By staying true to his form, Tim Burton has taken a classic children’s tale and turned it into a movie that’s probably too scary for the story’s original target audience. It’s starting to seem like every new adaptation of a classic children’s story that comes out these days seems to have been made a little too scary for younger audiences, most recently in A Christmas Carol. Not that that’s a bad thing, of course. I loved A Christmas Carol, and few things could be so dangerous to the success of a Tim Burton film than by making it for little kids. This is part of the reason Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was such a disappointment. But considering that this movie is a book adaptation but consists mostly of invented material, Burton’s version is surprisingly good.

The movie takes place years after “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass.” Alice is now 20 years old, suffering from recurring nightmares of her trip to Wonderland as a little girl, and struggling to live in the oppressively proper atmosphere of a young lady in Britain, where her imagination and sense of individualism simply don’t fit in. When an unimpressive suitor asks for her hand in marriage, she finds the passing White Rabbit much more interesting and follows it through the woods, ultimately falling down the rabbit hole. Here similarities to the plot of the book take a sharp turn, although the movie still feels faithful to the original material.

This time, when she arrives in Wonderland, it’s the same place but also years later (time passes in Wonderland just like here in our world, kind of like how we dream in real time), and all of Alice’s old friends remember and miss her. But the evil Red Queen has taken over control of Wonderland, while the White Queen is exiled and powerless. The Hatter and the March Hare are still having their strange tea party, but life has completely stagnated without Alice’s presence. When we first see the Hare and the Hatter about 30 minutes into the movie, the Hatter is snoozing at the tea table with his chin on his chest, and we can almost feel the life flow into him when he sees Alice.

A lot of people have complained about Johnny Depp’s performance as the Mad Hatter, but the biggest problem for me about the movie was nothing more than an overabundance of battle clichés. Alice’s task in the movie is to slay the Jabberwocky – which you may remember from the curious poem in the book -  in order to restore power to the White Queen and put the wonder back in Wonderland. Unfortunately, like so many special-effects-heavy movies these days, this one also dissolves in the third act into uninteresting action sequences which are almost entirely devoid of any freshness, despite the talent involved in creating them.

It should be noted, however, that there is almost never any sense of disappointment that the movie doesn’t adhere very closely to the original stories, which is a testament to the quality of the filmmaking, and of Burton’s unique vision. There isn’t a frame of it that isn’t thoroughly recognizable as a Burton film, which is what makes this such a perfect story for him to adapt. Since Alice has been gone, as the Hatter explains, the Red Queen has taken over and spread chaos all over Wonderland, and Burton is exactly the man to show us a world that used to be breathtakingly beautiful but is now twisted under the burden of darkness. In the book, Alice looks through a tiny door and sees “the loveliest garden you ever saw.”  Here, she sees something straight out of a Tim Burton movie, and she immediately knows that Wonderland is in trouble.

Ah, and of course something must be said of the characters. The March Hare is mad as a hatter, as they say, flinging teacups at everything and everyone in sight, and is nicely presented. Alan Rickman lends his infamous drawl to the caterpillar who sits smoking a hookah on the mushroom and making bizarre statements (he’s probably most of the reason why there are so many rumors that Lewis Caroll was on drugs when he wrote the original stories), and while he never sounds like anything other than Alan Rickman, the character comes across well. Tweedledee and Tweedeledum, however, are thoroughly strange creations. Their clever playing on words from the books is sort of preserved, but they are now just a couple of freakishly fat British kids with cockney accents who I think far underplay the energy of the original characters. The Cheshire Cat, however, possibly the most famous character from the stories, is outstanding in both voice and animation. His appearances and disappearances are exactly what I imagined while reading the book.

Depp’s performance as the Mad Hatter is the most famous one in the movie, and the one that will probably receive the most complaints. I’m not always a fan of Depp’s roles where he plays a character with a bizarre personality (I thought his turn as Willy Wonka was among his least impressive performances of his career), but here I don’t think that he was at all over the top or annoying. I was worried he might come off as sort of a Jar-Jar Binks character, shooting for energy and eccentricity but just coming off as irritating, but I was pleased to see he was able to restrain his energy and give the Hatter just the right level of strangeness. Indeed, he seems like exactly the kind of person that one might grow up to be, living in Caroll’s Wonderland. But Anne Hathaway as the White Queen seems like a mistake to me. She just doesn’t look right.

