Life Is Great...

Rango (A-) There's a lot of reasons to like this movie, but here's the main one for me: Non-Pixar animation studios are starting to get the message. In this case, the studio getting the message is ILM, Lucas' go-to guys for CGI. Oh, and the message is that you can do an animated CGI film that's really good, and it doesn't have to be made under the Disney banner. In the case of Rango, they gave the job to Gore Verblinski, who is not known for doing animated films. Neither is screenwriter John Logan, for that matter. And they brought the Coen brother's long-time DP, (Name) So you get an animated film that doesn't look like a typical animated film. (I like to imagine the fights Verblinski and co. had with the execs at Nickelodeon over the colour palette of this film:

'So no primary colours?"

"Nope. It's going to be shot like a classic Spaghetti Western." "Well, how are kids going to know it's for them?" "Sigh. Funny thing about kids is, they're smarter then we tend to give 'em credit for...")

While the story is one we've seen before- It's High Noon mixed with Chinatown- It's Logan and Verblinski's abilities, and Johnny Depp, and what they bring to an animated film that makes Rango so entertaining. Put it this way: Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo has a story that you've seen in a million other westerns, the cast makes me cock an eye, (Dean Martin?) but it's one of the best westerns I've ever seen. In Rango's case, the story isn't what the film is about, it's about the lead character's discovery of the heroic qualities within himself. While I usually complain about the logic of hiring A list actors to do voice overs in animation-Jack Black in Shark Tales, for instance- Depp's done a damn fine job here. I don't think the film's relative success is owing to just bringing non-animators on board. I think it's because both ILM and Verblinski had enough faith in the animation staff to do the job that they were asked to do. Heads will explode. It's a wonderful antidote to the crap like "Yogi Bear' and 'The Smurfs' that's been rammed down throats all year.

(I have one minor quibble with the plot of Rango, though: Wouldn't it have been better to establish Rattlesnake Jake's presence earlier on in the film? His return would've been a cause for genuine dread among not just Rango and the townsfolk, but the viewer as well. As it is, while he's an intimidating presence, he seems more like an anti-Deus Ex Machina plot device than an actual character.)


Conan The Barbarian (C+) Actually, not too bad. I mean, of course, the one with Ah-noldt, that bodybuilding chick, the surfer dude and James Earl Jones. Not that recent one with the Kevin Sorbo look-alike. Haven't seen that one. God, no. I like to imagine screenwriter Oliver Stone doing a line of coke and going back to his typewriter after getting an angry phone call from Dino DeLaurentis, ordering him to 'take out that scene where Conan surfs onto the beach of the island where Thusa Doom's castle is!' They're shooting this in Romania, director John Milnus! There's no surfing in Romania! I kid because I care.

It's the type of High Fantasy movie that works because it takes itself as seriously as it has to, no more, and no less. The temptation for jaded film types like Milnus and Stone is to put a bunch of tongue-in-cheek, yes-we-know-this-is-goofy-just-enjoy-the-ride stuff in it, but thankfully, they didn't. (There's one scene of Conan drunkenly punching out a camel-couldn't resist, eh, fellas?) The success of this movie, however, led to the whole genre of High Fantasy Sword and Sorcery film in the 80's of which I monotonously bitched about earlier. (If you can't be bothered to click the link, let me give you a TL:DR, as the kids say: Instead of making variations within a genre, they remade 'Conan'. Again. And Again. And Again. And Again. and-well, you get the idea...)

High Fantasy came out of the world of Pulp Fiction, where hacks got about a penny a word to crank out hard boiled fantasies about cynical gumshoes, soldiers of fortune, ghost-hunters, and of course, swashbuckling barbarians. At this point in history, we can all write pastiches of the pulp genre in our sleep. Well, I can, anyway. The dime store 'dreadful', as the press used to call them, went the way of the buggy whip maker on account of movies and T.V. If one is tempted to look back on those days with rose-colored glasses and sigh about why we don't bring back the simple, nerve-tingling excitement of those pulp adventures in our modern media, the answer is simple. 1) Why crank that shit out for a penny a word when the Screen Writers Guild will pay you points for a multimillion dollar movie these days, and 2) Believe me when I tell you, most of that stuff was not just cranked out shit, but utter shit. (For a penny a word, editors got their money's worth.) Herein lies the impending fate of the superhero genre.



Pinocchio by Winschluss (B+) So onto comics. Winschluss has a wavy, Peter DeSeve-line style which suits the satrical tone of the book nicely. It's also all done in pantomime, which is tougher to pull off in an extended narrative then you might think. (The only dialogue we get comes from a drunken reprobate Jiminy Cockroach, who takes up residence in the Pinocchio robot's head and has about as much influence on the robot's conscience as-well, yeah.) It's an extended piss-take on the treacly goodness of the classic Disney films, where Gepetto invents the robot to hopefully sell to the military, the robot separates from Gepetto owing to Gepetto's wife tragically mistaking Pinocchio's nose-a flamethrower-for a marital aid. From there on every trope in the original is gleefully subverted. Even Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs are brought into the story. It's crass and vulgar and perverse and I was sorry to see it end.