MovieBabe Blog

Under discussion:

My Best Friend  (2007)

Vitus  (2007)

By Tricia Olszewski

Vitus asks you to believe in a myth that pops up in film from time to time, usually in the most melodramatic of family dramas: the precocious little boy who prefers to dress like Tucker Carlson. The tiny vests and ties denote a type, to be sure. This kid is gifted. Serious. Far smarter than the adults who are nurturing him. And he knows it.

If you’re familiar with this particular personality, your first glimpse of the latest incarnation will likely give a good indication whether you’ll love him or hate him. Vitus’ titular character is introduced in a way that may not win him fans immediately. A boy of 12 is wearing a suit and shuffling on a sunny morning toward the runway of a small airport. The gate is padlocked shut, so he climbs over and hops into a plane. No one notices until he turns on the engine, at which point an employee waves his arms frantically and pleads with the boy to shut it off. Instead, Vitus gives a thumbs up, and away he goes.

Away he goes? Please. Mercifully, writer-director Fredi M. Murer immediately turns back the clock to when Vitus (Fabrizio Borsani) was a much more darling tyke of 6. His parents, Helen and Leo (Julika Jenkins and Urs Jucker), are just realizing how gifted their son is—he’s a natural on the piano, terrifically bored in kindergarten, and takes it upon himself to look up words that Dad doesn’t have time to define for him. They feel pressured to nurture Vitus’ talent, but, you know, it’s not so bad. After all, the kid can be trotted out at dinner parties to show up snooty co-workers who expect that Leo’s boasting means that the boy can play “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Vitus’ grandfather (Bruno Ganz), meanwhile, is more of a salt-of-the-earth type and has his grandson help with small construction projects while Gramps talks about his own dreams of being a pilot.

Metaphor alert! Vitus is being piano-benched by one generation and receiving hushed odes on the beauty of flight from another. For a while, it’s captivating. Vitus isn’t quite enough of a smartass to be irritating at this stage (see the recent Joshua or 2002’s Valentín for good examples of how exasperating these characters can become), though, admittedly, it’s mostly because Murer focuses more often on the boy’s incredible performances instead of, say, his arrogant ways with a babysitter. The awe of—and sympathy for—the child who is too smart to fit in anywhere dissipates, however, when the film skips ahead a few years. Vitus is now 12 (played by real-life pianist Teo Gheorghiu) and rebelling against whatever the world’s got. He’s sick of his mother’s stage-momness and those teachers who think they know everything. But really, he just wants to be normal.

Vitus, co-written by Peter Luisi and Lukas B. Suter, devolves into a ridiculous adolescent fantasy from this point. Try to keep liking the kid as he pulls off an act of supreme manipulation after deciding he no longer wants to pursue a career in music. Or becomes a whiz at the stock market. Or woos his former babysitter, going so far as to buy her a diamond ring and using statistics about death rates and peaking libidos to argue his case. This downturn is a terrific disappointment considering the film’s achievements: The acting, particularly Jenkins’ turn as Vitus’ cool, aristocratic mum and Ganz’s charming grandfather, is excellent, and the score (all piano, naturally) remains enjoyable even when the story goes downhill. It’s nearly enough to fool you into believing you’re watching one fine film—but like its main character, Vitus tries so hard to be intelligent that it forgets to be likable.

My Best Friend suffers from nearly the opposite problem: Its main character spends the movie trying to figure out the secret to being liked, but it’s unclear why those around him think he’s a git in the first place. François (Daniel Auteuil) is a French antiques dealer who owns a gallery with his partner, Catherine (Julie Gayet). François isn’t exactly the bleeding-heart type—he attends a former client’s funeral only to procure one final piece of furniture from the man’s estate—and at an associate-attended birthday dinner later that night, his colleagues accuse him of not having any friends.