But yeah, those battles at the end of the movie were just not my thing. Nicely rendered and animated and everything, but it’s too bad to see a movie overflowing with an almost uncontrollable level of creativity descend into a cliché of a battle right at the end, although this did give Depp several opportunities to show a different side of his character, which was welcome. There is a dancing scene with him at the end that feels like a strange homage to Michael Jackson, but the problem is that it comes out of nowhere and goes nowhere, like it was just dropped right into the movie simply to distract the kiddies from the sad and scary scene that immediately preceded it.

But all in all the movie was good, I’ll even admit even though Tim Burton is one of my favorite directors, I didn’t think the movie would be as good as it is. I just kept having bad feelings from memories of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, for which I had enormous hopes but which I just ended up hating. Mia Wasikowska gave a wonderful performance as Alice, she’s exactly what I would have imagined Caroll’s Alice to be as a young woman, and when a film can match what you imagined when you read a book it’s a pretty impressive thing. Definitely a movie that I would recommend seeing in 3D while you have the chance!

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Come on in...

This is not a good time for the cineplexes. A quick scan of the top 10 movies at the box office at Rotten Tomatoes will reveal that eight out of ten are listed as rotten, including The Tooth Fairy, which has scored a whopping 15%. That’s even lower than Alvin and the Chipmunks’ 21%. I’ve been trying over the last several weeks to bring myself to watch and review the Chipmunks movie, but no luck so far, even though Jason Lee is in it. I did watch the first few minutes before caving in and leaving, but I can pretty much guarantee you that it is definitely not better than The Tooth Fairy. In fact, seeing The Rock prancing around in a tutu and wings like a big, airborne ballerina was much more fun than I had anticipated. I would venture to call this the first surprise of the year.

It must be understood, however, that The Tooth Fairy is a kids movie from beginning to end, but I’m not a kid and I didn’t watch it with kids, and I still had a good time. Most of the reason is probably because of Dwayne Johnson’s charming performance and the fact that he was clearly having a great time with the role, and you may very well find it difficult not to have a good time along with him.

Derek gets a dreaded summons to Tooth Fairy Duty.

The Spy Next Door was a kids movie that had pretty much nothing for anyone over the age of 9 or so, but The Tooth Fairy, while certainly childish, at least has some genuinely funny moments.

So Johnson plays Derek Thompson, a retired professional hockey player who now coaches kids. His nickname in the big leagues was “The Tooth,” in accordance with his tendency to remove the chompers of the opposing teammates rather than because of any inconsistencies in his own grill. In fact, I would argue that his finely crafted row of gleaming pearlies may be part of the reason that he was cast in the movie, which might easily be called a 90-minute Colgate commercial. Brush your teeth, kids!

So here’s a quick breakdown of the multitude of storylines. Derek is a retired hockey player coaching kids. He’s dating a woman named Carly (Ashley Judd), a single mother with two kids, a six or seven year old daughter, and punk 12-year-old named Randy.

"Hey, maybe this fairy thing isn't so bad after all!"

Randy doesn’t like her mom dating Derek, he’s figures Derek’s no different than any of mom’s other boyfriends. Kids his age tend not to like their mom’s boyfriends, but this reference to the single mom’s mysterious number of former boyfriends seems a little out of place in a movie so clearly meant for kids younger than Randy.

But no matter. Derek’s main belief in life is that dreams lead to disappointment, and so believing in things like the tooth fairy or your own ability to be successful later in life will only result in failure or disappointment, and so the best thing to do is to stop dreaming and believing now. For this crime of “disseminating disbelief,” Derek is abducted into Fairyland and assigned by none other than Julie Andrews to two weeks or tooth fairy duty. A gigantically tall British comedian (Stephen Merchant, 6’7”) named Tracy, who has been saddled with the lifelong disappointment of never being able to be a “winged fairy,” is assigned to be Derek’s trainer, while Billy Crystal reprises his role from The Princess Bride and introduces to Derek all the cool products like shrinking potions and memory powders and whatnot. Well, Crystal reprises the costume from The Princess Bride, anyway. That’s enough for me.

So clearly there isn’t much in The Tooth Fairy to make your predictability radar quiet down for a little while. It’s not hard to guess that Derek’s forced work as a tooth fairy will cause him to re-evaluate his thoughts on believing, but it definitely is surprisingly enjoyable. There are lots of cheesy and goofy scenes, but even the really cheeseball moments, while predictable, aren’t at all bad. There are, however, plenty of bad blue screens, particularly during the shrunken scenes where Derek is 6 inches tall.

Tooth Fairy duty waits for no hockey game.

It doesn’t seem like a lot of progress has been made in the shrinking department since Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, which at least put a lot more effort into it than The Tooth Fairy does.

