Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (B-) Here's a funny thing: They say baseball players can identify a batter by the sound his bat makes when it hits the ball. For my part, after I got about fifteen minutes into this cartoon, the pacing of the story and the timing of the gags led to to think, "Hm. This story's a lot like the late lamented Clone High cartoon. And sure enough, after a trip to the IMDB, it turns out it was written and directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the same guys responsible for Clone High. So it's nice to see they're working.
As for the movie itself, it was based off a short children's book written by an illustrator named Ron Barrett and his wife. I'm familiar with Barrett because he was responsible for a cartoon in the old National Lampoon called, "Politenessman", the premise of that being that someone would be in a terrible predicament, and Politenessman would send his stainless steel hankie in to bonk an offender of etiquette on the head, Politenessman would appear to exhort said offender of their breach of etiquette, and the offender would clean up their act, so to speak. Usually with dire consequences to the offender. (One example, off the top of my head, had a woman victimized by a phone pervert, wind up marrying her attacker.)
I brought that up because the original 'Cloudy' book was a pretty simple idea. What with it being a kid's book and all. What Lord and Miller did was flesh out the premise and give it a solid story, with their own little gags and twists in dialogue. Which kind of makes me wonder what they could do with, say, 'Pat the Bunny'.
Ninja Assassin (D-) Is there any other type of ninja? The title's a little like saying, 'Lawn mowing Gardener'. And it goes downhill from there, believe it or not. The OTT gore in the first scene leads you to think you're getting a Wachowski Brothers version of 'Punisher: War Zone'.
What you are getting, point of fact, is a 21st century version of a cheesy Golan-Globus direct-to-video actioner. Only instead of Barry Bostwick or Michael Pare, you're getting a Korean pop star named 'Rain' in the lead. Nothing about it stuck with me, except Berlin looks a lot like Vancouver, with more misspelled German signs. Oh, and when someone in this film gets hit by a bullet or throwing star or chunk of flying wood splinters or a paper cut, they squirt out a bathtub full of CGI blood. Except in 'Rain's' case, where he squirts out two bathtub's of blood.
Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Universe (C+ -so far as I'm only 3 volumes in) We really don't need another whiny indy-comic about the tortured path of young romance stinking up the book stores, do we? And despite all surface appearances in this comic, Bryan Lee O'Malley, the creator, agrees with me. It occurred to me that it's not a comic influenced by North American indy-comics from the past twenty years, as much as it's influenced by Manga. O'Malley probably figured that he was in no position to view the tortured path of young love with any sense of proportion or distance, so he just went with the DragonBall Z trope. Which makes for more enjoyable reading, really.
Final Flesh (A for the idea, C for the execution) The mad genius behind Wonder Showzen and Xavier: Renegade Angel is back with a vengeance. Vernon Chatman's premise for this little cup of odd is as follows: Evidently, there are video production companies in the States which will, for a fee, (About a thousand dollars, if Chatman is to be believed.) produce tailor-made pornography according to a client's script. So if one has the money, one can hire a staff of eager young smut peddlers to fornicate to one's specifications of whatever sexual preferences one wishes to see. (I believe there are companies in other countries which can indulge these fetishes more extremely, which is why 'Swap.avi' is loose on the internet...)
So Chatman, evil little cutlet that he is, writes up four scripts with no sexual content whatsoever and a load of the odd, surreal dialogue he's famous for, ("Gregor Samsa will have the last laugh", one performer laments upon realizing the cockroaches will inherit the earth...) and foists it on four separate 'studios'. The results are surreal, kind of disturbing, and funny as hell. The performers go at the material they've been handed by Chatman with varying results. The talent on display here ranges from porn actor quality (Well...) to oddly enthusiastic. (The last act's particapants seem to be most in on the joke. Plus, they're the most attractive.) If nothing else, I can check this weirdly endearing little exercise off my big list of "Things I need to see before I die".
Fantastic Mr. Fox. (C+) Wes Anderson's greatest strength is in his ability to portray how dysfunctional families, well, function. So when he directs an animated film, he's sort of hobbled by the technical limitations of stop-motion animation. To put it more directly, I'm not watching an animated film based on a Ronald Dahl's children's book as much as I'm watching a Wes Anderson animated film based on a Ronald Dahl's children's book where I'm distracted by appearances of Anderson's stock company. (Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, William Defoe, and Jason Swartzman, for instance.) So I'm missing out on a lot of the subtleties and nuances the physical actors bring to their roles.
For instance, instead of showing us that Mr. Fox's son is insecure about how he measures up in his father's eyes, we have to have a scene where Mr. Fox and his wife explicitly inform us of this fact. It's a job Anderson can do with his eyes closed at this point in live-action film, but it's beyond anyone's ability to get across in a stop-motion animation, given the technical limitations of the medium. There are other examples, of course. (The mean rat/weasel played by William Defoe implies he had a past with Mr. Fox's wife, but nothing comes of it. Why? And the other animals don't seem to react in any way after Mr. Fox's rash behavior leaves them homeless. Mr. Fox's son seems to resent his cousin's growing infatuation with his female lab partner, but her role is unfinished. And so on.)
Overall, it's not a bad film. The art direction is amazing, with hyper-detailed sets and a colour scheme with no greens or blues. But in the end, it's a fairly generic kid's cartoon with a fairly standard set of tropes you'll find in any kid's cartoon. (Be true to yourself, Everyone is good at one thing at least, etc.) And Wes Anderson being behind all this, I was hoping for something more.
Oh, before I go, here's a quick Mea Culpa. A while back, I ripped on the movie Network as a whole. In fact, I've gone back and watched it a couple of times since, and my position has changed. It's a genuinely darkly funny satire, with solid performances by Peter Finch, William Holden, and Faye Dunaway, who can do neurotic and vulnerable like nobody's business. My main beef was with Beatrice Straight's role in the movie, which in hindsight, didn't really need to be in the film in the first place. Writer Paddy Chayefsky put her in to emphasize how Diana Christensen's poisonous world view was corrupting Max Schumacher's outlook, and how Diana was turning Max into one of her 'humanoids', as Max put it.
However, since Max had enough perceptive in the news business in the first place, he came to reject Diana, and her grasp for network ratings without having his personal life damaged enough. (He was watching Diana turn his mentally unhinged friend Howard Beale into a carnival freak already.) So Chayefsky really didn't need to write Max's wife into the script to hammer the point home. I suspect he and director Sidney Lumet felt they needed Max's wife to deliver a boilerplate 'hurting spouse' monologue to add to the drama and spoonfeed the viewer. Or something.
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