Now, you’d think such a charge would be made lightheartedly, especially considering that the discussion begins not a minute after François smilingly joins them. But these people are rather serious: You don’t bother to notice anyone, they say. No one’s going to come to your funeral. Catherine goes so far as to guess that François doesn’t even have one close friend. In fact, she bets on it. If he can’t present a best bud to her within 10 days, a valuable Greek vase that the dealer impulsively bought that afternoon will be hers. So François spends the evening struggling to come up with a list of pals, shooing away his loving, obviously devoted girlfriend (Elisabeth Bourgine) as he works.

Writer-director Patrice Leconte’s film (co-written by Jérôme Tonnerre) has two major strengths. One is the uniqueness of the script. It’s not often you see stories that are strictly about friendship—sure, there’s guy-love in plenty of films, but its portrayal is inevitably accompanied by explosions, sexy women, or other devices that are distracting enough to show grown men liking each other without making it seem as if they like like each other.

The other plus is its leads: Auteuil, always a charming presence from such fluff as Après Vous… and The Valet, is—in what will prove to be the film’s undoing—also quite likable here, as is Dany Boon (also from The Valet), playing Bruno, an easygoing, trivia-obsessed cab driver sought out by François for advice on how to make friends.

The problem with My Best Friend, however, is that its execution is as strained as its idea is unusual. After that first, mean-spirited dinner—at which point we’ve yet to see any red flags regarding François’ personality—the writers never bother to layer their main character, instead showing him approaching people from his past, all of whom act like he’s murdered their families. Even his college-age daughter tells Bruno that her dad “stinks.” (François’ sin against her? He thought she had a dust allergy, when really it was pecans.) Meanwhile, François’ predicament is played for laughs. He’s thrilled about his apparent instant rapport with salespeople and goofy when he asks two gentlemen in a restaurant how they cultivated their relationship. In other words, he’s funny and personable. Not exactly what the script ordered.

Worse, the plot takes turns contrived enough to get a sitcom canceled. Bruno and François develop a friendship, of course, but just as predictably things get strained—because François, you know, just can’t help screwing up. But the film wipes its hands of all plausibility in its final chapter. Let’s just say it involves Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and those lifelines. Against all odds, there are a few chuckles in this predictable arc, and the sentiment expressed about true friends is touching. But My Best Friend is ultimately a trifle that's too labored to be sweet.

Under discussion:

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix  (2007)

Joshua  (2007)

By Tricia Olszewski 

The mop top is gone, the torso is muscular, and the attitude is pissy. In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth cinematic installment in the gargantuan Harry Potter franchise, the Boy Who Lived is now more like the Boy Who Didn’t Ask to Be Born, and You’re Not My Real Dad, So Shut Up and Leave Me Alone! When we last saw Harry, he was finishing another year at Hogwarts, mourning the accidental death of a fellow student he was competing against in the grueling Triwizard Tournament, and freaking out over his unexpected battle with Voldemort, the all-powerful dark lord who murdered his parents but failed to take out the infant Harry. Voldemort has been in hiding since the beginning of the series, making his sudden appearance a very big deal.

Not many of these nor other particulars are recapped in Order of the Phoenix, so newcomers should be ready to enter the bewitched world so meticulously (and successfully) crafted by J.K. Rowling without their hands held. The story opens before the start of the new school year. Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) is miserable living with his obnoxious Muggle guardians, the Dursleys (Richard Griffiths and Fiona Shaw), and he’s forever fighting with their lunkheaded son, Dudley (Harry Melling). Worse, Harry’s hardly heard from his best friends, Ron and Hermione (Rupert Grint and Emma Watson). It’s not merely a lack of pen pals that bothers Harry—he’s waiting to hear news about Voldemort, specifically whether he’s turned up again and what Hogwarts, particularly headmaster Dumbledore (Michael Gambon), is going to do about it.

