The mood is romantic. The couple is parked in a secluded spot overlooking their charming home town. They lean in for a kiss. And then an alien rocket ship lands. I hate it when that happens.
Okay, no I don’t. I enjoy it. That’s a classic cheesy 1950’s alien invasion movie set-up and “Planet 51” knows that very well. The scene we have just watched is from a movie called “Humanoids” and it is happily being enjoyed by a theater filled with rapt, popcorn-chomping, little green creatures with antennae. Just like the couple in the car on screen. Dorothy, we’re not just not in Kansas anymore; we’re not even on planet Earth.
It feels like an idealized, if retro suburban Earth setting, though. The houses have white picket fences and the soundtrack has standards from the 1950’s. You could imagine Dick and Jane, Ozzie and Harriet, or Archie and Veronica playing hopscotch on the sidewalk, if they were green and had four fingers.
In this idyllic setting we have Lem (voice of Justin Long), very happy because he just got a job in the planetarium and is beginning to think Neera, the pretty girl next door (voice of Jessica Biel), kind of likes him. And there’s Lem’s friend Skiff (voice of Seann William Scott), who wears braces and works at the comic book store. And then things get complicated when an alien arrives.
That would be one of us.
This is “E.T.” in reverse. The American astronaut is the alien invader. His name is Chuck (voice of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson). While many of the people on the planet (I know, they’re not human, but I’m going to call them people) are terrified and determined to kill, capture, or dissect Chuck, Lem, Neera, and Skiff are willing to try to get to know him.
This theme is very similar to the more serious Battle for Terra 3D earlier this year. But it is sillier and sweeter, with a cute robotic sidekick somewhere between R2D2 and a puppy. It is also a little bland. It is a shame that a movie tweaking retro cliches falls into the white bread conventions itself, especially from a Madrid-based production company. That they believe Americans will only buy tickets to movies about white guys shows that the message of the movie about how it is all right to be different has not really been learned.
Twenty years after his groundbreaking “Roger & Me,” documentarian-provocateur Michael Moore returns to some of the same themes with “Capitalism: A Love Story,” about the financial meltdown and what it shows about the failures of our financial and political systems. Before “Roger & Me,” about the shut-down of General Motors operations in Flint and other parts of Michigan, documentaries tended to be balanced, straight-forward, and dull, the kind of thing we’d snooze through in Social Studies class. But Moore’s movies are brash, confrontational, opinionated, and fearless. He has taken on guns, insurance companies, and the war in Iraq. Twenty years ago, he predicted General Motors would fail. He predicted that we would find no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that health care would become a central political and economic issue. And now he takes on the financial meltdown, and once again he is naming names and pointing fingers.
Like Balzac, Moore believes that behind every great fortune is a crime. And with one percent of the population having more money than the lower 95 percent put together, that feels like a crime, and a very foolish one, because there is not enough money even in that one percent to make up for the collapse of the entire society. Moore’s most telling argument is about the extinguishing of the middle class, and the consequences of losing the crucial foundation of not just our economy but our culture.
Once again, Moore gives us a collage of archival footage, stories of individual heartbreak, and more stories of institutional corruption and callousness. If it is not really a coherent, linear explanation of what went wrong. For that, see I.O.U.S.A. and “American Casino” and listen to the superb series of podcasts from Planet Money. Moore’s facts are about one small group of trees in a very large forest. But his film is a howl of protest, sturdily founded in a clearly authentic moral outrage. In a chilling parallel to “Roger & Me,” there are scenes of foreclosures and evictions that would make a pre-ghosts Scrooge burst into tears. Moore tells us that since that first film, the devastation of his home town of Flint has spread throughout the country. And then, in a goosebump-inducing revelation, we see that foreclosure letters are coming from nowhere else but Flint, in a pathetic and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to find some sustaining enterprise to keep its economy alive.
Moore also uncovers a shocking and apparently pervasive piece of financial engineering. Major companies took out millions of dollars of what they called “dead peasant” insurance policies on their employees without telling them. That means that if these employees died, the companies collected huge life insurance payments. It is one thing to have “key man” policies on the top executives. But companies like WalMart and Ameritech took out policies on the lowest-level employees, especially young, healthy ones, in the hopes that they would outsmart the actuarial tables and make a profit on the death of their employees. Moore even finds a memo apologizing that the death rate was only 72 percent, so the profits were less than anticipated. But, it goes on to say, let’s look on the bright side — there were three suicides and that kept our numbers from being even worse!
