An Education

Posted on March 30, 2010 at 8:00 am

Part of the charm of “An Education,” a bittersweet coming of age story based on a brief memoir by Lynn Barber, is how much we know what its main character does not. Jenny (an incandescent Carey Mulligan) is a teenager in 1961 London, over-protected by her overly-cautious and conventional parents and eager to be independent and to have adventures. She is used to being the smartest one in the class and so even more than most teenagers, she is convinced that she understands many important things her parents cannot possibly comprehend. She is eager to grow up, to seem sophisticated, to be sophisticated. She is innocent, filled with potential, willing to be taught — and she has no idea how powerfully attractive those qualities are to a predatory older man.

But we know that, and when David (Peter Sarsgaard) rescues Jenny and her cello from a rainstorm by giving her a ride home, we know she will confuse urbanity with wisdom, that she will think that because he lies on her behalf he will not lie to her. But the most important thing we know is that like Jenny, London is also on the brink of enormous changes. We know that a world of opportunities she could never imagine will open up to her. Unlike Jenny, we know she is going to be fine. After all, we know she went on to tell her story, in itself a triumph over whatever went wrong and whatever she lost.

Danish director Lone Scherfig perfectly captures London just as it is about to move from the drab, stiff-upper-lip, world of post-WWII deprivation to the brash and explosive era of mods and rockers, Carnaby Street and the Beatles, Twiggy, “The Avengers,” and Joe Orton. Part of what makes David so exciting is that Jenny believes that the only options available to her are teacher and housewife and the only examples of both she has seen appear dull and unrewarding. David gives her a glimpse of a life that is never dull. It is always shopping and parties and travel, pretty clothes and lovely restaurants. If in order to have all of that she must lie to her parents and defy her teachers, that makes it all the more exciting. It binds her to him even more, creating a set of rules that is just for them.

That is how it seems, anyway. The education referred to in the movie title tells us that she will learn some difficult lessons. But its conclusion reminds Jenny and us that it is only the end of her beginning. She thought meeting David was the beginning of her future; she learns that the real beginning only came afterward.

The screenplay by Nick Hornby (“High Fidelity,” “About a Boy”) is sympathetic but insightful, skillful in sketching in each of the characters. Sarsgaard also makes David more than a predator. Jenny is not just smarter than he is; she is stronger, too. As Jenny goes from school girl to dressed-up doll to the beginning of adulthood, from the make-it-do, wear-it-out modesty of her home to Paris hot spots, Production designer Andrew McAlpine and costume designer Odile Dicks-Mireaux show exquisite sensitivity in giving Jenny a look that tells the story. Every performance is a gem: Alfred Molina, proud but fearful as Jenny’s father, Emma Thompson, starchy as the headmistress, and Olivia Williams, a teacher who wants more for Jenny than she wants for herself (it must have been quite a challenge for hair and make-up to turn Williams into such a dowdy character). Rosamund Pike is utterly charming as a dim but kind-hearted party girl. And Carey Mulligan, in a star-making turn, makes this into one of the best films of the year.

Interview: Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders of ‘How to Train Your Dragon’

Posted on March 24, 2010 at 3:59 pm

Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders are the writer-directors behind one of the best family films of the year, “How to Train Your Dragon.” It was a very great pleasure to talk with them about adapting the popular books and the movies they love most.

One of the great pleasures of this film is the fabulously imaginative assortment of dragons. Were they based on research into legends about dragons or did you start from scratch?

DD: The well-spring of the dragons who are in the film started in the book, of course, but really it was Nico Marlet, who also did designs for Kung Fu Panda. We have seven dragons in the movie, five of which are his designs. He has piles of drawings in his room, no kidding, about two feet thick of other dragons that he drew. It’s endless. We realized we had an opportunity in this movie to do something that had not been done before — not just multiple breeds of dragons but individual personalities.

Each new dragon turned all my thoughts on what a dragon was upside down.

DD: Each of them was based on animals we recognize in the animal kingdom. For example the gronkles, the big, fat, dump-truck-like dragon, was based on the walrus and has walrus-type behavior, lying around in packs and being lazy and grumpy. And then the nadders, the blue ones with the yellow spikes, they’re very parrot-like, and they have bird-like actions. Toothless is very feline. But he has dog in him, too. He’s based in part on the black panther, so he has mammalian qualities to him. One of the characters has two heads and is very snake-like and slithery. So every one of them had an animal reference to it, and that influenced its behavior both in personality and movement.

