How to Train Your Dragon

Dreamworks’ “How to Train Your Dragon” is a welcome surprise with beautifully animated flight sequences.

Advertisers may think they know what “How to Train Your Dragon” is about. They see the cute dragon, they see the fat one, the scary, ugly one, and they see Gerard Butler’s name stapled onto the credits and they assume a madcap adventure made to be coupled in with trailers about movies with talking, live action cats and dogs. Thank goodness someone saw how elegant the flying sequences were in “Up” and “Avatar.”

“How to Train Your Dragon” is a welcome surprise, a charming film that can stage a moment of the utmost beauty and tranquility through marvelous animation and the right pacing and tone. It has the same markings of any Dreamworks movie as well, but I became invested in the characters and enchanted by the visuals to even appreciate the longer, manic ending of action and fire breathing explosions.

The film takes place in a Viking village overrun by dragons on a regular basis. The tribe is fully concerned with killing and eliminating dragons of any kind, but after a scrawny boy named Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) has an encounter with a rare dragon he successfully harmed, he finds he has a change of heart towards the creatures when he looks into the eyes of this particular dark blue dragon and can’t bring himself to kill it. Continue reading “How to Train Your Dragon”

No shorts? Is that all, folks?

What happened to the animated short? Modern Hollywood animated features should take more cues from classics like “What’s Opera, Doc?”

This column was originally published on March 10, 2011 in the IDS Weekend under my column heading ‘Cine’cism

When you went to the movies many, many years ago, you got to see a newsreel, a short film, a feature and if you were lucky, a Mickey Mouse cartoon. That little guy was more famous than Shirley Temple.

Today there isn’t much of a market for animated shorts at the movie theater. That market has moved online in the form of independent viral videos, music videos or remarkable segments from otherwise popular shows.

But the studios once responsible for producing animated shorts for kids and adults the like have focused their attention on churning out poorly made Saturday morning cartoons or big budget, 3-D action extravaganzas with increasingly large sequel numbers on the end.

Now I’ll admit, “Kung Fu Panda” isn’t that bad. Even in loud, frenetic animated films, there is a considerable amount of craft that goes into making that panda somersault through the air, careening into everything, and then fart. Continue reading “No shorts? Is that all, folks?”

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarves’ was labeled Disney’s Folly but proved to still be a masterpiece today.

“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” is a miracle of color, sound and charm. As one of the most influential and popular films of all time, Walt Disney’s pioneering animated feature set insurmountable standards that had never been seen before and have arguably still not been matched by any cartoon ever made.

It’s story is well known and well parodied. In fact, three Snow White films are now officially in production for 2012. Millions of parents now use it as an introductory film for their children, it being one of the few populist old Hollywood masterpieces suitable for children this side of “The Wizard of Oz.” So parents have grown accustomed to it, and children have learned to love it, but maybe to never fully appreciate it.

But audiences in 1937 surely did. “Snow White” won an honorary Oscar that year for being “recognized as a significant screen innovation which has charmed millions and pioneered a great new entertainment field.” Continue reading “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)”

Rapid Response: The Lost Weekend

Billy Wilder explores alcoholism in this early Best Picture winner.

It is perhaps hard to imagine today how edgy and depressing a movie like “The Lost Weekend” was in 1945. Ray Milland portrayed Don Birnam in an Oscar winning role that gave us the movie’s first drunk. Milland and Director Billy Wilder not only led this tough, gritty and realistic film to box office success but also to a Best Picture award.