Moore devotes too much time on some tangential stories like the privatization of juvenile detention in Wilkes-Barre that led to a kickback scandal. As horrifying as the story is, he is unable to make a compelling case that this kind of corruption is the inevitable consequence of capitalism. Indeed, the same kind of kickbacks have been known to occur in government settings. His portrayal of the bailout as completely driven by unjustified fear is overstated and his recommendation that we all respond by breaking the law is silly and irresponsible.
But when he focuses on the stories of the people most affected by the economic meltdown, he knows how to make us feel their struggles without impinging their dignity. He shows us laid-off workers staging a sit-in to demand their back pay and a family living in a truck who, with a Capra-esque assist from their community, become squatters in what once was their home. Most wrenching is the story of a farm family from Peoria, Illinois, evicted from their home of four decades. When I spoke to Moore at the Washington, D.C. premiere this week, he said he had hired a lawyer at his own expense to get their home back. Moore is frank about grounding his positions in religious faith, taking on those who say that exploitative capitalism is consistent with God’s laws. He not only dubs an old movie to have Jesus endorsing bank deregulation, he consults with the priest who married him and other clergy to talk about whether our current system is immoral, even sinful.
Moore proves to be an able investigative reporter and an archivist, retrieving an old television commercial from Countrywide, the mortgage company at the heart of the subprime crisis, putting it in the context of the payoffs Countrywide gave to legislators and regulators through favorable VIP mortgages and fee waivers, even paperwork waivers, to keep them from paying too much attention to what was going on. And he uncovers some long-lost footage of Franklin Roosevelt, who was more successful in implementing the fundamental rights he fought for in the countries the US helped to rebuild after the war, including our former enemies, than he was at home.
The movie is rated R because of three bad words, or, rather, the same bad word three times. Trust me, teenagers already know this word. And this is a movie they should see, to begin their investigation of what has happened and to help them resolve to make sure it can never happen again. Moore’s film makes no pretense of being balanced, but with the Chamber of Commerce spending $100 million to defeat any effort at regulatory reform under the phony banner of “economic freedom,” in my mind a bigger abuse than the bailout (which was a loan and is already significantly repaid), it helps balance the debate by reminding us what that definition of freedom has brought us.
Tim Burton’s 3D “Alice in Wonderland” extravaganza comes out this week, so it’s a good time to take a look at Alice’s many cinematic trips to Wonderland and of course Through the Looking Glass as Well. Burton’s film combines elements of both.
Alice in Wonderland began with a real Alice. Her name was Alice Liddell, the daughter of a clergyman. Oxford mathematics professor Charles Dodgson told Alice and her sisters a story to entertain them on an outing. It was published in 1865 as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. As a mathematician, there are many puzzles in the book, which is structured around a deck of cards, and in its sequel, Through the Looking Glass, structured around a chess board. The books also have a number of word puzzles and references to people Dodgson and the Liddell family knew and to the culture of the time, like the parodies of popular poems. It has remained one of the most popular and influential books for children and their families ever since. And as soon as the movies began, versions of Alice’s story began to appear on screen, starting in 1903 and including Disney’s popular animated musical version in 1951. It is certain that Burton’s version will not be the last.
A new DVD called “Alice in Wonderland: Classic Film Collection” includes several Alice movies including a silent live-action film from 1915 and two of Walt Disney’s earliest films, an ambitious combination of live-action (four-year-old Virginia Davis as Alice) and animation (just about everything else) called Alice’s Adventures in Cartoonland, produced in 1935. It also has “Alice of Wonderland in Paris,” an animated film featuring the voice of Carl Reiner, and the terrific 1972 British live-action theatrical release starring future Phantom Michael Crawford, Peter Sellers, and Dudley Moore.
I have one copy to give away to the first person who sends me an email at moviemom@moviemom.com with “Alice” in the subject line and tell me your favorite wonderland character!
“2012” is yet another example of technological genius and story-telling mediocrity. Its careless, almost gleeful destruction of the entire world makes the brilliant CGI work jarring in a way the film-makers did not intend.