Did you have to think about the physics of the way they moved?

CS: There are links to the larger world that we wanted to create for this film. The believability factor was the most important thing. They have to move and breathe as if they’re really alive. It’s important that they not come across as too cartoony because then we would lose the emotional weight in the film. We wanted people to really believe in this world. Even though the designs are really fanciful, they move and breathe as though they’re really alive. They adhere to a strict set of rules. They never break or shatter that illusion.

The voice talent is terrific. But your Vikings (Gerard Butler and Craig Ferguson) have Scottish accents!

DD: It’s a conceit. It’s silly and admittedly flawed, but here it is: growing up in North America, I was in Canada, I had a lot of friends whose parents sounded like they came from somewhere else. There’s always a remnant of the mother tongue in the older generation. When we came on the film, they’d already cast people with very American voices and then they had Gerard Butler. We had to cast someone to be Gerard’s best friend and the confidante to Hiccup. We thought, we’ve already got this Scottish voice in place, and we could just flesh out the rest of the older generation with Scottish accents and then the next generation could have their own assimilated accent.

CS: Gerard really loved it when we encouraged him to be himself. The only casting that we did was Craig Ferguson and he happens to be Gerard’s really good friend and they happen to have the same accent. Craig Ferguson is completely at ease in front of a microphone. It’s funny because Gerard Butler is really funny off-mic, constantly goofing around and talking about pranks, amusing himself. And then when he’s on mic, well, his character is called Stoick. He was a little jealous — “Why is Craig getting all the funny lines?” But Craig, off-mic, was the opposite. He’s so funny when you have the mic running, and then when you stop, he’s actually a serious guy.

I was also thrilled to see that you have three disabled characters. You rarely see that in movies, especially disabled characters who have full personalities and experiences and are not just there to be disabled.

DD: Definitely we brought to the mix the ending, for many reasons. We wanted to give it a little bit of weight, believability, and peril. The satisfying quality of the ending would be generic if he did not come out of it so that he and Toothless can complete each other.

How did you go about adapting the book? You made some big changes.

CS: The main reason Dean and I were asked to come into the film was to “age it up,” giving it a little more weight, more adventure, and one of the very first decisions we made was that in the book there were elements of humans and dragons being in a symbiotic relationship but also elements of humans and dragons being at war. We decided it had to be one or the other. We made the decision that they were mortal enemies, which made it possible for Hiccup to take the greatest risk possible by befriending one. It allowed us to have Hiccup live this double life in the second act. At night he’s repairing a dragon and learning to ride a dragon. By day he is learning to fight one. This is not going to last. This has to get discovered. Everything else came from that.

DD: It’s fun that by the end he gets everything he wanted but he no longer wants it. The attention he’d rather avoid by then.

What movies are your favorites?

CS: Both of us are huge fans of a movie we referenced in this one, The Black Stallion. The scene on the beach is our homage.

DD: What really worked for us was the young protagonist. I love characters that are young and relatable in their childhood but also have adult qualities and are in over their heads in a world of fantasy, like “Escape from Witch Mountain,” “Watcher in the Woods,” and even “E.T.”

The movie is very rich, very exciting, but also exceptionally well-paced and satisfying.

CS: A lot of movies do not have much in the second act, but we really had one packed with events. But it is also important to have moments when the characters are quiet. There are three moments in the film where we let the camera and the acting and the music tell the story.

I liked the fact that he is really an engineer, a problem-solver. And he doesn’t get it right away.

DD: In the concept of the book Hiccup was much younger and they collect eggs and teach the dragons to do tricks. We kept the spirit of the runt Viking who changes the world but we had to give him a dragon who could be ferocious and at the same time cuddly. We thought he’s a nuisance, he’s the bane of the Viking community. He is made an apprentice to get him out of the way but in the shop he learns to compensate for what he doesn’t have. We combined this organic form with early mechanics.

CS: He also discovers that he has to operate it. He is only really himself when they’re together.