“The Lost Weekend” was the first film to tackle alcoholism head-on, and it was a bold move for an audience that until then had wanted little more than to be entertained. Birnam is set to go on a detox weekend with his brother until he convinces his brother and girlfriend to delay the trip by a few hours. In that time, he scours his apartment for hidden booze and money so that he can get sloppy wasted. And after leaving more than a dozen “vicious circles” on a bar, he misses his train and is abandoned by his brother, his bartender and soon his girl. I imagined this would become a movie in which we watched a man go from bad to worse to rock bottom, but that comes later. The screenplay by Wilder and Charles Brackett actually devotes about a third of the film to developing Birnam as a writer, as a lover and as an amateur barfly. Continue reading “Rapid Response: The Lost Weekend”

Rapid Response: Spellbound (1945)

Alfred Hitchcock’s “Spellbound” is fairly overacted, but it’s remarkable to look at given Salvador Dali’s famous dream sequence.

Spellbound

I might have thought that an Alfred Hitchcock movie with a psychological twist, Ingrid Bergman, Salvador Dali set pieces and skiing would’ve blown me away, so when I notice how campy, absurd and overacted “Spellbound” is, I may be expected to be frustrated rather than admitting how much fun I had watching the damn thing.

It’s certainly far from a trash, B-movie. It was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director and a handful of other Oscars, and Hitchcock is such a technical perfectionist that it’s impossible not to be entranced in a story even as bananas as this. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Spellbound (1945)”

Crazy, Stupid, Love

“Crazy, Stupid Love” is a rom-com salvaged by its cast but done in by a strange side plot.

Steve Carell is hoping to be a movie star after “The Office.” Ryan Gosling is trying to prove he can do more than simply dramatic method acting. Emma Stone wants to be seen as more than a kid. “Crazy, Stupid, Love” tries so hard to be generic and boilerplate, and there’s a sense the cast would simply not allow it. Continue reading “Crazy, Stupid, Love”

I Love You Phillip Morris

Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor give some of the best performances of their career in this farcical biography.

Some Hollywood love stories just seem too good to be true. “I Love You Phillip Morris” seems way too good to be true, and yet somehow it is, but hardly in the cliché way one might expect from, well, Hollywood.

Steven Russell (Jim Carrey) is a man devoid of any identity but a pro at performing the expectations of society whenever the mood strikes him. As a child, he was adopted and became an upstanding poster boy. As an adult, Steven’s a cop and a model citizen living the American dream with a wife and kids. Following a car accident, he reveals he’s gay, but more accurately, flamboyantly gay, going as far as committing credit fraud to live a perfect life of fashionable luxury. And in prison, Steven’s the perfect cellmate laying down the rules of the yard and encouraging the sexual favors.

Yet with no personality to fall back on, Steven’s cheerful demeanor and everything that comes out of it is a lie. He means no ill will, so it’s impossible to dislike him, but if you’re going to be a fraud, why not be a fraud in the biggest way possible? Continue reading “I Love You Phillip Morris”

Rapid Response: The Hudsucker Proxy

It’s always fun to see how far the Coen Brothers have come. There was a time after “Blood Simple,” before “Fargo” and surrounding the time of their Cannes victory for “Barton Fink” that the Coens had a peculiar reputation in the critical community, not like today when they are practically revered beside Scorsese, and some of the few American directors people actually eagerly anticipate movies from.

Rather, they were seen as remarkable stylists so in love with the movies that the Coens established a cult following and cult hatred long before “The Big Lebowski.” Some of their movies, as critics argued, were all style over substance, exotic plunges into cinema itself with plots that were intentionally contrived or outrageous, dialogue that was purposefully literary and fantastical and characters that were not just aiming for parody but were steeped in it.

The other three movies they made in this time period were “Raising Arizona,” which is a cult classic comedy that I couldn’t even get through, “Miller’s Crossing,” which I haven’t seen and is probably one of their lesser known dramas, and “The Hudsucker Proxy,” which I watched last evening.

“The Hudsucker Proxy” so perfectly sums up the moment in cinema history that were these infuriating and revolutionary characters the Coens before they were the Coens. It is a film that was generally panned when released but today has a solid following for the strongest of Coen fans. The reason for it is that it was thought they had made a film so in love with their own cinema dissertation that even fans would not get past it, a film so intentionally cliche it was maddening.