But despite all of these shortcomings, I think this is the best of the bad movies in theaters right now. It’s light-hearted and enjoyable, and there are no forehead-slapping moments to be found anywhere, while in, for example, Leap Year or The Spy Next Door, there was almost nothing else. There is, however, no real reason to pay $10 to see it in the theater. As was pointed out in Hollywire’s Then and Now article, ticket prices are nothing to laugh about these days. But once The Tooth Fairy comes out on DVD, I’m gonna go out on a limb and recommend it.

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So Legion opens with the following short exchange between a devoutly religious mother and her young daughter – “Why is God so mad?” “I don’t know, I guess he just got tired of all the bullsh*t.” I got a good kick out of that beginning, and it sets the stage well for the little skirmish between mankind and God that takes place during the movie. Usually we get movies about people who have lost faith in God, but this time God has lost faith in man and sets Himself to the task of exterminating us. And how would He choose to execute such a mission? Why, by turning a lot of people into zombies and having us kill each other off, of course. Even the Almighty needs to be entertained!

So we meet a random group of people in some roadside truckstop in the middle of some American desert. Dennis Quaid plays Bob Hanson, the owner. He bought the place thinking a nearby shopping mall would turn it into a huge success, but the mall was built in the wrong county, so he was left with a struggling business in the middle of nowhere, the perfect location for divine retribution. Under his employ is a geeky mechanic who’s in love with the waitress, who’s single and pregnant with the Last Hope For Mankind, and he gets a small but regular stream of caricature customers. Sandra and Howard are a young, married couple on their way to Scottsdale, Arizona. Tyrese Gibson plays Kyle, who’s going through an ugly divorce and stops by because he’s lost. And Jeanette Miller, an actor with more than half a century of acting experience, plays a sweet old lady named Gladys Foster. And Mrs. Foster is…well, it’s best to let you find out about that on your own.

Before long an angel named Michael (Paul Bettany, who you’ll remember from The Da Vinci Code) shows up – this is just after the, ah, incident with Gladys – and warns the customers that more like her will be coming soon. He explains the situation with God, the impending extermination, and the fact that he used to be one of God’s exterminators but decided to switch sides.

Lord of the Flies

That seems unwise to me, but no matter. The movie comes dangerously close to turning into nothing more than another movie about some random cross section of humanity trapped in some store or whatever and holding off against the evil forces outside. In fact, it does turn into that, but at least there’s a little more to it.

Unfortunately, the little more there is to it is all about this Biblical battle between mankind and God, which doesn’t really seem like a fair fight, and the rivalry between Michael, the rebellious son, and Gabriel, the loyal son. Michael’s trying to help the humans and Gabriel is sent to do the job that Michael screwed up, and I guess God is just kicking it up there in Heaven rooting for the destruction of the race that He created.

The Good Son

My real problem with the movie might just be chalked up to incomplete religious education. But I always thought God was, you know, omniscient and all-powerful, that kind of thing. Yeah, I understand that He works in mysterious ways, but would He really have to send out angel/demons to do His bidding? Michael informs us at one point that he used to be “a general in God’s army.” This was before he defected and joined the side of the humans, going against God himself in the process. But if God were betrayed like that, couldn’t he just smite Michael down? I would’ve smoted him up good, man.

What'll it be, kids?

At any rate, the first half of the movie is not bad at all. The waitress is assigned the role of Mother of the Last Hope For Mankind for no good reason, but the incident with Gladys and the transformation of the ice cream man are both some images that you’ll not soon forget. Unfortunately, the movie gets pretty powerfully goofy about halfway through and never really recovers. The whole theological section of the movie is botched pretty thoroughly, but that’s still not to say that the thing isn’t entertaining. But the movie serves us a ham-fisted message about mankind’s propensity toward violence and war and the characters speak almost entirely in ancient clichés and platitudes. It’s got some entertaining gunfights and action, but in it’s efforts to save mankind the movie forgets completely to save itself.

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Peter Jackson has one of the most interesting career arcs of any major director that I can think of. He began his career in film making with a couple of horrifically gory horror films, Bad Taste, which lives up to its name, and Braindead (a.k.a. Dead Alive), one of the most preposterously gory splatterfests I’ve ever seen, and I know my way around the video store. Sample dialogue: “Your mother ate my dog!” Nice, right? So Jackson goes from making this stuff to directing one of the biggest and best trilogies ever committed to film, and then follows it up with a big-budget remake of King Kong, one of his own childhood favorites. Many times the question has been asked, Where does he go from here?