The 138-minute Order of the Phoenix, written and directed by Potter neophytes Michael Goldenberg and David Yates, respectively, has been culled from Rowling’s nearly 900-page book. Yet the movie is not about a whole lot in and of itself; it feels more like the mere chapter in an epic series that it is. Harry is 15 now, and in addition to worrying about Voldemort—whose presence Harry feels in his dreams—he’s got a pile of typical teenage concerns as well. He’s nearly expelled for performing underage magic, he’s dealing with his first crush, and he can’t stand the fact that Dumbledore is trying to protect him by withholding information about Voldemort while everyone else knows what’s going on. But no one really believes that the evil wizard is back, so Harry, once revered, has also become the laughingstock of the school. He’s soon questioning his own motivations: “I just feel so angry all the time,” he says.

Behind much of this is the slow takeover of Hogwarts by the frilly yet stern Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton, always grinning and puffed with self-satisfaction). An employee of the Ministry of Magic—essentially the wizarding government—Umbridge begins teaching at the school, implementing a “Ministry-approved” curriculum and devising fresh, Patriot Act–like policies faster than the students can figure out ways around the old ones. Her rules result in Harry teaching a defense class in secret to aid the kids who are now getting only theoretical lessons in the classroom.

The scenes of the students mastering new skills turn out to be the lightest and most enjoyable of this otherwise seriously minded sequel. Though Order of the Phoenix is continually absorbing and often exciting, much of the tiny magicians’ charm that dominated the start of the series has given way to workaday storytelling. (At least that’s true of the film. Rowling did stuff the book with her usual quaint, otherworldly details such as prickly house-elves or paintings whose subjects move and complain.) The new tone suits Radcliffe best, though: Now 18, he does troubled just fine, as he showed in his recent star turn in the London production of Equus. Ask him to act cheery or relieved, though, and you get the stiff expressions of an actor who might not have made it out of obscurity if it weren’t for his resemblance to a popular literary character.

The finer dramatic talents of Radcliffe and his co-stars, however, is nearly a nonissue—one of the joys of the Potter series is watching how they’ve grown since the first film in 2001, pretty much matching the development Rowling imagined for them. While each of them is capable, the star power comes from glimpses of the movies’ ace supporting actors such as Gambon, Maggie Smith, Alan Rickman, Gary Oldman, and now Staunton. All of them make their short screen times memorable, upholding the reputation that even though the Harry Potter stories are about kids, they aren’t exclusively for kids.

The title character of Joshua could school the Hogwarts students in a bit of evil Muggle magic. The debut feature of documentarian George Ratliff doesn’t exactly employ the supernatural in its story about a Manhattan boy who’s murderously jealous of his infant sister. After all, any 9-year-old can get his hands on some poison. But being able to psychologically torture your elders, say, or plant Crayola scribblings that any therapist right out of graduate school would recognize as the work of the abused? Now that’s a gift.

The trouble is that in this case, these bwah-ha-ha moves persistently feel like they were carefully spawned from a scripter’s imagination rather than a child’s cunning. Co-written by Ratliff and freshman screenwriter David Gilbert, Joshua is the latest twist on the increasingly tired spooky-precocious-kid thriller subgenre. This bad seed, played by Jacob Kogan, is a meticulously groomed private-school student and piano prodigy. He doesn’t care much for soccer or baseball, which gives him the sense that his racquetball-playing father, Brad (Sam Rockwell), might not be so crazy about him. Joshua relishes the attention he gets from his musically inclined uncle (Dallas Roberts), but it’s not enough to quell his insecurities. And when his mother, Abby (Vera Farmiga), brings home baby Lily, the family’s fawning stresses him out so much that one day he vomits. “Do you ever feel weird about me, your weird son?” Joshua asks his dad later. “You know, you don’t have to love me.”

Don’t worry, Josh—everyone will stop loving you soon enough. The filmmakers make this kid someone you eventually want to strangle. It’s partly Kogan’s irritating stare, which projects blankness just as often as menace. But mostly it’s the character’s, well, weirdness. Joshua doesn’t talk much, but when he does it’s random, wannabe-spooky statements such as “Are we safe, Mommy?” and “Someone died in this apartment.” He’s so stiff and unchildlike that any affection he does show his parents—and especially his little sister—comes off as patronizing. Instead of feeling frightened of Joshua, you’ll probably figure that a good slap could put an end to all the unfortunate things that start happening.

