Shorts

Posted on November 24, 2009 at 8:01 am

A rainbow-colored wishing rock creates comic chaos in a film from Robert Rodriguez about bullies, family communication and being very, very careful what you wish for. It is also about an army of crocodiles, a telepathic super-genius baby, and a pig-tailed villain named after a font.
Rodriguez is a one-man studio who brings a stylish, kinetic energy to two kinds of movies, the ultra-violent (“Desperado,” “Once Upon a Time in Mexico”) and the family-friendly (the “Spy Kids” series). He is writer, director, cameraman, editor, co-composer of the score and in this case also father of four members of the supporting cast.
He understands that kids would be as likely to wish for getting their braces off as for money or superpowers. He knows how to get them actively involved in figuring out what is happening. He can tell that they will find a booger monster wildly funny. And he knows that what kids and parents wish for most is to be close to friends and family.
The title refers to the way the story is presented — brief intersecting stories going back and forth in time, each filling in additional details of the others. It is set in a community that literally exists in the towering shadow of Black, Inc., a huge corporation headed by Mr. Black (James Spader). He wants to create the ultimate technology, the Black Box, with innumerable functions that include a phone, vacuum cleaner, toaster, dog groomer, and baby monitor. Black’s harried employees include Mr. and Mrs. Thompson (Leslie Mann and John Cryer), who are assigned to lead competing teams and get so caught up in the pressure to succeed that they communicate primarily by texting, even when they are standing next to each other.
That is why they do not notice that their son, Toe (Jimmy Bennett), has no friends and is thrown in the trash every morning by a group of bullies at school led by Mr. Black’s children Cole (Devon Gearhart) and Helvetica (newcomer Jolie Vanier in Wednesday Addams mode). They throw a rock at Toe that turns out to have magical powers. But Toe and the other people who come in possession of the rock are no better at holding onto it than they are at stating their wishes with the requisite precision. Like all fairy tale wish-granters, the rainbow rock is very good at finding loopholes.
Toe presents each character’s experiences with the wishing rock, going back and forth in time and letting us put the pieces together. Toe’s neighbor Loogie (Trevor Gagnon) and his brothers make a number of wishes that do not turn out the way they had hoped, including a wish for “telephonesis” instead of “telekinesis” and wishing for wisdom without being more specific about who should become wise. And then there is another neighbor, Toe’s former friend Nose (Jake Short). He is confined to home with his germaphobic mad scientist of a father (William H. Macy), who spends every minute he isn’t wiping everything down with antiseptic working on contraptions to create a bacteria-free environment. When Toe’s sister (Kat Dennings) unknowingly carries the rainbow rock to her job as Nose’s tutor, Nose uses it to make an unselfish wish – but that does not keep the consequences from being equally disastrous. When Toe’s parents wish they could be closer, the result is more literal than they had in mind.
And then Helvetica and her father get the rock, and things really get out of hand.
After the disappointment of “Spy Kids 3D” and “The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl,” it is good to see Rodriguez moving toward what made the first “Spy Kids” one of the best family films of the last decade. This film is not as imaginative or heart-warming as that one, but it is refreshingly un-glamorous and it has a warmth and sense of fun that makes it just the end-of-summer treat a family might wish for.

(more…)

