The Haute Critique on Spout

Under discussion:

Beauty and the Beast  (1991)

Charlie's Angels  (2000)

Iron Man  (2008)

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince  (2009)

I’ve seen all the Harry Potter movies, but I am decidedly a muggle. In fact, if you are not a muggle, you have already seen this movie and discussed it ad nauseam with fellow wizards. I don’t mean that pejoratively. My wife, Mrs. Gravity, is pure magic. It was with her and a few other magic folk that I went to the matinee showing of Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince.

Six posters lose the plot

For a weekday showing, it was well attended. Once the strains of the familiar score started dancing in the dark, the theater was ready, more like longing, to be entranced. The familiar feeling doesn’t stop with the score. We begin with cryptic warnings of danger and doom from Professor Dumbledore. Harry, feeling cryptic warning fatigue, goes along with Dumbledore compliantly, and without a great deal of concern. And, so does the audience. Yes, there will be danger and the fate of the world will be decided in the balance. We understand all that, now let’s get on with the movie, shall we?

It is a great first pitch. Movie after movie we start with a similar setup. We are older and wiser. So is Harry. This matched emotion between viewer and Harry, however, is quickly betrayed. In the first real scene of magic (Other than warping around Britain and turning a wand into a flashlight), Dumbledore goes Mary Poppins and cleans up someone’s house. Harry is *stunned*. Speechlessly he dodges plates returning to the cupboard. His jaw drops as light bulbs change themselves. Surely not! This can’t be possible!?! What happened to that world weary teenager that was a scarf and some eye-liner away from writing some brutally insipid emo poetry? Suddenly he is acting like Belle from Beauty and the Beast. This kid has fought demons. He has seen death. He owns a flippin’ invisibility cloak, but somehow an automatic garage door opener suddenly looks like the work of some unicorn woodland nymph fairy.

That rant aside, the film looks great. The slick polish and epic transitions really do build an enveloping world. And whether it is Charlie’s Angels or Iron Man, all blockbusters look a little better through the green filter. The fantasy world looks fantastic, which by some mathematical principle distributes a genuine feeling of place. The stone walls are massive and the snow, pure white.

Post production twinkle isn’t the only fairy dust on screen. There is a smorgasbord of puppy love and subdued horn-doggery. The giggling, flirting, crying and pouting are actually really well done; and so many flavors. There are more ‘love’ stories than I can enumerate. Each arc trickles through the first half of the film, like a Plinko chip on The Price is Right, it bounces playfully from peg to peg. Even when the outcome is formulaic, our inner school kid cracks a little smile. Eventually, Dumbledore sighs,”Oh, to be young and feel love’s keen sting.” (or something like that)

All of the Sadie Hawkins romance does squeeze any momentum out of the macho storyline. Remember how the fate of the world hangs in the balance? Yeah, that thing.

The straining balance totters back and forth. Once the doom and gloom really gets marching, the mushy bits are put on pause, never to be revisited. But the oscillating tone truly does damage to the crown jewel of the whole Harry Potter series. Like I said, I never read the books, but, almost everyone I know did. And when Half-Blood Prince came out, one scene was read and re-read through tear filled eyes. Not just eyes of babes, but adults who felt magic had been left behind long ago. In that moment, the Harry Potter spell was its most tangible. On the road to this revelation there are many scenes of graphic, jarring action and juiced up puppy love presented with flair and acumen. Then, when the time comes, the film simply doesn’t include the books climax. Oh, it happens (and if you have the faintest idea of the plot of this volume of the Harry Potter saga, you know what ‘it’ is). The team that made this picture gets to check that box. The deed is done. However, for someone that didn’t read the book, even being lit up with the spirit, primed for empathy, it seemed pedestrian. For my party of magic folk, it was simply heretical. To me, it was boring.

Before we close the book, a couple of parting shout outs. The brightest spot for me was Luna Lovegood. She pops up as if she is a shared hallucination. An ephemeral, and not completely there, sprite. A bubbly lemon-lime refreshment that pops up when the rest of the plot starts getting dry. A bit of lunatic charm that says,”Don’t worry. You’re just as sane as me.”

The other part worth mentioning is the liquid luck. It is a potion that brings success in all endeavors to whomever drinks it, until it wears off. We quickly imagine that the potion transforms the drinker into the toast of the town. The director then hints deeper that the effects include a hyper alertness and a suave macho aggression. Then a funny thing happens. We learn that the potion, in truth, gets you totally baked. That’s right. Drinking liquid luck is like pigging out at Willie Nelson’s brownie bar. And, for some viewers, it is another glimpse of the talent this director has with perfect empathy. Unfortunately, that too wears off.

As we wandered out of the multi-plex, back towards parking spot 9 3/4, the magic folk cooly dismissed the effort. For my part, while liquid luck helped some of the film succeed, it wasn’t enough to catapult it into haute cinema.

No related posts.

Under discussion:

Falling Down  (1993)

Up  (2009)

I can’t say that Up was a bad movie. It was, in many ways, good.

