son of a god who swallowed his children to prevent them from besting him. Zeus, hidden by his mother, grows up to defeat his father and become the king of the gods. Ancient Greece also produced the story of Oedipus, who killed his father and married his mother, and The Odyssey, whose narrator tells us “it is a wise man who knows his own father.”

These themes continue to be reflected in contemporary storytelling, including films that explore every aspect of the relationship between fathers and their children. There are kind, understanding fathers whose guidance and example is foundation for the way their children see the world. There are cruel, withholding fathers who leave scars and pain that their children spend the rest of their lives trying to heal. There are movies that reflect the off-screen real-life father-child relationships. Martin Sheen not only played his son’s father in “Wall Street;” he played the father of his other son, Emilio Estevez, “The Way,” which was written and directed by Estevez, and which is about a father’s loss of his son. Will Smith has appeared with his son Jaden in “The Pursuit of Happyness” and “After Earth.” John Mills appeared with his daughter Hayley in “Tiger Bay,” “The Truth About Spring,” and “The Chalk Garden.” Ryan and Tatum O’Neill memorably appeared together in “Paper Moon.” Jane Fonda produced and starred in “On Golden Pond” and cast her father Henry as the estranged father of her character. Jon Voight played the father of his real-life daughter Angelina Jolie in “Tomb Raider.” And Mario Van Peebles, whose father cast him as the younger version of the character he played in “Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song” made a movie about the making of that film when he grew up. It is called “Badasssss!” In the role of Melvin Van Peebles he cast himself.

Director John Huston deserves some sort of “Father’s Day” award. He directed both his father and his daughter in Oscar-winning performances, Walter Huston in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and Anjelica Huston in “Prizzi’s Honor.”

Some actors known for very non-paternal roles have delivered very touching performances as fathers. Edward G. Robinson is best remembered for playing tough guys, but in “Our Vines Have Tender Grapes” he gave a beautiful performance as a farmer who loves his daughter (Margaret O’Brien) deeply. Cary Grant, known for sophisticated romance, played loving – if often frustrated — fathers in “Houseboat” and “Room for One More.” “Batman” and “Beetlejuice” star Michael Keaton was also “Mr. Mom.” Comedian Albert Brooks is a devoted father in “Finding Nemo.”

There are memorable movie fathers in comedies (“Austin Powers,” “A Christmas Story”) and dramas (“To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Boyz N the Hood”), in classics (“Gone With the Wind”), documentaries (“Chimpanzee,” “The Other F Word”), and animation (“The Lion King,” “The Incredibles”). There are great fathers (“Andy Hardy”) and terrible fathers (“The Shining”). There are fathers who take care of us (“John Q”) and fathers we have to take care of (“I Never Sang for My Father”). All of them are ways to try to understand, to reconcile, and to pay tribute to the men who, for better or worse, set our first example of how to decide who we are and what we will mean in the world.

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