Angels & Demons

Posted on November 24, 2009 at 8:00 am

Harvard professor of Symbology Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) returns for another round of save the world heroics peppered with chases, kidnapping, murders, clues, codes, and ancient manuscripts, a beautiful and very erudite woman, murky motives, and a lot of historical, religious, and artistic arcana, all to the music of angelic choirs and crashing horns.While the book occurs before the blockbuster sequel, this movie begins after the events of The Da Vinci Code. Langdon is not the Catholic church’s favorite guy, given his heretical findings about the role of the real-life Mary Magdalene and the efforts of the church to suppress it. The Vatican has repeatedly denied his request for access to some of their historic documents. But when a crisis hits just as the cardinals have convened to select the new pope and the four leading candidates are kidnapped, with the clues pointing to a secret and possibly terrorist sect of Catholic rebels, the Vatican calls on Langdon to solve the mystery.To make things more complicated — and believe me, this gets very complicated — something else has been stolen. It is “antimatter” created by a supercollider that is intended to find “the God particle,” the piece of matter that will answer some important questions about how the universe began. And if they don’t get to it by 8 pm, there will be a very, very big boom.It isn’t just atoms that are colliding here. Author Dan Brown specializes in dark conspiracies of power in the name of faith. He posits this story as a conflict between religion and science going back hundreds of years. Once again, he takes intensely detailed research into church culture, history, and canons, even the intricacy of Vatican succession and chains of command plus Galileo, Raphael, sculpture, and architecture, and then he builds a fictional story around it, giving a standard chase and explosion saga some added weight, freight, and interest. Once again, however, the heavy exposition translates unevenly to the screen as the actors have to chew through paragraphs of detailed information as they are careening through the streets of Rome.Hanks (without the scholar’s mullet this time, thank goodness) is game throughout, always seeming skeptical without being cynical, though for a guy who says he is “anti-vandalism” he leaves a lot of destruction in his wake. Ewan McGregor seems a little lost as the assistant to the late pope whose position gives him a fragile claim to authority. And the lovely Israeli actress Ayelet Zurer is wasted in a role that calls on her to provide instant expertise in everything from astrophysics to Latin and pharmacology. Like its predecessor, this book and film have been controversial, challenging the church for the way it responds to challenges. For much of the story, Langdon is chasing after the Illuminati, for the purposes of this story a pro-science group “radicalized” by mistreatment hundreds of years ago and allegedly seeking the destruction of the church hierarchy by infiltration or violence. The bark of author Brown and director Ron Howard is provocative but the bite is thoroughly de-fanged and by its fictional overlay and its conclusion. Most of those who have what Langdon describes as the gift of faith will be satisfied. (more…)

Up

Posted on November 10, 2009 at 8:00 am

Pixar movies are beautiful to look at, but what takes your breath away is the story. They don’t rely on fairy tales or best-selling books with pre-sold stories and characters we are already attached to. And, as if challenging themselves to make it even harder, they take on increasingly unlikely protagonists — a gourmet rat, an almost-wordless robot, and now a cranky old man, and somehow they make us fall in love with them.

In some ways, this is the oldest and most enduring of tales, the story of a journey. And this is one that started a long time ago. A brief prologue introduces us to Carl and Ellie, a boy and girl who dream of adventure. They pledge to follow their hero, explorer Charles Muntz, to see Paradise Falls in South America.

Then they grow up and get married and life intervenes. He sells balloons and she works with birds. They save for their trip but keep having to use the money for un-adventuresome expenses like repairing the roof. Then Ellie dies, and Carl (voice of Ed Asner) is left alone. Developers are closing in on his little house. He just can’t bear to lose anything more. And so he takes the one thing he has and the one thing he knows and ties so many balloons to his house that it lifts, yes, up into the sky, so he can follow Muntz to Paradise Falls at last.

But he does not realize he has an inadvertent stowaway. Russell (voice of Jordan Nagai), a pudgy, trusting, and irrepressibly cheerful little Wilderness Adventure scout who needs to assist an elderly person so that he can get a badge. They arrive in South America and as they pull the house, still aloft, toward Paradise Falls, they meet an exotic bird, talking dogs, and several kinds of danger, and have to rethink some of what they thought they knew and some of what they thought was most important to them.

The visuals are splendid, making subtle but powerful use of the 3D technology to make some scenes feel spacious and some claustrophobic. Carl and his world are all rectangles, Russell all curves. The Tabletop Mountains-inspired landscapes are stunning and the balloons are buoyant marvels, thousands of them, each moving separately but affecting all of the others, the shiny crayon dots of pure color amid the dusty rock and the earth tones of Carl’s wrinkles, gray hair, and old clothes. The other glowing colors on screen are the iridescent feathers of the bird, inspired by the monal pheasant.

