Damsels in Distress

Damsels in Distress is a odd little movie. I mean, obviously – it’s a Whit Stillman film. He appears to specialise in quirky little films about the posh and privileged speaking eloquently, showing their little oddities and hypocrisies, and dealing with little moments of lasting consequence.

When Lily (Analeigh Tipton) transfers to Seven Oaks, she is immediately taken under the wing of Violet (Greta Gerwig), Heather (Carrie MacLemore), and Rose (Megalyn Echikunwoke). While living together, they discuss boys – primarily the ‘Romans’ of a nearby frat house and the men Lily seems to get entagled with – and how to live life. Though there is a mock battle, a couple of break-ups, a sanity-restoring bar of soap and even a dance number or two, everything remains resolutely low-key.

The thing is, even though, say, several of the performances are slightly mannered, the way the characters speak is often lofty and unrealistic and even the moments of high comedy appear with quotation marks, none of that feels wrong for the characters in the film. They appear artificial often because they are, attempting to develop deep profundities and life lessons in a way very familiar to anyone who has spent time around a university. The embrace of the superficial as necessary and the necessary as superficial gives the film an odd sensation, but is also startlingly accurate.

The overall result is left appreciating the film for being good, but also with a head-scratching ‘what did I just watch?’ As Violet, Greta Gerwig feels like she’s channeling Chloë Sevigny, playing a young woman of firm, off-kilter beliefs who manages to turn even the polite acceptance of criticism into a compliment. As a slight counter to her distinct performance of an artificial person, Analeigh Tipton’s role as Lily seems to be one of pliant politeness, as her initial role as the new girl who asks questions slides into merely being pleasant. Her reactions drive a lot of the film, and yet she’s not asked to do much.

It’s just an odd duck. Quite charming, and amusing, and the reaction it evoked felt intentional – but perplexing, nonetheless.

The Pirates! Band of Misfits

The Pirates! confronting danger.

The Pirates! Band of Misfits, as an Aardman Animation film, is what you’d expect – a very silly, charming trifle. The humour has a British tinge of whimsy (and a couple of throwaway moments are quite dark, as befits pirates) and everything is a light frothy mix that effortlessly entertains.

The plot, such as it is, involves the Pirate Captain (Hugh Grant) trying to win the Pirate of the Year award. Involving his game and loyal crew, all given only descriptors for names like The Surprisingly Curvaceous Pirate and The Pirate Who Likes Sunshine and Kittens, the plot revolves around a Pirate King, Charles Darwin, Queen Victoria and the last remaining dodo. There’s action, adventure and laughs, all sprightly and fun.

I could have done with the Pirate Captain being a little less stupid at times, but Hugh Grant makes him charming all the same, even with his vanity and obliviousness. Martin Freeman, as the second-in-command Pirate With A Scarf, is well-experienced with the long-suffering second banana who provides the voice of reason. There’s even a non-ironic use of a Flight of the Conchords song.

Not quite as good as Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Wererabbit or Chicken Run, but still well worth seeing.

Carnage

The cast in happier times, aka at the very start of the movie.

Carnage, based on the play God of Carnage written by Yasmina Reza, couldn’t be any simpler in concept. Two sets of well-off parents meet to discuss how their sons got in a fight, and one hit the other with a stick. On stage, the way the conversation progresses – and degrades – is propulsive, engaging and often very funny. On film, however, it all falls flat, despite the best efforts of a top-notch cast.

It’s hard to pinpoint how it manages it, but it’s as if the film was specifically designed to magnify all of the play’s flaws. I’ve seen a couple of her plays, and Reza’s characters can occasionally feel like they’re merely delivery systems for barbed opinions of the world. Onstage it’s less noticeable, but in Carnage it feels much more obvious, less of a peeling back of civility and more of a sharp turn towards the dramatic. Onstage, the way the allegiances shift in the second half of the play felt organic and interesting, but on film it just felt forced and muted. Onstage, the histrionics felt almost completely earned; on film, it’s like Jodie Foster is going out on a limb and there’s no reason for it.

There just was something missing – maybe a sense of lightness, or a required sense of intimacy. The audience should have been pushed to laughter through catharsis, but the couch was silent. Perhaps in opening it up, however minimally it was done, took away from the impact. It certainly provoked one of my friends to get quite annoyed with how close Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz would get to leaving the apartment, and yet still getting pulled back in; on a stage, there’s more of an anchor to the living room, as that’s the only place you can see, and the moving camera takes that away. So I suppose Roman Polanski’s direction is to blame, no matter how minimal it is.