It has the usual disaster film elements: concerned scientists pick up disturbing information, staring at computer screens and using important-sounding jargon (something about neutrinos). Government bureaucrats are reluctant to believe its implications. People say, “That’s impossible!” Some ancient culture predicted this all along. Some crackpot conspiracy theorist predicted it all along, too. The disaster brings out the best and the worst in people. Someone says, “I thought we’d have more time.” The same dozen people keep running into each other. Iconic landmarks collapse. The entire world may be at risk, but we still have time for a little romance and some touching lessons about the importance of family. There are some sad deaths but a couple of convenient and satisfying ones as well. And when things really get bad, there’s a soaring angelic choir on the soundtrack.
But a disaster film has to be about survival, and this one, from how-can-I-blow-up-the-world-today writer/director Roland Emmerich (“Independence Day” and “The Day After Tomorrow”) is too cavalier in tone, soft-pedaling the real implications of its apocalyptic storyline as though the world’s literally breaking apart is justified in order to bring John Cusack back to his family. It is curiously antiseptic, with only a couple of dead bodies, and the deaths we witness almost like the coming of The Rapture. And, at two hours and forty minutes, it feels endless, as though by the time you get out of the theater, it will be 2012.
The CGI is impressive, especially when the ground buckles and heaves as a car speeds along a crumbling road, trying to stay ahead of the collapse. And you don’t need a lot of story in a special effects movie. But you do need the right kind of story, and this one seems as off-kilter as the convulsing tectonic plates. The question is inevitably posed — how do we decide who will survive? But it is never engaged. There is a momentary mention of the possible problems of a sort of economic Darwinism, selling survival to the highest bidders. But the characters never deal with the consequences of that decision either way; it spends more time on the lesser issue of whether people deserve to know what is about to happen. No one is asking for a debate about philosophy or ethics; just enough narrative Spackle to keep the story going forward. Instead, it repeatedly derails. It’s no more compelling than watching a kid knock down a tower of blocks. In a movie like this, with little time to do more than sketch out the characters, a lot of the story’s validity depends on who lives and who dies. It is harder than it seems at first to put together exactly the right mix of satisfying (bad guys get what they deserve, think Richard Chamberlin in “The Towering Inferno” and Victor Garber in “Titanic”) and sad but honorable (Bruce Willis in “Armageddon,” Leonardo DiCaprio in “Titanic”). The mis-handling of the outcomes here contributes to its inability to engage the audience. And so does the howler-filled dialogue. In the middle of utter catastrophe a scientist stops to make cocktail party chit-chat with a desperate father about the last time they met. In the wake of utter devastation a couple engages in arch but completely leaden banter. (She does miss the opportunity of a lifetime, though, to say something like, “Not if you were the last man on earth.”)
Chiwetel Ejiofor is brilliant as always as the concerned scientist with a heart, though we can’t help wondering whether the stricken look in his eyes is as much about the disaster he is in as an actor as it is about what his character is witnessing. In a story where 21st century robber barons seem to carry the weight, it is perhaps appropriate that the movie itself resembles a hedge fund manager — too expensive, too arrogant, and, finally, dull.
Hayao Miyazaki has produced another trippy fantasia, this time a fish out of water story along the lines of “The Little Mermaid.” A little girl goldfish with magical powers loves a little boy and turns herself into a human, by ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny-mode stopping at a few evolutionary species along the way and sometimes reverting back to chicken feet in times of stress.
The boy is Sosuke (Frankie Jonas) and he dubs the fish Ponyo (Noah Lindsey Cyrus). In a bit of stunt casting, both main character voice talents are the younger siblings of Disney mega-pop stars. Ponyo’s father (voice of Liam Neeson), angry over the human’s mistreatment of the oceans and concerned that her leaving may upset the balance of the world, wants her back in her original fishy form. A storm rises and creates enormous flooding. While Sosuke’s mother Lisa (Tina Fey) is taking care of the wheelchair-bound elderly women at the nursing home (voices include Betty White and Cloris Leachman), Ponyo uses her magic to enlarge Sosuke’s toy boat and they go out onto the water.
Stunning bursts of imagination and sensational, almost psychedelic images make the film a garden of unearthly delights. The undersea settings, including the flooded village, are filled with intricate detail and grand concepts, like waves that turn into enormous leaping fish. Ponyo uses her new feet to race across the tops of the waves in a moment of pure exhilaration. The images are visually rich and engrossing and the tenderness between the two children is affecting. But they are also at times disconcertingly grotesque and as in past films Miyazaki cannot make visual splendor compensate for moments in the storyline that are random and inconsistent.
in 1951. It is certain that Burton’s version will not be the last.