There are a couple of logical and chronological inconsistencies that are distracting. But the dogs, with special collars that allow them to give voice to the canine purity of their feelings, are utterly charming — and there is a clever twist to keep the scariest one from being too scary. Another pleasure of the film comes from the way the precision of the graphic design is matched by some welcome and very human messiness in the story. Everything is not resolved too neatly but everything is resolved with a tenderness and spirit that is like helium for the heart.

Aliens in the Attic

Posted on November 3, 2009 at 11:03 am

Back in the era of Saturday matinÃ©es, “Aliens in the Attic” would have been just fine sandwiched between a couple of cartoons and a newsreel, especially if about half an hour was lopped off and there was a bit more imagination or wit in the title invaders. It’s probably better suited for DVD and a pizza at slumber parties than for an $8 movie theater ticket. But as long as no one expects too much, this is not a bad time-waster.

The Pearson family: mom, dad (SNL and “Weeds” vet Kevin Nealon), love-struck teen queen Bethany (“HSMs” Ashley Tisdale), sulky middle child Tom (Carter Jenkins), cute sock-monkey-clutching kid Hannah (Ashley Boettcher) are joined in their vacation home by their grandmother (Doris Roberts of “Everybody Loves Raymond”), uncle (Andy Richter), and cousins, aggressive Jake (Austin Robert Butler of “Zooey 101”) and gamer twins (Henri and Regan Young). Tom is not happy with himself, with being away from his computer, with having to go fishing, with any of his family, and especially with the uninvited arrival of Bethany’s boyfriend Ricky (Robert Hoffman), who seems able to fool everyone but Tom with his good manners and preppy appearance. And then there are the aliens in the attic, four little green creatures with many arms who have come in search of something they need to take over the planet. One of their most potent weapons is a mind-enslaving dart that turns humans into remote-controlled zombie slaves.

But it only works on adults.

And so the kids have to learn how to work together to protect the grown-ups and the planet. What works best in the film are the special effects, clearly the primary focus as the talented cast, including Tisdale and SNL vet Tim Meadows, get less attention than the CGI and wire work. The gamer expert twins use the Wii-style remote to manipulate the zombified Ricky and grandma, the kids have to assemble weapons with whatever they have on hand, and the aliens turn off the gravity and get tangled in a Slinky. A lot of slapstick and a little crude humor went a long way with the kids in the audience and there were frequent hoots of delighted laughter. I could hear some of the punchlines repeated and stored for later use. (That last point is as much a warning as an endorsement.)

Related Tags:

Action/Adventure Animation Comedy

The Taking of Pelham 123

Posted on November 3, 2009 at 8:00 am

This third version of the story of a hijacked New York subway car may be superfluous but it still delivers some zip thanks to Tony Scott’s music-video flash and even a bit of heft thanks to Denzel Washington.

The 1974 version had Robert Shaw (“Jaws,” “The Sting”) as the leader of a group of trigger-happy thugs and a bitter ex-subway motorman and Walter Matthau as the transit cop working for the safe return of the hostages. The film’s great strengths were its nicely twisty plot, its superb cast of character actors (including Jerry Stiller), and its gritty feel for the city at a time of great economic turmoil and municipal decay. Then there was a made-for-TV version in 1998 with Vincent D’Onofrio and Edward James Olmos. This time, it is updated for the era of cell phones, laptops, and failing financial markets. The leader of the hijackers is John Travolta, with a 70’s porn star mustache, a prison neck tattoo, and a whole lot of attitude. He starts out at the top of Mount CrazyAngry and pretty much stays there the whole time. At the other end of the phone is transit guy Garber (Denzel Washington), who has depth of expertise and some complications in his work situation.

Director Tony Scott knows how to deliver a cinematic adrenaline rush, and there are some impressive car crashes and chases. James Gandolfini is superb as the mayor, a cross between Giuliani and Bloomberg, and there are some nice up-to-the-minute touches for the era of cell phones, wifi, and Wall Street collapses. It sacrifices some of the original’s craftiest switch-ups for action but the biggest problem is that Travolta never really connects and Washington’s fully-realized portrayal of the troubled but heroic Garber makes even more obvious Travolta’s struggle to make his character work. Travolta may steal the subway car, but it is Washington who steals the movie.

Related Tags:

Action/Adventure Crime Remake