A waste of a great cast – none of Kate Winslet’s big moments land, Jodie Foster feels like she escalates way too quickly, and I couldn’t help but wonder how James Gandolfini would have been in John C. Reilly’s role, as he was on Broadway. None of it felt as organic as it did onstage, which really undercut the impact it should have. It was just a disappointment.

Super

Frank isn’t happy that if you search for Super, you get lots and lots of Mario.

Super is a low-budget film that asks the question now frequently posed by movies, ‘Just what, exactly, kind of person do you have to be to become a superhero?’ with the answer, ‘A severely damaged one.’

Frank (Rainn Wilson, putting his general oddity to good use) has had two perfect moments in life. One was marrying Sarah (Liv Tyler, effectively spacy), a waitress at the diner they both work at who is trying hard to make this go at sobriety stick. The other was the moment when he pointed a police officer towards a running criminal. When Sarah leaves, Frank decides to save her, and with the help of local comic store worker Libby (Ellen Page, appearing to have an absolute blast), he gains inspiration to become the Crimson Bolt.

Super is often dark, funny, and entertaining, as you might expect from a movie whose lead decides his catchphrase should be, “Shut up, crime!” and whose prime weapon of choice is a wrench. Notably, the violence is more realistic than in most films of this type, and a little to my surprise that actually made it even funnier. Of course getting slammed in the face with a wrench is going to wreck you up, and seeing it happen, blood and all, actually emphasises the absurdity and humour.

As the film follows Frank and as Libby gets closer to him, we get to see just how messed up they both are – and to even Frank’s surprise, how Libby is even more unstable than he is. With the exception of one weird CGI scene here and one underused Linda Cardellini there (seriously, I want to see the film where she and Ellen Page play sisters), Super was a lot of fun, a B-movie conception on superheroes with lots of moments of delight, from the joyous opening credits to the surprisingly poignant finale. A good, solid film.

Toy Story

Woody and Buzz during the happy times.

I was a little underwhelmed by Toy Story when it first came out, a classic case of the hype undermining the film. I didn’t dislike it, I just was surrounded by A-reviews and adoration and little excerpts and was therefore left a bit cold by the final product. Separated from the hype, though, and also in the light of two sequels I love very much, it was interesting to revisit the original film.

First of all, yes, I do think it’s a terrific movie, and I appreciated it more this time around. It also was evident this was the first CGI movie, as animation has progressed so damned much since then; all the humans look creepy, the backgrounds are sparse, and while nothing ever looks as bad as Hoodwinked!, let alone, say, Foodfight, it’s clear Pixar were doing great work within a limited resource. If nothing else, just the way Woody runs with his cloth limbs is rendered so perfectly, the talent can be seen even if the raw computing power can’t.

Second of all, I was reminded how dark the film is. Though set in a mostly bright world of colours and children’s fantasies, there’s some rather Lord of the Flies-esque behaviour going on from the toys, with mob rule and the voice of anger (usually Mr. Potato Head, actually) often leading the way. Woody commits a Toy Crime and gets banished for it, even as he tries to atone; justice in Toy World is harsh, unforgiving and quite appropriate for a cowboy.

Also, Sid’s experiments on toys are treated as a source of pure cinematic horror, emphasised by the way that none of the toys in that house have a voice. In the sequels, this house of tortured toys would be more likely to have something to say, however few of them having heads left, but it’s not likely for a kid’s film to include hearing from the subjects of Frankensteinian experiments. Though toys don’t seem to experience much in the way of pain, it could still be seen as a form of torture, and thus hard to casually insert into the redemptive story of a cowboy and spaceman becoming friends.

So one hero seeks redemption, the other learns the truth about himself and has to embrace his new reality while a mournful Randy Newman song plays. All of that could be overthinking it, though, because really Toy Story is a charming adventure with some mature themes but an overall sense of excitement. I’m still a bit iffy on the climax of scaring Sid with the sight of awake toys; I get it, it gets the job done, but I think I’d prefer if they’d managed it without ever breaking the ‘reality’ of toys, even if just by doing everything short of actually speaking to Sid directly. I also still love the inventiveness of the aliens in the claw machine who worship the claw as their god, and the way Buzz and Woody’s inherent toyness, from plastic wings to pull-cord, are remembered as who they are rather than simple plot devices. In animated movies, no detail is a happy accident; every single item onscreen has to have been thought up and rendered, and I appreciate the artistry Pixar uses.