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Posted on March 23, 2010 at 12:00 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	4th - 6th Grades
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for action, smoking and slang humor
Profanity:	Humorous use of the word "cuss" in place of swear words
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Character smokes a cigar, alcoholic cider
Violence/ Scariness:	Characters in peril, violence includes guns, fights, explosions, character injured but no one seriously hurt
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters, retro gender roles
Date Released to Theaters:	November 25, 2009
Date Released to DVD:	February 18, 2014
Amazon.com ASIN:	B00GRA7KBY

Today Criterion issues a gorgeous new Blu-Ray edition of “Fantastic Mr. Fox” with lots of great behind-the-scenes extras. Director Wes Anderson has often seemed more interested in his films’ props and sets than the characters and stories. His last movie’s most memorable character was a set of luggage (The Darjeeling Limited). The previous one’s most memorable image was a cutaway that turned a sea-going vessel into a sort of doll’s house (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou). And so perhaps it is not surprising that his liveliest and most appealing movie is “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” a story told through stop-motion animation, every shot filled with precise and intricate detail. This is movie-making as Cornell Box.

The effect might be suffocating but for Anderson’s superbly chosen collaborators. While his previous films have been based on original material, this time he uses a beloved book by one of the foremost children’s book authors of the late 20th century, Road Dahl (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory James and the Giant Peach). And as voice talent, he has George Clooney and Meryl Streep, whose smooth, subtle performances lend emotional grounding to balance Anderson’s clever but claustrophobic tendencies.

It’s a Peter Rabbit-style story, with the title character in a battle with three farmers: “Boggis, Bunce, and Bean, one fat, one short, one lean,” according to a taunting children’s song. Fox (Clooney) agreed to stop stealing from the farmers when Mrs. Fox (Streep) became pregnant and has settled into a foxy middle-class life, working as a newspaper columnist. But he feels the call of the wild — and the call of the farmers’ plump chickens, apple cider, and geese. He starts stealing again, bringing down the wrath of the farmers on the whole animal kingdom. It is up to Fox to find a way to save them all.

The theme of the call of the wild comes up several times as the story shifts back and forth between ultra-civilization (Fox wears a shirt and tie) and the animal instincts of the non-human characters. The combination of the very familiar (Fox’s son Ash feels neglected, especially after his more talented and cool cousin comes to stay), the very cerebral (the “Oceans 11”-style heist plans), and the strangely feral (watch the way Fox eats) keeps the story as intriguing as the tiny props and costumes and the odd, stiff movements of the stop-motion figures. Unlike plasticine-based stop-motion (“Coraline,” “Wallace and Gromit”), the high-touch textures of the figures make them seem like toys come to life.

The screen is filled with enticing details, but it is the performances that keep us connected to what is going on. The script is filled with arcane non sequiturs but the warmth of those voices, with able support from Anderson’s brother Eric and regulars Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, and Owen Wilson, keep us in the story. And that really is fantastic.

The Men Who Stare At Goats

Posted on March 23, 2010 at 8:00 am

“More of this is true than you would believe,” “The Men Who Stare at Goats” cheekily informs us as it opens. And while its tone is high satire, even farce, the story it tells is not hard to believe at all. Military officials are portrayed as credulous, ineffectual, and petty. But they are also portrayed as candid, open-minded, and forthright. Much of what goes on in the military’s 20-plus-year exploration of what we used to call the “human potential movement” seems outlandish, but those were outlandish times. And one aspect rings especially true. According to this film, based on the non-fiction book by debunking Welsh journalist Jon Ronson, the real reason the US and the USSR entered into these “new age” programs was that each was convinced the other was doing it. So much for the efficacy of “remote viewing.”

That would be the power to see something mentally that could not be seen visually, either because it was too far away or on the other side of a wall. This division, led by Bill Django (Jeff Bridges), whose long, gray braid hangs down over his fatigues, experiments with all categories of extra-sensory perception including telekinesis (the ability to affect objects without touching them), clairvoyance (the ability to read minds), and precognition (the ability to predict the future).

Jeff Bridges, as a Viet Nam vet who explores the new age fads of the 1970’s, one hot tub at a time, conveys slightly seedy optimism in the early days of the program and shows us the consequences of too much mind-bending at the end. Kevin Spacey is the ambitious psychiatrist who guides the program as it mutates from exploring what our troops can do to exploring how what we have learned can take away from the humanity of the enemy troops we capture. George Clooney centers the film as the most gifted of the program’s subjects, a man who seeks some way to integrate his abilities and experiences to find some meaning in the effort. But Ewan McGregor never convinces us that he is a dumped husband, a reporter, or an American. The reference to Jedi warriors just reminds us of his role as Obi-Wan Kenobi in the “Star Wars” movies and makes his appearance seem like an in-joke.

