Animated sports
Movies seen in the spring of 2005.
Originally written: October 2005
Sin City
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Perfect Match
Cinderella Man
People speak too much in cinemas these days. Not the people on the screen but the people in the audience. I say this recognising some level of hypocrisy because I was for a time a teenage cinema heckler. Of that, more anon. Joe Queenan, the acerbic/erratic US critic, confesses to being a 'cineplex heckler', but he did it deliberately, in order to write an article about the effect that a cinema loudmouth has on those in the cinema around him and the generally apathetic way in which the cinema-goer treats even the most boorish of interjectors in the theatre. But I am getting to the stage where I will commit mayhem on the customer who always seems to sit right in front of, or right behind, me at the films, and either provides a blow-by-blow commentary on the action or feels compelled to tell their companion what they have just seen or are about to see. For which I blame the home cinema experience. People are used to viewing films, either hired DVDs or pay-TV offerings, in the comfort of their own home where their commentary does not bother anyone other than their loved ones, who are probably used to it. They then import their bad habits thus developed into public places where they come for the sole purpose of ruining my cinema experience. My own youthful indiscretions were of a different character, I plead in mitigation. When I went to university in 1968, there was both a Film Group and a Film Society. The former was largely interested in making films; the latter in viewing and critiquing them. Each had film days and nights. Additionally, the Union (soon to be made voluntary by the minions of the Howard gang who misremember their own university experience and want to deny it to succeeding generations) offered a couple of movies a week at midday. All of this (and Bill Collins' Golden Years of Hollywood and Deadly Earnest's Aweful Movies, both on television at the time) meant that I saw maybe a thousand films in a couple of years. It also meant that I often saw them among aficionados who were not afraid to talk back to the screen. Good movies were seen in respectful silence; movies like The Green Berets were made bearable by the comments emerging from the audience. I confess: I was a Union Theatre heckler ... but only when the movie deserved it. And I recognised that I could not transfer that movie-watching modality to the Paris or the Plaza or the St James. That discrimination among venues has disappeared from the current generation of movie loudmouths and the sooner they are told where to go and how properly to behave in cinemas, the better.
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Quentin Tarantino and those directors who might be called his posse have always seemed to assert the primacy of style over substance. The longer he has gone on, the more style Tarantino has asserted, and the less substance has accompanied it. Robert Rodriguez remains one of the most interesting of the post-Tarantino directors. Emerging from his early and cheap westerns to create a series of cartoon-like live action films, starting with the Spy Kids trilogy, he has managed to maintain the visceral edge that encompasses the directorial style he aspires to, without completely sacrificing substance. The recently released Sin City exemplifies this and shows why Rodriguez is likely to make films far more interesting than either half of Kill Bill. The graphic novel origins of Sin City, and the participation in the making of the movie of creator Frank Miller as co-writer and co-director, means that the resulting film is even more cartoon like than most of Rodriguez' corpus. However, for all its post-modern references and contemporary feeling, Sin City is essentially a film noir in the 1940s traditions. And this is reinforced by the largely monochrome coloring of the movie, mitigated only by some primary colors used for the more-than-occasional blood, some eye and hair color and the skin of the Yellow Bastard. Here, heroes, whether cops or civilian, battle entrenched evil in a city where corruption is endemic in politics, religion and law enforcement. The movie has three distinct stories that cross over at points in time, place and theme. In the framing story, Bruce Willis' Hartigan, a tough but honest cop, battles with a serial pedophile, strongly connected to the corrupt rulers of Basin City. The two episodes of this story are separated by about a decade, allowing the damsel in distress to grow into womanhood. Between the two parts of this story, there are two further narratives, both involving reluctant heroes also seeking to assist what they see as women in need of protection. Mickey Rourke, heavily weighted down by prosthetics, is Marv, a serious loser who wakes up next to a dead prostitute who had turned to him for protection. Clive Owen is Dwight, whose attempts to protect his lover Gail, the leader of the city's prostitutes (who appear quite capable of taking care of themselves), lead to the death of a garrulous cop and the possible destruction of the