Yet until its absurd end, the film itself is fairly enjoyable. It’s just as much about postpartum depression as it is sibling jealousy, and it’s much more interesting when viewed as a story about a breakdown of a household. As Lily morphs from a gurgling angel to a sack of constant shrieks, Abby slowly begins to lose it. Brad is always working and when he isn’t, he’s of little help, leaving his evangelical mother (Celia Weston) to insist she knows what’s best. Meanwhile, construction on the apartment above the family’s combines with the noise already inside Abby’s head to drive her to popping pills. Farmiga’s fierce performance, with her increasingly mussed hair and vacant, disconnected eyes, is what’s truly unsettling, aided by a subtle, string-heavy score and creepy shots of the long, narrow hallways of the couple’s home. Abby’s eventual madness is deeply rooted and believable. But the Zen kid with one masterfully planned act of evil after another? Be grateful for the film’s scariest moments—which tend to happen whenever Joshua is offscreen.

Under discussion:

Transformers  (2007)

Ratatouille  (2007)

By Tricia Olszewski

There’s a Herbie the Love Bug moment in Transformers. A high-school kid just got his first car. He’s crushing on a girl who looks 10 years older than he is and doesn’t tax her taut body by throwing on a lot of clothes. She needs a ride home; the vehicle flings its passenger door open and plays the Cars’ “Drive.” Once it’s got her inside, it further helps out its owner by motoring them to a remote spot—and switching the radio to “Sexual Healing.”

OK, so maybe it’s a scene that would make Herbie blush. But what do you expect from a movie based on…toys? Transformers is the latest directorial effort from Michael Bay, so you probably don’t need the PG-13 rating to tell you that despite its Hasbro origins, the movie’s not for the little ones. But unlike the rest of this summer’s something-for-most-of-the-­family fare—particularly other fanboy stuff like Spider-Man 3—the live-action Transformers has an unflattering vibe all its own: It’s not for kids, but it’s not quite for geeked-out adults, either. It’s for the stunted.

Bay and his screenwriters, Mission: Impossible III duo Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, are betting that audiences will feel that a heap of CGI sophistication will make up for lack of depth elsewhere. (And they’re probably right, alas.) The story is a gibberish-laden shell that integrates the giant robots from another planet, who until now have been kept there in the animated TV series and 1986’s The Transformers: The Movie. Shia LaBeouf trains for his upcoming Indiana Jones role as Sam, the uncool student who ends up with the prying old Camaro that he eventually learns is Bumblebee—though Bumblebee was originally a Volkswagen Beetle—one of the good-guy Autobots. It (he?) and a few other bots are there to support their leader, Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen), as Optimus travels to Earth and hunts for the Allspark, something that’s ridiculously important for the Autobots to have.

Of course, the evil Decepticons also want it. And they almost had it: Megatron (Hugo Weaving), the baddest of the bad, came searching for the Allspark back in the 19th century, only to accidentally freeze and later be discovered by Sam’s great-great-grandfather, an explorer. Before he was paralyzed, though, Megatron etched out a map to the Allspark on Grandpa’s glasses, which are currently in Sam’s possession. Why did the Autobots wait until 2007 to gain control of the Allspark? Apparently it took that long for the Decepticons to figure out how to hack the government’s security system (and, uh, attack U.S. soldiers in the Middle East) and defrost Megatron—or something like that.

All you really need to know, though, is that the shape-shifting androids are in a battle of good vs. evil, and it’s just an excuse for a lot of explosions, gunfire, childish humor, and a couple of completely unnecessary hot women. (How important are the actresses’ looks compared to the movie’s logic? Sam’s love interest, played by Megan Fox, somehow gets a wardrobe change while everyone else is knee-deep in Armageddon.) The action is mind-numbing rather than stupidly invigorating, filmed primarily in Bay’s messy style of thrashing cameras and dizzying edits. What Bay and his technical crew do get right, on the other hand, is what most of the audience members probably came to see: the alien stars morphing from their disguises as helicopters, trucks—whatever each stealth situation calls for—into their badass (or goodass) robot selves. From machine to ’droid and back again, their transformations are quick and fluid, often seamlessly occurring midair. The bombs may not impress you, but at least this will.