Roger Ebert’s two star review wonderfully analyzes each school of thought in either reviling the film or hailing it as a masterpiece. “The problem with the movie is it’s all surface and no substance,” one side of his brain says, while the other chimes in that, “That’s the tired old rap against the Coens… How many movies do have heart these days?… One good reason to go to the movies is feast the eyes, even if the brain is left unchallenged.”

Except the movie does have mental challenges, just not for the moral side of the brain. How and why the Coens choose to recreate so many historical cinema cues without actually making them a parody is part of the film’s mystique. At times it undoubtedly is too excessive even in its excess, but it falls back on its own sense of quirk and charm even if you’re not familiar with all the references they drum up.

It also continued to prove to me why Paul Newman is one of my all time favorite actors. He along with Tim Robbins and especially Jennifer Jason Leigh channeling Rosalind Russell in “His Girl Friday” are terrific. I will say though that if the Coens made this movie today, they would have cast J.K. Simmons in the part of the newspaper editor.

So yes, maybe the origin story of the Hula Hoop is not the most riveting or heartening tale of the rat race and romance in the 1950s, but “The Hudsucker Proxy” deserves to be seen as a relic of film history, both past and present.

Rapid Response: Shadow of a Doubt

To say “Shadow of a Doubt” is one of Alfred Hitchcock’s best films is like saying that “Please Please Me” is one of the Beatles best albums. It may not even crack the top 10. And who else can make a movie as good as this one and not have it be in their top 10?

However, this did represent a turning point in Hitch’s already legendary career. “Shadow of a Doubt” was his first wholly “American” film. He made “Rebecca” under the American studio system, but the cast was British and so was the setting. This film starred Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotten in a thriller set in the quaint coastal town of Santa Rosa.

And it says on the special features of the DVD that “Shadow of a Doubt” was in fact Hitch’s favorite film. It seems strange considering how personal “Vertigo” is, or how around the ’40s and ’50s he was considered one of the greatest directors of all time, but not for the American films he was making at the time. His British films like “The 39 Steps” were the ones that resonated with critics so strongly. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Shadow of a Doubt”

Rapid Response: Witness for the Prosecution

Billy Wilder’s “Witness for the Prosecution” is an outrageous, silly and over-the-top courtroom drama that likely would blow up in its own face were it not based on an Agatha Christie play. And boy does it work.

It stars Charles Laughton in one of his best roles, a blow hard of a barrister in the English courts just getting out of the hospital, but not without a singing sense of humor and dry bout of cynicism. His constant disdain towards his nurse insisting that he not work, drink or smoke is one of the film’s great charms.

His job is to defend the innocent inventor Leonard Vole (Tyrone Power), who has been accused of murder of an elderly widow. She recently changed her will to leave everything to him, and although he constantly plays the naive fool as to how serious of trouble he is or how much his German wife Christine (Marlene Dietrich) will actually defend him, he’s a cool, confident and likeable character. He’s portrayed by one of Hollywood’s former boy toys, Tyrone Power. In this 1957 film, he was 43 and died a year later, but he had boyish good looks that landed him in numerous blockbuster A-pictures of the time. “Witness for the Prosecution” even gets cute with this when Power is seen watching “Jesse James,” the title character serving as one of his most notable roles.

And being a play, the film is almost entirely courtroom drama. There are only a few scene changes and all the extended courtroom sequences are handled with an enticing pace and levity.

But the ending surely makes the film famous. Just before and following the verdict, “Witness for the Prosecution” has more twists and turns than a pretzel, and all of them are deliciously absurd. The performances Laughton, Power and Dietrich especially are rightfully over the top and accommodate these more idiotic moments nicely.

The film was nominated for Best Picture that year, and it certainly isn’t as good as the winner “The Bridge on the River Kwai” or the fellow courtroom drama nominee “12 Angry Men.” It also arguably isn’t one of Billy Wilder’s best but it’s an enjoyable classic film with a great cast and fun story.