As I might have done myself, he chose to leave the big budget special effects extravaganzas and do something a little more down to earth, like the story of the rape and murder of a teenage girl and her subsequent adventures trapped in limbo while her friends and family grieve and attempt to move on. I can tell that Jackson wanted to do something a little smaller, something that he thought had a genuine story that he really believed in, but unfortunately he chose to challenge himself in a genre that he doesn’t know, and he ended up getting wrestled to the ground and then pinned under an avalanche of cheesiness. And as far as the made-for-tv special effects, I’m not even going to attempt a theory.

The story – A 14-year-old girl named Susie Salmon is raped and murdered and then finds herself in a strange afterlife populated by other girls whose lives were interrupted, and who now provide helpful advice about such things as the post-mortem rules against interacting with the still living, and so forth. Almost a year passes. The town grieves and her family is understandably devastated. Her father Jack Salmon (Mark Wahlberg) struggles to accept her loss and then becomes dangerously obsessed with conducting his own investigation into the murder of his daughter. Meanwhile, his increasingly ignored wife Abigail (Rachel Weisz) nurses a growing need for professional help and then ultimately abandons her husband and their remaining children in favor of a life picking fruit in some field outside Santa Rosa. Nice.

Meanwhile, Susie’s killer (a thoroughly seedy Stanley Tucci) goes on with his lonely life across the street from the Salmons, the town moves on and begins to forget, and as Susie watches from a parallel dimension, it becomes less and less likely that he will ever be brought to justice. And then things get weird. Jack becomes obsessed with his own investigation, driving his friend in the police force up the wall with his constant requests to look at this guy’s or that guy’s background, tax information, phone records, etc. He suspects the 80-year-old man across the street of bizarre sexual behavior because he discovered that he wears adult diapers. Ah, I see. Surely he’s the killer then. Never mind the creepy, lonely guy across the street with the doll-house collection. He’s cool.

But the big problem is that the film has an unfortunately disjointed feel as it swings wildly back and forth between deeply inspired direction and screen composition to cheeseball effects sequences (although I should mention that yesterday I watched Avatar in 3D, so it’s to be expected that the effects might look a little unimpressive) and far too much breathy narration by Saoirse Ronan. She’s a fine actress, especially for a 15 or 16-year-old, she was brilliant in Atonement and is otherwise impressive here as well, but her cloying narration makes the movie sound like a bad self-help video. Mark Wahlberg falters a bit during his obsessive investigating but otherwise fits his role nicely, as does Rachel Weisz as his wife.

I would be lying if I said that the effects sequences were not occasionally beautiful, but in the same way that a photography student’s Photoshop work can be beautiful. The colors and composition are nice, but looking at them, it’s impossible not to think of the effects guys sitting in darkened rooms pasting images together and making wild adjustments to the colors and contrasts. Surely I’m not the only one who has come to expect more than this from the man who brought Middle Earth to life. The story encapsulates an interesting idea but Jackson doesn’t know when to rein in his artistic flagrancies, resulting in a touching tale of loss and suffering punctuated with weird flights of artistic fancy that call attention to their strangeness more than they add to the story. Sad to think that it may very well only have required a little less of that for the movie to have been much, much better.

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For James Cameron, one of the cinema’s most powerful filmmakers, to take 14 years of planning to execute a film that he reportedly has been planning since childhood, the result better be something pretty freaking spectacular, and Avatar is definitely nothing less than spectacular. It’s a masterpiece of film artistry from a brilliant writer and director at the top of his form and instantly takes its place among the greatest science fiction films ever made. That’s a powerful statement, of course, but Avatar takes us to a completely new world, which is something that even the most recent science fiction films have not only failed to do, but deliberately flinched back from doing. Consider the ending of Pandorum, an otherwise outstanding sci-fi thriller which takes us to a new, inhabitable world, but covers it with clouds rather than attempting to give us even a passing glimpse of it. And 2012 ended with the ships theoretically heading towards Africa, the last inhabitable place on earth, while not even attempting to show us what was left of our planet.

Not this movie, man. James Cameron, whatever your opinion about the movie as a whole, has given us the most richly detailed and thoroughly presented alien world that has ever been committed to film. That’s another powerful statement, I know, but if you’ve seen a totally unknown world presented in better detail in a movie, I should sincerely like to hear what movie it was. Cameron takes us to a real, three-dimensional world and saturates the screen with detail, even putting it all in slow motion so we can get a good look at the animals inhabiting the place.