The light-heartedness of the movie’s tone goes from pratfall humor to a wrenching depiction of the consequences of foolishness. It is smart enough not to be entirely dismissive of the idea that some or all people may have some uncharted capabilities we should try to understand and focus. But it is clear that none of that will do much good against a gun and that the efforts to pursue it may lead to extensive personal and organizational trauma. The main character is unhappy that his scoop is almost entirely ignored when it is published. The media picks up only on the side detail that Barney music was used to break the spirits of prisoners. The pernicious influence of that song appears to have been the only usable information produced by the program; something that any parent of a toddler could have conveyed with great enthusiasm. If this movie directs more attention to Ronson’s findings, that will be gratifying to him, but to us it should also be an important lesson about how one factor in allowing large organizations get out of control is that no one is paying attention.

The Blind Side

Posted on March 22, 2010 at 8:00 am

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for one scene involving brief violence, drug and sexual references
Profanity:	Mild language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Character abuses drugs, social drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	Gun violence and some peril, car accident
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	November 20, 2009
Date Released to DVD:	March 23, 2010
Amazon.com ASIN:	B002VECM6S

“The Blind Side” is a movie about football that had its own broken field running challenge. It is the true story of Baltimore Ravens offensive lineman Michael Oher, a homeless black kid adopted by a wealthy white family. So, it could so easily have been syrupy, or condescending, or downright offensive. At worst, it could have been a cross between the Hallmark channel and “Diff’rent Strokes.”

There have been too many “magical Negro” characters in movies, the non-white character whose role in the story is to give some white people a spiritual or ennobling experience. And there have been too many of what my friend Tim Gordon calls “mighty whitey” movies, where some needy non-white person is helped by some saintly white person. And there have been way too many movies where someone says, with a catch in his or her throat, that “he helped me more than I could ever have helped him.” This movie risks failing in all three of these categories and somehow it manages to deftly come together to make the story genuinely touching. You may find yourself with a catch in your throat, not to mention a tear in your eye.

It helps that the story is true. The wealthy Touhey family did take in and then adopt a homeless black teenager whose life had been so chaotic that there was almost no record of his existence. He happened to go along with a friend who was applying to a private school on an athletic scholarship and was seen by the coach who recognized his ability. He is enormous and he is fast, both valuable in an offensive lineman. And this happened at just the time that the role of the offensive lineman was becoming one of the most critical positions on the team. Leigh Anne Touhy (Sandra Bullock, in her Oscar-winning performance) explains at the beginning of the film, based on the Michael Lewis book of the same name, that New York Giants lineman Lawrence Taylor changed the game. He went after quarterbacks like the Washington Redskins’ Joe Theismann, who received a career-ending injury because Taylor came after him in his blind spot. Hence the increased focus on protecting the quarterback, and that is the job for which Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron) seems to have been designed.

It isn’t just that his is very big and very fast. It is another quality, the one that was identified when he was given a battery of tests as the only stand-out ability in a long list of failures. Tests showed that he had an extraordinary level of protective instinct and experience showed that he had an extraordinary ability as well.

She was never tested, but Leigh Anne is probably off the charts for protective instinct as well. It is this quality they share that makes us believe in their connection.

And it is another of Leigh Anne’s qualities that keeps the story from getting too sugary. She is kind of obnoxious. Girl-next-door Sandra Bullock shows us Leigh Anne’s determination and passionate dedication to her family and her ideals and makes us understand that she has a bit of a sense of humor about herself. When she has to admit her husband was right about something, she also concedes that the words taste like vinegar. She has no problem telling pretty much everyone from her condescending friends to the high school coach what they should do. But it is her vinegary spirit that makes the situation and the movie work. She does not cry over Oher’s trials and she does not act like he is her St. Bernhard puppy. She is just someone who has a strong sense of justice fueled by her faith, a quality too rarely portrayed in the media. And she has that protective instinct. Oher is not the usual gentle giant, which helps as well. He has a sense of humor and self-respect that makes clear that he is a full partner in becoming a member of the family, giving as much as he gets.

So this movie is smarter than it had to be, which gives its emotional core even more of punch. You’ve seen the highlights in the trailer. But the quiet moments in between and lovely performances by Bullock, Aaron, and Tim McGraw as Leigh Anne’s husband make this one of the best family films of the year.