I still love the sequels more. But Toy Story is definitely a terrific movie. The more I watch these animated films, the more Pixar remains head and shoulders above even the best of their competitors, give or take a film starring cars.

Cloud Atlas

First of all, I haven’t read the book.

Secondly, I missed this when it was released earlier this year. Combination of a busy schedule, but also the fact that it had quite a limited release, and seemed to mostly be on at 3pm in the afternoon.

Other than the fascinatingly long previews that were released for this, my only other knowledge of Cloud Atlas was directly from a First Tuesday Book Club review where it was panned by everybody except Jennifer Byrne. I was similarly warned off reading it by several friends. Yet I did know that it was a long novel that structured its narrative as a kind of matryoshka doll, starting at a point in the past and working it’s way through characters to some point in the distant future, and then seemingly back again. Additionally I knew that it attempted to show some form of continuity of thought or expression through history and projections of the future.

Maybe I was wrong about what I knew.

As a film I just don’t think it works. Visually it is amazing, but you got that with the price of admission when the directors were the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer. The performances are credible throughout, and though he lists between mugging buffoonery and gentle belligerence, Tom Hanks manages to do well despite the fact that he increasingly resembles a cartoon character.

The problem is the approach. The scattergun method of delivering six interwoven yet distinct narratives just doesn’t wash. Occasionally there’s a magnificent melding of multiple narrative strands into a moment of gravity and power – Autua’s acceptance into the crew in the 1849 sequence, for instance – but these are too far and few between, and are quickly forgotten. The mosaic of the narratives might have succeeded had they been refined down, or the film shortened, but too often it feels as if the viewer is constantly interrupted just when something was starting to resonate. At times the intercutting of the narratives appears almost arbitrarily random or tokenistic, as if the directors felt if they didn’t intercut the audience might forget that was the point after all.

Yes it does build to a satisfying resolution, but so do all half-decent films. And for all the nigh-on three hours of attention-deficit storytelling that’s gone on before the final moments, it’s not worth it. The ideas of the novel are glorious, they’re magnificent and worthy of cinematic depiction. But this just doesn’t do them justice. It possesses all the grace and subtlety of a bull in a china shop, which is even more galling when that china shop is meant to convey some element of profound significance on the majesty of human existence.

In the end, too much needed to go. Cut most of Broadbent’s faffing about in a retirement home, cut the extraneous detail of Halle Berry’s strand (intrigue! conspiracy!), and deliver some kind of focus to all the meanderings (why did Ben Wishaw commit suicide? where was the motivation to do so?).

It could have worked and worked well, I feel, if they had told the story much as it appears in the novel. One strand at a time, building to some form of majestic revelation in the keystone narrative. As it is, it feels too much like an exercise in seeing how long the audience can put up with incessant cross-cutting. A shame.

Brave

Merida, looking boss.

I fell a little bit in love with Brave the first time I saw Merida’s hair as she rode on horseback. It just looked awesome – naturally messy in a way hair like hers often is, and it moved naturally – a massive achievement for CGI.There’s a lot to recommend it, but that was the moment I first truly appreciated Brave.

Being a Pixar film without cars in the title, I of course loved the film. A Disney Princess who doesn’t want to be a princess, a mother-daughter movie in a genre filled with dead mothers and heroic princes – but besides all that, it’s fun, and funny, and charming and up to their usual standard. One of my favourite things about it was also that the trailers really do only give you an idea of the first half-hour of the film, so everything after the tournament to win Merida’s hand could be a surprise; if you think you’ve seen the film after just watching the preview, you are completely wrong.

I did have a few problems with it. The three younger brothers felt like less-interesting versions of the aliens from the Toy Story movies, little scampering plot devices that added less to the film than they could have. Also at times the sheer number of brogues competing could be hard to follow; when the other clans come to compete for Merida’s hand in marriage, it was not always easy to follow the conversation as each Scottish accent ran rampant over the next.

But this is a charming animated film about a difficult mother/daughter relationship, the perils as well as possibilities of responsibility, and some good old-fashioned bow-firin’, horse-ridin’, bear-fightin’ fun. Not my favourite Pixar movie, but well up to their standard.