extant peace agreement between the ladies of the night and the police. What I had expected was not what I found. Certainly there was plenty of overt violence and sensuality, as would be expected from the sort of graphic material clearly derived from Japanese adult comics and the film noir sensibility that had earlier informed The Dark Knight Returns. There were also excessive doses of humor, as if the film-makers were deliberately undercutting any offensiveness by making plain that this was not to be taken seriously. And there was also some damned good acting and some very moving characters created. Willis is an expert in this genre, often seen in futile fights against entrenched authority but Owen was better than King Arthur would have led me to expect and Rourke, whose career seemed to be in the toilet after trawling through the dregs of bit parts and B movies, is perhaps the stand-out as the bemused Marv. They are aided by some good performances from the women: Rosario Dawson, Jessica Alba, Carla Gugino and Devon Aoki in particular. The villains are not quite so convincing or so well-drawn, seemingly there more to provide a focus for the heroes' actions than as characters in their own right. Another interesting thought provoked by this movie is the comparison of the way in which, as companies like Pixar try to make their animations more and more life-like, you have directors like Miller and Rodriguez moving their live action films into the realm of the cartoon, so that the two genres almost meet at the interstices. Once you accept the high levels of (somewhat) stylised violence and the overt sensuality, and willing suspend your disbelief and accept the off-hand humor, there is a lot to enjoy in this episodic romp. Recommended.
Gone for a Burton
I have to start with a confession that may see me isolated by civilised society: I have never seen Gene Wilder's turn in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. So I came to Johnny Depp's interpretation of the same character with no preconceptions, other than those arising from Roald Dahl's words. In that light, I have to make a further confession: I quite liked Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and I liked it in spite of, not because of, Depp's performance. The credit for the success here belongs to director Tim Burton (and his production designer) and the imaginative use of the source material. As the title would imply, Burton throws the spotlight back on Charlie, rather than Willy, as the point of view character. Freddie Highmore, so good in Finding Neverland, is excellent in the eponymous role. And the concentration on Charlie, and the Bucket family, means that Willy Wonka's entrance is delayed. Burton has combined a creative production design that owes much to the surrealist movement, and to the sort of landscape that Sylvain Chomet drew in Les Triplettes de Belleville (the design of the Bucket residence owes much to Mde Souza's house in the Chomet cartoon) and some imaginative interplay between members of the Bucket family to create the right feel for the movie. As the ambit of the story widens, there is some lessening of this, as the other children invited to the Wonka factory with Charlie are introduced. They represent a panoply of childish sins, gluttony, aggression, self-absorption, and violence, and their failings are reinforced in equally flawed parental units. Charlie, on the other hand, has a hard-working dad, a stay-at-home mom, and four resident grandparents, all of whom love him and each other. The tone of the film alters again when the kids, and their parents, reach the factory for their tour. This is in part a result of Depp's enigmatic performance, which seems to channel Michael Jackson, in part from the introduction of musical interludes, which are largely in the hands of the Oompa Loompas (all played by the same actor by the use of CGI techniques), and in part because of a narrative drive that combines the explication of the factory structure with the comeuppance of the naughty children and the discovery of Charlie's reward. All of this quite entertaining and runs at a quick pace. Cath and I saw the film in the delightful sylvan setting of seaside Nelson Bay, on Port Stephens, and the cinema was replete with junior citizens, ranging from ankle-biters to teen couples, and they all seemed to be taken in by the factory section of the film, even if the earlier, introductory scenes, had not quite been on their wavelength. (I sometimes think it rather strange that most critics view films in exclusive settings, away from the reaction of those at whom the movie is aimed, particularly in the case where the target audience cannot as yet vote. One test I apply to such films is how well they suck the littl'uns in.) The introduction of Willy's dental dad (Christopher Lee in another strange role) and some of the denouement did not work as well as the factory sections and the movie sagged a little towards the end. But the factory section, the set design and the musical interludes save the film. And the personality of Freddie Highmore. Tim Burton deserves some credit for finding a way of re-interpreting a classic tale in a fresh way.