When Chicken Run came out, it was 90%+ on the Tomatometer. Over the years I’ve noticed this across the board. Animated movies can be very high (with a few exceptions).

Waiting for Up, we saw trailers for two horrible looking animated features.

Up, however, didn’t look horrible. The Pixar/Disney film looked great. The styles, shapes, shading and color were fantastic. They’re not done with a realist’s eye, but with true inspiration. And the writing! It was nail on the head. When they needed a sad beat, it was at their finger tips (failed at child-birth, forcing your wife needlessly up a death march of a hill to give her a poignant present, killing her before she reaches to bow on the box, a boy whose douche bag father’s new woman berates him for longing for paternal acceptance). If they needed cute, oh, that came out of thin air. Baby chicks, Seth Rogen in dog form (seriously cute)…

And the Tomatometer shows it. Another 90+ for Disney/Pixar. Most of their pictures are in that range. Places usually reserved for Best Picture Nominees. Are these production companies the greatest motion picture artists of a generation? Since Beauty and the Beast danced across a psychedelic chandelier with Oscar, can they do no wrong?

• Beauty and the Beast (1991) – 93%
• Aladdin (1992) – 91%
• The Lion King (1994) – 92%
• Toy Story (1995) – 100%
• Antz (1998) – 95%
• Toy Story 2 (1999) – 100%
• Chicken Run (2000) – 98%
• The Incredibles (2004) – 97%
• Ratatouille (2007) – 97%
• Wall-E (2008) – 97%
• Up (2009) – 97%

I think that the format and style lends itself to a low bar. Leaving Up, we re-conjure the part of the film we like and, if we laugh some, check. If we are sad, another check. Shed a tear? Check plus. Laugh with that tear still on our cheek and awards season isn’t that far off. The child in us does a little victory dance.

Up seems to try a little too hard for that tear. Defeats are brutal and relentless, and they are executed with a sadistic exuberance. If this were recreated in live action it would be beyond disturbing. Early on we would watch the main character start as a darling little boy and build a beautifully charming life with the love of his life. After she passes, THE MAN comes and tries to squeeze our ideal grandfather out to make way for some horrible tenement. The plucky hero, courageously stands up for his heart. Picture Ernest Hemingway or the Dos Equis guy in your head. Then, a couple of construction goofballs (think Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez) accidentally knock over his mail box. Suddenly plucky old man goes all Falling Down on the guy. The cartoon naturally softens the violence, but the fall from grace becomes too realistic and breaks the spell.

Plus

Leads to this:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Of course, he is booked, tried in a court of law, found guilty, and forced out of his home, by Agent Smith from The Matrix, no less.

If it is so obvious that these situations are just previous motion picture archetypes playing twister on a story board somewhere at Pixar or Disney, why such hard charging positive reviews? It has to be that victory dance. The appeal of a dog telling us the reason he fell asleep next to us on the couch was because he loved us. What kid doesn’t love that? One issue with Up is that this well honed vernacular seems too technical. Technical can be beautiful, and often has been for Pixar. Up, however, lacks the pitch perfect balance that turns something technical into what the french call technique.

I can’t wave you off seeing Up. In fact, I can guarantee you will see something you like. And, maybe that is enough. (But, I prefer Miyazaki.)

No related posts.

Under discussion:

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen  (2009)

I remember seeing the first trailer for Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen (T2:ROTFL?) in the theater. It was loud, and that was the best I could say. Everything that followed that first impression accelerated expectations in a death spiral.

Obviously, I wasn’t the only one, Reviewers around the world sharpened their pencils and got jiggy with it, sometimes with magnificence.

”’Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen’ is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine.” – Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

“Few elements of Fallen are completely odious unto themselves, but rolled together it becomes a wave of inescapable proportions – a literal tsunami of shit.” – Rob Humanick, The Projection Booth

“It’s a wad of chaos puked onto the big screen, an arbitrary collection of explosions and machismo posturing and frat boy assholery.” – David Cornelius, eFilmCritic

“If it sounds as though the script was written in serial-novel form during an all-night mescaline bender, well, I have no evidence that it was not.” – Chrostopher Orr, The New Republic

“I know there are still 17 months to go, but I’m thinking Transformers 2 has a shot at the title Worst Movie of the Decade.” – Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

All of this piling on, however, pales in comparison with the masterpiece spawned on io9. Charlie Jane Anders drops the mother lode of a review, defending Transformers as a subtle work of post modern art. The truth is, it is her review that is art. If you haven’t read it, you owe it to yourself to read the whole thing. For now, let me quote a few choice moments.

Imagine that you went back in time to the late 1960s and found Terry Gilliam, fresh from doing his weird low-fi collage/animations for Monty Python. You proceeded to inject Gilliam with so many steroids his penis shrank to the size of a hair follicle, and you smushed a dozen tabs of LSD under his tongue. And then you gave him the GDP of a few sub-Saharan countries. Gilliam might have made a movie not unlike this one.