The story is about mankind in the year 2154, searching for another planet to inhabit, now that we’ve totally destroyed our own world. Not exactly the most original catalyst, but the space travel is secondary to the story that unfolds on Pandora, the new planet, as the movie’s rather ham-handed anti-war message plays itself out for us. Pandora is inhabited by the Na’vi, a race of, ah, people, let’s say, who are blue-skinned, yellow-eyed and about ten or twelve feet tall, possibly because the gravity is weaker than Earth’s. Their planet is a phenomenal artistic creation – the flora and fauna alone are so thoroughly detailed and fascinating that they could spawn a school of study. But the only thing the Earthlings are interested in is the rich deposit of “Unobtainium” waiting to be harvested from underneath one of their largest and most sacred trees.

If there’s one thing that I could criticize the movie about, it’s the obvious throwbacks to current and recent American wars. Just in case you weren’t already thinking about Iraq because of the whole story about invading a foreign land about which we know little and care even less other than the fact that they have a resource we need (and because Stephen Lang plays Colonel Miles Quaritch, the military leader, with an unmistakable Texan drawl), I counted the lines “win the hearts and minds of the natives,” “some kind of shock and awe campaign,” “there’s nothing we have that they want” (democracy, anyone?), and my favorite, “fight terror with terror!” The script is clearly not the movie’s strong point, but it’s interesting that the invaders justify their assault by claiming that they’ll have to fight the terror that they introduced to Pandora with, I guess, more terror. At any rate, I think it’s best to let the Iraq metaphors rest there. Avatar is not a piece of political filmmaking, but it would be pretty naïve not to realize that it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to derive some pretty major political statements from it.

More interestingly, the movie’s biggest gimmick, and meaning of it’s title, is the militarily necessary “avatars” that humans have to remotely control in order to enter and study the Na’vi inhabitants and thus orchestrate their destruction. Sort of like the little guys you use in Farm Town, except with more detail. Or like the guys in Gamer, but with more detail. Or like the surrogates in Surrogates, but with more detail. Cameron knows enough to make the natives not only peaceful, but with a deeply sophisticated culture, a connection to their planet that most modern humans couldn’t begin to understand, and absolutely fascinating and attractive, so that the invading “aliens” look like violent, soulless little goblins that need masks to breathe and, gasp, don’t seem to believe in anything.

Weapon of Mass Heart and Mind Winning

Jake Sully (Sam Worthington, who you might remember as the guy who thought he was human in Terminator Salvation) is the paraplegic twin brother of a man who was highly trained to take control of an expensive avatar which, like the rest, was grown organically and designed to be remotely commanded by real humans from the confines of the base on Pandora. Theoretically any harm that comes to the avatar would leave the human unaffected, but we’ve all seen movies before so we know that’s probably not true. Sigourney Weaver makes the most welcome appearance of anyone in the movie as Dr. Grace Augustine, in charge of managing the avatar controlling and who has a much friendlier disposition toward the Na’vi than the corporate presence, Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi). Performances across the board are spot-on and play off of each other with remarkable precision, even from Michelle Rodriguez, who I’m still trying to forgive for The Fast and the Furious and “Lost.” No luck so far, but things are looking up.

More importantly, I’m hoping that James Cameron will keep making movies for at least the next 50-70 years. After that I probably won’t be watching movies that often, but his is one of the most interesting and successful careers in Hollywood. Every time he tells us his next movie is going to reinvent this and it’s going to raise the bar on that, we’re always skeptical but he always delivers. I have yet to have the opportunity to see Avatar in the 3D that he had his own cameras made to create, and I doubt it’s going to be very easy to get IMAX tickets any time soon, but if ever there was a movie that was deserving of spending the extra cash for the extra dimension, this is it. In the meantime, 2009 is officially over, the road to the Oscars is well under way, and Avatar is at the head of a sterling motorcade.

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*Update: January 4, 2010. I just saw Avatar in 3D and I kid you not, it was one of the best times I’ve had in a movie theater in my entire life, other than a few choice dating experiences in high school. IMAX is definitely worth the extra cash!

My first impression at the beginning of The Princess and the Frog was that the animation seems to be years and years behind the rest of the majority of the animated features that are populating the cineplexes these days. The movie is presented in the style of classic Disney animation, and it’s a classic Disney story, which lends to the proceedings something of a retro feel when compared to the advanced animation in things like Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs or 9, to name just a couple. But it’s only a few minutes into the movie when it becomes clear that rather old-fashioned animation is not going to get in the way of a highly entertaining and charming movie experience. There are towering classics in the Disney catalog for any new film to compete with, but The Princess and the Frog is definitely one of the best ones to come along in quite a few years.