Summer of her discontent
Although it has been renamed The Perfect Catch for its Australian release (a name that has some resonance for the sport concerned and the thematic elements), the original title, and the title used in its US release, Fever Pitch, transfers pretty well from its football origins to its baseball setting in this American adaptation of Nick Hornby's first book. Well, more accurately, as the book is a non-fiction account of the highs and lows of sports fanaticism, and not about a year of love, an adaptation of Nick Hornby's 1997 screenplay based on the book. This screenplay is written by veterans Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel (who have graduated from Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley to write dozens of screenplays, including A League of Their Own) and the directors are the Farrelly brothers, who are better known for their slightly off-color comedies, like There's Something About Mary. Somewhere between the blandness of the screenwriters and the edginess of the directors, this film finds a happy romantic comedy medium. Former Saturday Night Live comedian Jimmy Fallon gets to play another of Hornby's boy-man roles: an aging adolescent, now a math teacher, but still suspended in his immature adoration of the Red Sox. He is matched against business-woman Drew Barrymore, who meets, and falls in love with, him in winter, only to discover his secret come spring. They make an engaging couple and the fortuitous coincidence of the filming of the movie during the 2004 season, particularly during the play-offs when the Sox finally overcame the curse of the Bambino, leads to an ending, incorporating the World Series win, which encapsulates the rom-com ideal. Barrymore is, as usual, very good indeed, and Fallon does well with the lead, even if his character never quite reaches the same interest as John Cusack in High Fidelity or Hugh Grant in About a Boy. There is nothing deep or meaningful in the movie but it is a good romp and another quite successful baseball movie.
Crowe makes Howard's end
In the days when I knew every Heavyweight champ from Sullivan to Ali, James J Braddock was one of the interchangeable parts between Johnson, Dempsey and Tunney and Louis and Marciano. Ron Howard's Cinderella Man is an attempt to make him something more real; to restore him to what he was fifteen years before I was born: a Depression-era hero whose exploits inspired the American underclass. It is an interesting question to ask whether the world needs another boxing movie, however good, and the US box office returns might indicate a negative response to the question. On the other hand, director Howard, writers Cliff Hollingsworth and Akiva Goldsman (the latter also wrote A Beautiful Mind) and actors Russell Crowe and Paul Giamatti have combined to make an absolute corker of a movie, one which goes beyond the boxing metaphor to say something quite profound about the role of chance and about the essential goodness that can be found even in brutal sports like boxing. To single out Crowe's performance, and there is a strong tendency to do so because it is so good, is to miss the fact that much of the success derives from the writers' refusal to over-simplify the characters and the situations. Braddock's descent into poverty, and the social conditions of the Depression, are demonstrated with frightening imagery. The coincidences involved in his comeback and rise to fame make for a rivetting scenario and lead to some of the most brilliantly filmed fight scenes. The brutality of the sport is not disguised and the fight scenes are amongst the best ever done for film, so violent that you can feel the punches, as well as appreciate the rhythm of the fights depicted. But the fight scenes (and the boxing theme) should not distract you from what is essentially a fine character study, particularly in the interaction between Braddock and his manager (Giamatti in another good performance) and between Braddock and his wife (Renee Zellwegger in the only performance that isn't quite pitch perfect), well written and well directed, capturing an era and the people who lived in it. The story arc leads to a climactic fight (against Max Baer) which dominates the final part of the movie and to an emotional denouement (not a surprise from Howard) that is particularly well done. This is superior film-making and film acting, and quite the best film I've seen this year, so far.
[Note: Information about the movies mentioned, including cast and crew lists and all sorts of trivia, is available at the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).]