LaBoeuf projects a pathetic, wall-eyed dorkhood, when he’s not babbling like a tumor removed from Woody Allen’s prostate that somehow achieved sentience.

And he has the hottest girlfriend in the universe, Megan Fox, for whom banality is a huge aphrodisiac. The more pathetic Sam gets, the more Fox’s lips pout and her nipples point, like little Irish setters.

…part of your brain that thinks it would be awesome to see robots with giant dangling testicles, or hot chicks turning into robot tentacle monsters, or “ghetto” robots that talk in inept hip-hop slang and smash each other playfully, or funny Jewish men who talk about their “schmear” and randomly strip to their G-strings. Is that going too far? Then let’s go 100 times farther than that and see what happens!

Transformers: ROTF is so long, you’ll need to wear adult diapers to it. But the movie’s pure celebration of the primal urge, and unfiltered living, will make you rejoice in your adult diapers. You’ll relieve yourself in your seat with a savage joy, your barbaric yawp blending in with the crowd’s screams of excitement.

…after you fall into a brazen despair that the walls of reality have become toxic ice cream of a million flavors, you will gasp with a greater realization: that once the world is reduced, forever, to a kaleidoscope of whirling shapes, you are totally free. Nothing matters, effect precedes cause, fish spawn in mid-air, and you can do whatever you want. Let yourself go in your adult diaper, Michael Bay invites you.

Then there is Megan Fox’s own contribution. She’s dropping quotes to Entertainment Weekly like:

People are well aware that this is not a movie about acting. Once you realize that, it becomes almost fun because you can go, ‘All right, I know that when he calls action I’m either going to be running or screaming, or both.

Then speaking of her stardom as a result of her attitude:

I think if I had been a typical Hollywood actress and I said all the right things and I had been a publicity android, it wouldn’t have escalated to this level.

And then ludicrous stuff:

I don’t understand why people don’t have a f—ing sense of humor. Always assume that I’m being sarcastic. Like when I said those things about High School Musical. I didn’t really mean that it’s about pedophilia. But if you get high and you watch it, that is what that f—ing movie is about!

Q: Did you watch that high?
A: Yes, and it blew my mind.

With the stage set between a phalanx of reviews and this faint glimmer of self awareness from Fox, I strapped on that adult diaper and dove headlong into Transformers 2: Revenge of The Fallen.

Ambition is certainly not lacking from this picture. We start, just like Kubrick’s 2001, with pre-sapien hominids. This grandiose wankery permeates what is otherwise a pretty straight forward Saturday morning caliber story line.

Spoiler Warning (like you really care.)

Many reviewers claim the plot is impenetrable, but it is really quite simple. There is some bad **** Decepticon buried on Earth. He is going to destroy the sun, but there are two things in his way. First is that he can be killed by a ‘Prime’. Second, he needs a widget to do the dirty deed.

Of course, Optimus Prime is the last of the Primes, so they whack him. Then poor little Sam (La Boeuf), goes Beautiful Mind and is the only one in the universe that can find the widget. Oh yeah, and the widget can bring Optimus Prime back to life. A race ensues to decode Sam’s brain. The good guys get the stuff and bring Optimus Prime back to life and…

That’s right. Dot, dot, f’ing dot. Roll credits. The ever escalating boom and gloom, all heading for an anthropomorphic death battle of epic proportions, fizzles. Two and a half hours and they couldn’t even fit it in. Sure, OPrime gives you the hollow platitude at the end, but that’s it.

Maybe the baroque CGI mayhem (and there is enough that this might qualify as an animated feature) isn’t the point. In fact, not a single flickering frame catches the best performance and only reason to see the film, and that is the performance Megan Fox has been giving on the press tour.

The one thing that is mentioned in every review, no matter how snarky or scathing, is the fact that Megan Fox is quite the woodland nymph fairy. After being buried under a pile of men’s magazines rushing to crown her ‘Hottie #1’, she started doing interviews. The attention pointed at her has given her a chance to say some silly things, but also, to craft a persona out of her puttified male interviewers. She hasn’t quite got it all together, but it was enough, combined with my own private reasons, to try and summarize it in this set of clips.

Alone, these comments are fairly banal, but paired with this steaming heap of a movie and the drool drenched pages of every male targeted magazine, it starts to make sense. In some cases, is down right genius.

So, the final verdict is pretty straight forward. Under no circumstances allow yourself to be subjected to this movie sober. Terrible idea. Also, don’t see this movie unless you have a borderline obsession for Megan Fox. Blazing through this fiasco, one thing becomes evident. Her screaming and running, mixed in with her otherwise slutting it up fused her wicked, if sometimes annoying, off screen presence spins a seductive intrigue.

I don’t think this formula is unknown to the studio either. I’m pretty sure their accountants added it up. How many stoners are there? And how many people are obsessed with Megan Fox right now? Shit. This is going to be the biggest movie of all time.

No related posts.