And the story, of course, you already know. It’s a retelling of the classic children’s story “The Frog Prince,” except this time it takes place in the American south at the height of  the Jazz-Age, when the lower Mississippi was full of enormous, rich white men and poor, healthy black people laboring in a still-racist society and harboring small, impossible dreams. We meet a young black girl named Tiana who dreams of opening a restaurant with her father, and a rich, bratty white girl named Charlotte who’s father hands her everything on a silver platter and who dreams of one day marrying a prince and becoming a princess. Reminds me of some girls I knew in high school.

Before long, Tiana finds herself transformed into a frog at the worst possible time, when she’s about to sign for the purchase of a building in which she’ll open her own restaurant and fulfill hers and her father’s dreams. You can imagine her frustration, and to make matters worse, she’s stuck with a similarly transformed Prince Naveen, and they have to work together to break the spell in time to fulfill their respective dreams.

The colorful cast of characters is one of the staples of most Disney movies, but also one of the most difficult things to get just right. When the comic relief is nothing more than a gimmick thrown in to get a few laughs, it’s nearly impossible to overlook, but they hit the nail on the head here. My personal favorites were Michael Leon-Wooley as Louis, a trumpet-playing alligator, and Jim Cummings as a fast-talking firefly. And the atmosphere of the lower half of the United States is created so thoroughly and tangibly that I felt like I had lived there. I could almost smell the Cajun food cooking and hear the fireflies in the air.

Tiana and Prince Naveen discover one of the harsh realities of amphibious life.

And on a more serious note, the movie walks a wispy tightrope in accurately portraying a racist society, but they make no efforts to pretty anything up, which might be why they succeed so brilliantly. There’s no reason to deal with racism here. That’s just the way society was at that time and that’s all there is to it. It’s all just a backdrop here anyway.

At some point not long into the movie, the charming story and hilarious characters make the simpler, old-fashioned animation starts to bring back fond memories of countless Disney classics. This will happen right about the time when you remember that movies should be appreciated on their own rather than immediately compared to the technical aspects of their counterparts. 2009 has seen an amazing amount of contribution to the world of animation, but The Princess and the Frog has come along, and perhaps just in time, to remind us that huge advances in animation technology are not necessarily the way of the future, and that even in the ultra-modern world of computerized animation perfection, there is still plenty of room for the same style of movie that we knew and loved when we were kids.

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2009 is turning out to be a banner year for the animated feature film, but unfortunately, Sony Pictures’ new offering, Planet 51, isn’t exactly turning up near the top of the heap. The animation, to be sure, is outstanding, and I may as well start with that because it’s the first thing I noticed. But for an animated film to really strike me as memorable these days it has to be something more than just for the kids, and Planet 51, while not a total children’s movie, is made almost entirely for them. Not that that’s a bad thing, of course. I could rattle off a whole list of kid’s movies that I absolutely love (Flight of the Navigator will never get old, for example), but the childish humor, much of which falls completely flat anyway, starts to pile up pretty quick.

So the gimmick, as you know, is that instead of aliens invading earth and then generating whatever response from humans that will be most appealing to the movie’s target audience, an American astronaut lands on an alien planet – modeled so closely after 1950’s America (right down to the title, as it were), that everyone speaks English and listens to American 50s music – and then has to find his way off the planet and back home before the local, American-style military units turn him over to their scientists for experimentation and probing. It’s a clever idea to have an alien invasion taking place the other way around, but I wouldn’t have minded if the alien civilzation wasn’t exactly like America. And it’s not like I’m asking for a totally new world or entirely new languages or anything – Tolkien didn’t write this thing, after all – but I can’t stop the feeling that there was a gaping hole in the creative process somewhere along the way.

Then again, it seems perfectly natural that the society that Chuck (voiced by Dwayne Johnson), the stranded American astronaut, encounters is based on 1950s America, since alien invasions were a major topic around here back then, as a quick stroll through the classics section at your local video store will tell you. Besides, at least it rains rocks, which is at least a stab in the dark at something different. Sadly, I’m going to go ahead and argue that recent memories of precipitating meatballs is still monopolizing the curiosity factor in the solid rain department. Chuck soon befriends the local science whiz, Lem (Justin Long), who wows his audiences by describing how their universe is five hundred miles long and contains thousands of stars. His lack of knowledge illustrates the technological know-how of his people, and also some of the best comedy in the movie.