Shrek 2

Puss In Boots, easily one of the best parts of the film.

I have been babysitting, so the last few films I’ve seen have been aimed at a younger crowd. I had seen Shrek 2 before – in cinemas, even – but the second time around didn’t do it many favours, emphasising what I disliked and taking away from the fun parts. And, yes, there are quite a few fun parts, between the songs, the clever animation and new characters like Puss In Boots and the Fairy Godmother. But oh, some of the film annoys the crap out of me. And not in a ‘aimed for children’ kind of way, either.

The plot is basic – Shrek (Mike Myers) and Fiona (Cameron Diaz) get some happily every after time before they’re invited to the land of Far Far Away to be officially recognised by Fiona’s parents (John Cleese and Julie Andrews). Donkey (Eddie Murphy) comes along, poor relations ensue, the Fairy Godmother (Jennifer Saunders) and Puss In Boots (Antonio Banderas) get involved, and everything, once more, works out for the best. Which is all well and good and fine. The voicework ranges from workaday (Diaz) to effective (Rupert Everett as Prince Charming, most everyone else) to downright terrific (Saunders and Banderas). The concept of Far Far Away as Hollywood riffs on the joke of Lord Farquaad from the first movie being a parody of Michael Eisner, former head of Disney, and provides for a few amusing – albeit, adult-aimed – references. Even a few of the more popular side characters from the first film pop up, most notably Pinocchio and the Gingerbread Man.

But though it’s bright and peppy, it’s also not good. Primarily because Shrek and Fiona are easily the most boring part of their own film. Worse, while Fiona’s just rather dull, Shrek is actively kind of a dick, arguing, grumbling and attempting to stubborn his way through things. Compared to them, the schemes of the Fairy Godmother and the hastily-dropped plot of Puss In Boots as an assassin are so much more fun, that I spent the film wanting the villains to win, not the ostensible heroes. While Shrek and Fiona are having contentless arguments and boring, boring spats, everyone else, especially those working against them, holds the audience’s attention much better. Though while the antagonists get the humour and the audience’s engagement, they also get the bulk of the cheap pop culture references that make up the bulk of what passes for enjoyable in your lesser children’s movies. At least Shrek and Fiona keep ahold of most of the tired montages set to a pop song, preferably a cover by a very of-the-moment artist of a stone cold classic. None of this is new to Shrek 2 – they’re just quite egregious in this installment.

Also, there are many plot elements that bothered me. I won’t go into the ending’s problems, except to say it implies that Fiona is required to make more sacrifices than Shrek, which is rather problematic. But there are other problems. While arguing over their first dinner together, Shrek takes offense when the King suggests that he might eat his young, a case of ogre stereotyping… except that in one of the other Shrek films it’s said that father ogres do often try to eat their children, and it happened to Shrek too, with his own dad. So Shrek might want to be less huffy at the outlandish accusation and more acknowledging of a very real thing that ogres do, and that a new father-in-law might be worried about.

Or, and this one really annoys me for reasons I can’t even fully explicate – a group of the creatures from the first film, including the Three Blind Mice, Three Little Pigs and Pinocchio, all come to Shrek’s rescue after seeing him arrested on television. Yes, the fantasy kingdom, and the isolated swamp Shrek lives in, have TV. Anyway, despite the journey taking a montage-y long time when Shrek, Fiona and Donkey took it, the other characters manage to get to Far Far Away that day, and try to break Shrek and Donkey out of prison. The final thing needed to do so is to get Pinocchio to grow his nose, so the other characters tell him to lie. Any lie will do. The suggestion is made for him to say he’s wearing women’s underwear, which he does… but his nose doesn’t grow, because it turns out he is. A pink thong, even. His embarrassment about it and follow-up lies get his nose to grow, and the rescue succeeds.

Now. Why on earth would he say it in the first place? Knowing that he’s wearing women’s underwear, he surely wouldn’t say that he wasn’t wearing it, because it would show he was. And, weird enough that they want to make a joke about a boy wearing grown-up women’s underwear, but if they are so wedded to the joke, the writers could easily have had him balk at saying it in the first place, and then have the scene proceed as before. But no, Pinocchio says something he knows is true when asked to tell a lie, and it just goes so against how people, wooden or otherwise, behave, that this relatively miniscule moment aggravates me out of the movie. It a little vortex of wrongness, in character, concept and motivation, and it’s just stupid enough to make me like the whole film less.