If only the script weren’t unbearable. Despite a 144-­minute running time, the story gets choppy. (Days turn instantly into nights, while lines such as “I had fun” refer to nothing we’re privy to.) The characters are one-note: Sam’s immediately comfortable with his new world, rattling off details of the planet’s possible doom to others; Fox’s Mikaela is a function of her wardrobe. And the jokes are painfully adolescent. (Ha ha, that robot is peeing—­something—on a government official! That guy’s picking his nose!) The package would be passable for kids—if they were the movie’s intended audience. But our inner children deserve better.

Ratatouille’s hairy version of vermin isn’t anything like Mickey and Minnie. Which means that the latest animated Pixar offering has a similar, though much less significant, problem as Transformers. Adults may roll their eyes at a movie that turns their childhood heroes into urinating clowns, and grown-ups may not be thrilled about watching rats—even friendly ones with opposable thumbs—swarming buildings and getting their paws on restaurant food. But will children be interested in a 110-minute story of a rodentian Rachael Ray?

It’d be a dicey proposition if it weren’t for Mr. Incredibles. The newest creation of writer-­director Brad Bird, now officially the darling of Pixar, is Remy (Patton Oswalt), a French rat with a refined palate and desire to “add something to the world,” despite his family’s insistence that their kind was meant to take things from it. Neither Remy’s gruff father (Brian Dennehy) nor his dimwit brother, Emile (Peter Sohn), understand why he won’t just eat garbage like the rest of them. Remy wants to be a chef, but Dad tries to scare him straight, telling him that the human world is too dangerous and that he should abandon his dream of leaving the clan. Remy’s father does finally recognize his son’s talent for identifying the ingredients of a concoction by sniff—and puts him to work as a poison detector.

The family and their horde of friends are discovered in an old lady’s house—in a surprisingly violent scene, a carpet of them fall through the ceiling when she goes crazy with a rifle after spotting Remy among her seasonings—and they get separated while escaping. Remy negotiates gushing pipes (another frightening sequence, though the inky waters look damn good) and ends up safe beneath a once five-star-rated French restaurant. Since he assumes his family is dead, he takes the advice of his new companion, the ghost of his idol, rotund chef Gusteau (Brad Garrett), to sneak into the joint and spice up the kitchen.

Bird may not have created anything as exciting as superheroes or an iron giant when he developed Remy, but the rat’s culinary adventures are both sophisticated and kid-friendly—while mercifully avoiding the usual two-tiered paradigm of lots of face-plants and potty-humor for the little ones while grown-ups get assaulted with pop-culture references. Instead, the story is kept simple while the visuals are extraordinary. As Remy takes rather entertaining steps toward his goal, plenty of worthy life lessons are served as well: Not stealing is a big one, but there are more subtle messages about the importance of family (OK, that’s a yawner) and how not everyone can do whatever they want, but that those with talent need not feel inhibited by their circumstances to succeed (not only a wise teaching, but one that’s ingeniously woven).

Lifelike delicacies may be served in Gusteau’s place, but the eyes get a feast elsewhere as well, particularly in the amazingly realistic skyline views of Paris glowing at night. Bird also loads the film with clever passing details, such as the goings-on in apartments that Remy scampers above or the backstories of the more zestily painted minor characters, such as a severe cook named Horst (Will Arnett) who’s featured in a brief montage of the various reasons he gives for having spent time in prison. (“I killed a man with this thumb.”) Ratatouille is not a showcase of belly laughs, which is a bit of a disappointment if you compare it to its predecessor, The Incredibles. But it’s charming, original, and solid—not a description that will make your kids beg you to see it, but like the patrons eating Remy’s dishes, they never have to know.