But as entertainment for the kids, Planet 51 is perfectly acceptable, even commendable. The youngsters in the audience were all having a blast when I saw the movie, and it’s still entertaining enough that the adults will chuckle along with the kids, at least knowing that they’re having such a good time.  I certainly wasn’t blown away, but the movie is enjoyable enough despite a few overly immature moments. The worst part doesn’t come until the very end when the movie’s message is spoon-fed to us like we’re all squabbling babies (this is one of my least favorite things that any movie ever does), but even though the movie will be summarily consumed by the sheer weight of it’s animated competition,  I don’t see much wrong with a movie that remembers it’s genre’s original audience.

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I read a review of The Polar Express comparing the look of the film to illustrations in old children’s books, the ones that, for certain generations, bring back warm and much-cherished memories, and while the movie didn’t exactly knock my socks off like I expected it would, this is exactly what it looks like, and that kind of aesthetic appeal can go a long way. It is famously the first film using the innovative new motion capture photography technique, where real actors are filmed wearing little sensors on their face and body, so that their actual visages can be animated right into the movie for a level of computer animated realism like nothing we’ve seen before. And it works.

The story involves an urgent Christmas-time emergency. A young boy lies quietly in his bed on Christmas Eve, as the story begins, and pores over doubts in his mind about the existence of Santa Claus. Enter The Polar Express, a magical train designed for just such an emergency. The conductor (one of I think five separate roles played by Tom Hanks), in one of the film’s finest moments, calmly urges the astonished boy, “I think you should get on the train.”

There are definite roller coaster moments which, for all of the movie’s thematic cleverness, remind us periodically that this is meant to be a good ride, thrilling us with the stomach-turning train travel as much as with the brilliant animation and entirely new form of acting. What I love about the movie is that it doesn’t give us a sugary confection when we get to the North Pole. Santa is not jolly old St. Nick here, he’s a businessman with a lot of employees. Tiny employees, but also not cute little elves either. Even the reindeer look like real animals, that grunt and snort and, gasp, may even have bodily functions! This is a Christmas movie that is not only more technologically advanced, but more mature.

There were a few points in the movie where I felt that the Conductor was a little on the abrasive side, sometimes even a little mean. I appreciate that the movie doesn’t shoot for your traditional Christmas movie, opting instead to add some excitement and even be a little scary, but at some times the effort to do this became a little transparent and we get something where the conductor just comes off as a jerk. Nevertheless, he has an excellent character arc, especially when you realize at the end what he has accomplished with that harsh behavior. Besides, I should also mention that the most persistently unrealistic aspect of the movie was the fact that our hero, a young boy, spends the vast majority of the movie running around in his pajamas on the outside of the train as it sped through the snowy landscape. Even I felt cold.

But I should mention that it is ironically because of things like the Conductor’s attitude that the movie is so watchable, and re-watchable. I’ve heard some people worry about what this new method of capturing performances will mean in the future (I know that some people are, for some reason, worried that actors will some day literally be able to “phone-in” their performances), although that doesn’t exactly strike me as a valid concern. It seems like an addition to the art, rather than a corruption. Either way, it’s a great holiday movie and a pretty exciting ride!

The Bean Meter

So the first question that popped into my mind when I heard about the film adaptation of Where The Wild Things Are was, “Can they really make the Things look real enough?” And then I realized what a ridiculous question that was, because when it comes to the Things, what does ‘real’ even mean? A more pressing concern is that they have voices now, which can’t possibly match the different sounds that each person imagined them making when we were kids transfixed by Maurice Sendak’s classic story which, if I remember correctly, is something like ten sentences long.

I’m generally not a fan of filmmaker’s taking creative liberties with original material, especially when dealing with classics, so I was worried about how much they were going to have to add to the story to make it into a feature film, but director Spike Jonze captures the perfect mood and atmosphere of the original story, and is able to give the Things more fleshed out personalities without losing sight of their image in so many of our minds. This is a tremendous achievement.

I think we’re all pretty familiar with the story. A little kid named Max is having kid troubles at home and so escapes into this imaginary world populated with these crazy creatures that are all come combination of different animal parts, and like most politicians, he becomes their king by making promises that he can’t keep. But he escaped the real world to this land to get away from his troubles, only to discover that the Things aren’t big warm fuzzies, they’re emotional creatures with combative relationships with each other and powerful tempers. It was a daring move for Jonze and screenwriter Dave Eggers to make a children’s movie with so much darkness, but it was also a smart move.