Unfortunately, it has help from the film’s other weaknesses. I remember Shrek as being better and Shrek 3 as worse, and have not seen the fourth, but I don’t plan on rewatching them any time soon. Of course, babysitting being what it is, that’s no guarantee.

The Great Gatsby

Divine decadence, darling.

The Great Gatsby features all of Baz Luhrmann’s excesses. Lurid artificiality, modern music in an older setting, tonal whiplash, blazing literalism, it’s all here. It can be argued that the eventual emptiness at the film’s core actually suits the central narrative, but it doesn’t stop the film from frequently being not good.

Oh, it definitely has its moments. As equally as it’s stiff work for the film to get anywhere, the climax works solidly. The big party scenes manage to both be alluring and yet look like they wouldn’t actually be any fun. Most of the actors are terrific, though some (Jack Thompson, Steve Bisley, Isla Fisher) were unrecognisable. I even enjoyed some of the contemporary music choices, though some were also unbearably on the nose.

Now, I can’t say I knew the plot of the film well before seeing it; I’ve a copy of the book handy, but chose not to read it before seeing the movie. A lot of the text appears onscreen, I gather – some literally, because Luhrmann decided to actually put words on the screen, which really just emphasised how much he was Adapting Important Literature, rather than actually working for the film. I enjoyed the story. I enjoyed Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby, though I think he says ‘Old Sport’ upwards of fifty times in the film, and Carey Mulligan as Daisy, even though she occasionally veered a little close to a Marilyn Monroe impersonation. Elizabeth Debicki is like the essence of loucheness as Jordan, and she’s terrific, if underused – most everyone except the key four characters gets very little to do. It was occasionally odd to see a roomful of Australian actors all doing American accents, especially because it feels like the sound is just a little bit off, like everything has been redubbed in later, which makes everything sound even more painfully artificial. This impacted Joel Edgerton’s performance the most, because while when thinking about it I can’t say he was bad, I spent the entire film thinking he was wrong – wrong for the role, sounding a little less than real.

This is where The Great Gatsby fails the most, I felt. The artificial nature Baz Luhrmann was going for sometimes looked good, but rarely did the story any favours. Instead of making things more epic or more universal, they made them less important and less interesting. Any points about race or the underclass that the odd lingering shot of a man with a trumpet or a car-full of African-Americans with a white driver was meant to evoke was muted by the shallow nature of the film.

The film was a curate’s egg, parts of it off, parts really quite good. It’s very Baz Luhrmann, and I think the off parts outweigh the good, but that’s a personal call. I wouldn’t recommend the 3D, even though it’s pretty good for 3D, because it increases the sense of spectacle at the expense of enjoyment.

Iron Man 3

 

Tony Stark and his good buddy, sitting. Brooding.

 

I greatly enjoyed Iron Man 3. Less bloated than the second film, with a lot of things that I enjoyed – good use of the villain the Mandarin, good use of Pepper (and Gwyneth Paltrow’s body is ripped – it looks like she takes five yoga classes a day, or something), even good use of the Tony Stark’s heroism.

Of course, I was predisposed to like it, because Shane Black’s fingerprints are all over it, and he’s responsible for Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which I’ve already celebrated. From the Christmas setting to the bookending Robert Downey, Jr. voiceover to the playing with timing and expectation, all the hallmarks of his work are present in Iron Man 3, and I’ll admit it – I lapped them up. The voiceover is ultimately forgettable, but the rest of it worked like gangbusters.

There’s also at least one bravura action sequence, the ‘barrel of monkeys’, which delighted me. One of the things that bugged me about Star Trek Into Darkness was the continued scenes of extras casually perishing in the background of the action. This constant death of innocents ran contrary to the purported goals of the characters – and the movie itself. Iron Man 3, however, has the opposite effect, especially in one terrific set-piece where Iron Man goes to the rescue, not of the Named Importants, but of the unnamed extras in the background. It was thrilling, but it was also gratifying.

Yes, it’s a summer action film. Yes, its plot (apparently taken from the comics) has its problems. Yes, Guy Pearce is much less believable as the nebbish in the prologue of the film than he is as the suave bastard he becomes. But the plot holes are smaller than they could be, Pearce is not alone in Hollywood at having difficulty hiding his natural charisma, and overall I just had a really fun time at the cinema. Which is pretty much the point of an iron Man movie.