Jonze starts the movie with quick editing and hand-held camera work, lending a documentary-style realism to our introduction to Max’s life in the real world, and then he smartly continues the same shooting style when Max gets to the island where the wild Things are. I’ve heard complaints about this, but for me it really made the beautifully photographed environment feel palpably real, and it made the Things more realistic to me as well, like they were really there and the filmmakers just photographed them.

The voices of the Things were the make-or-break element for me, and there are times when they sound just a little too normal, a little too human, but overall they are wonderful performances across the board, particularly from James Gandolfini as the troubled Carol. And 12-year-old Max Records gives a perfect performance as Max. I would never have thought that they could get a performance out of someone so young that fit so well with the images in Sendak’s book. And the costume department in this movie definitely deserves some awards!

But for the most part, most of the criticism that I’ve heard against the movie is that it’s not kid-friendly enough. Yeah, whatever. Go watch Finding Nemo again if you don’t want a little dark reality mixed in with your childish fantasy. You know what else had darkness in it? Labyrinth, one of my all-time favorite movies, and I have no time for anyone who roundly condemns it because their 5-year-old got scared. Jonze and Eggers took a huge risk taking on the film adaptation of a book like “Where The Wild Things are,” and they succeeded brilliantly. Like Jonze’s two previous films, Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, Where The Wild Things Are is a delightful artistic creation that we should be thankful for. Bravo!

The Bean Meter

Visually, 9 is one of the most amazing films that I have seen in some years, but probably the most amazing thing about it is that it is writer/director/creator Shane Acker’s first feature film. Acker is a recent film school graduate, and before this film the only things he had written or directed were two short films, both under two minutes in length, and the 2005, 11-minute version of ‘9’, which you may remember was nominated for an Oscar in 2006. It is one of the rarest things in cinema for a young director to come galloping out of the gates with something as powerful as his new film, which is already good enough to earn him a lot of well-deserved recognition, even before the Best Animated Feature nomination which will be bestowed upon him in a few months.

If you’ve read anything about the film, you’ve probably heard the film criticized for having an undeveloped or incomplete story, despite the stunning visual achievements. True, there is a lingering sense of incompleteness in regards to the full story arc of the characters’ lives, but on the other hand, the movie also feels like a brilliant short film that has been fleshed out into a feature length film without losing its heart. When short films are made into feature films, there are usually two things that happen – an imaginative and impressive short film can be overshot in the feature film department with too much budget and too many big-name actors (Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow), or a bland short film can be fleshed out into a feature film without the addition of a single new idea, resulting in a half-witted idea spread much too thin over a full-length running time (A Day Without A Mexican).

I somewhat agree with the thought that adding voices to the characters was a bit of a creative misstep (it definitely brings a major atmospheric change to the proceedings), although I would also argue that he did it while still maintaining his original artistic vision. Voices were one of many necessary additions to justify a feature running time, and the voice performances are impressive as well . It is true, however, that the dialogue and action take a distant back seat to the incredible visuals, although as a debut film, 9 remains a towering achievement.

The plot – Nine little ragdolls have been created and left in a world in which all humans have vanished, leaving only themselves and a population of machines bent on their destruction. They have to save themselves, destroy the machines, and figure out what their problem was in the first place. They exist in a bombed-out wasteland of an Earth, which they refer to as “The Emptiness,” and from which they stay in hiding pretty much all the time. Almost immediately, an enormous mechanical beast comes after 9 but he’s rescued by 2, who the beast takes away. He is presumed lost by the rest of the numbers, but 9 insists upon a rescue mission.While attempting to convince the rest of the curious cast of characters of the importance of the mission, our heroes have numerous run-ins with the monsters and also learn of their own origins and the cause of the destruction of the Earth, and of mankind.

As you can clearly see from this plot description, this is hardly a Pixar film with the family in mind. The movie starts off right at the beginning with deeply affecting images of destruction and death, and maintains its post-apocalyptic mood throughout the entire running time with little if any pause for comic relief. It’s well-known that Tim Burton has taken a Producer’s role with the film, and it is up for debate whether the permeating darkness in the movie is a result or a cause of his involvement, but either way, Burton and Acker seem to have similar visions and tastes for tone and mood.

The atmosphere created by Acker is so imaginative and such a brilliant and vividly realized darkness that it is understandable that the lesser things about the movie, such as the dialogue and the relatively unimaginative action sequences, have come under attack. It is pretty clear that Acker has a better talent in the visual department than the storytelling department, but he is certainly one of our most formidable young talents, and we should keep an eye on the development of his career.

The Bean Meter

4 Beans out of 5.