Home » Movies
Up
By Scott Mendelson
Up is the best animated film since Meet the Robinsons. Both films are unabashedly sentimental fables about the broad strokes of life. Meet the Robinsons dealt with a young orphan boy who learns to accept the hardships that early life can bring, so that he can 'keep moving forward'. Up is about a man at the end of his life, with seemingly nothing to live for except to look backwards with fondness and regret. At the risk of scaring off would-be viewers, it is the most achingly sad romantic fable since Sarah Polley's Away From Her. And while I wouldn't recommend it as a casual date movie, and I'm not sure how it will play as a family film (since the kids might wonder why mommy and daddy are crying), it is a gloriously beautiful adventure film that will likely remain the finest film of 2009.
A token amount of plot - Elderly Carl (Ed Asner) has just buried Elle: his wife, his childhood sweetheart and his best friend. Waking up without any purpose to his life, he simply sits on his couch, mourning both his loss and the one adventure that his wife and he never got around to taking (life kept getting in the way). After circumstances put both his house and his freedom in jeopardy, Carl decides to live out Elle's childhood dream (traveling to South America and living in a house on the mountaintop next to the theoretical Paradise Falls). Using leftover balloons from his days as a balloon peddler, Carl sets sail as his entire home floats into the sky. As he embarks on one final adventure to keep a promise, he soon discovers that a young 'wilderness explorer scout' has accidentally stowed himself away on the front porch.
That's all you get. I wouldn't dream of revealing what Carl encounters on his journey. It offers up its visual pleasures without explanation and without apology, knowing that it has earned the right to its own imagination. The film is surprisingly simple, with a relatively straight-ahead narrative that takes only a few twists along the way. As Carl and the young boy bond through their mutual grief (young Russell is mourning the apparent divorce of his parents and the absence of his father), Carl desperately tries to get his house to the falls before the helium runs out. Despite the melancholy undertone, this is, similar to the last Indiana Jones picture, an often rousing story about a man nearing the end of his days discovering that he still has a life left to live.
While the film is basically about death and the fragility of life, Up is every bit as funny and exciting as any other Pixar film. The 'talking dog' (via electronic collar) revealed in the previews is just the beginning of the glorious discoveries that are in store. The animation is, of course, astonishing, with rich bright colors and vivid details around every corner. The score by Michael Giacchino is every bit as rousing as his work on The Incredibles. And the vocal work (mostly filled with actual voice over artists, save for Delroy Lindo and Christopher Plummer) is splendidly low-key and naturalistic and always at the service of the story (Ed Asner is wonderful per usual, although most of Carl's best moments are silent ones). Even if kids don't get the heavy dramatics at play, there are plenty of laugh-out-loud gags and gee-whiz action scenes to keep them enthralled.
Up is a wonderfully touching, openly dark, and surprisingly surreal adventure story. To call the picture 'sentimental' would be an understatement, as it is often an ode to sentimentality. It uses wordless montage and the power of silence every bit
as effectively as Wall-E and it's often just as action-packed as The Incredibles. It is a beautiful tale, gloriously told with rich and vivid characters, eye-popping visual splendor and it acknowledges the complete despairs and utter joys of life in one fell swoop. It is the finest film of 2009 and one of the finest animated films I've seen in my lifetime.
Surveillance
By Scott Mendelson
Puzzle box movies are a mixed blessing. The best of them are completely absorbing and compelling regardless of their climactic reveals or final incidents. So even if you know 'the big secret' of The Sixth Sense, the film still works as a emotional drama about a young boy with an unimaginable problem and how it affects his relationship with his mother. And even if you know where The Usual Suspects is heading, it's still a well-acted crime drama with a compelling narrative under its belt. But if the sole intent of a given film is to play a climactic game of 'gotcha' with the audience, then said filmmakers had best be darned sure that we can't guess the big answers before we're intended to know them. Otherwise the film becomes an exercise in tedium.
Surveillance is a movie all about deducing how a specific crime unfolded. At the beginning of the picture, there is a murder and apparent kidnapping, followed by a mass murder along a country road. The three witnesses are an eight year old girl, a strung out junkie, and a local cop. The inquisitors are two out-of-town FBI agents (Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond) who have invested months in this apparent cross-country crime spree. As the feds press the survivors for relevant information, the narrative of just what happened unfolds from several points of view, with none of the narrators proving all that reliable.
The picture, directed by Jennifer Lynch (the director of the infamous Boxing Helana), may very well have worked as an hour-long short film on Showtime or HBO. But this is a full-length 97-minute feature, and there just isn't enough storytelling to fill up the allotted time. As a result, the opening act is full of atmosphere and character introduction, without a hint of actual character development or narrative progression. The film is filled with solid character actors, such as Michael Ironside, Cheri Oreri, and French Stewart, but the dialogue is shockingly bland and the cast is generally wasted. The set up is interesting and the actors (especially Pullman and Kent Harper) are game, but the film is just light on substance for much of its running time.
There are a few moments of twisted diversion. In a flashback, two cops spend their day terrorizing motorists unlucky enough to be caught speeding, teaching them to never ever break the speed limit again. And while the violence is surprisingly restrained, there are just enough moments of gore or surprise bloodletting to snap us awake. But most of the running time is basically spent waiting for the inevitable reveals, when we finally see how the mass killing played out and which characters are hiding which secrets. If you don't figure it out early on, you simply sit there waiting for the reveals. If you've figured it out already, the film is almost unbearably dull.
In the end, Surveillance is a puzzle box film that has nothing to offer except the various puzzle pieces. The characters do not stand out, the drama is not compelling, and the screenplay is light on even remotely interesting dialogue. There just isn't enough story and character to fill up a feature length movie, so the entire first and second acts just come off as filler. Considering the talent involved, Surveillance is a major disappointment.
Grade: C-
Drag Me to Hell
By Scott Mendelson
Drag Me to Hell is, by default, the best horror film of the year thus far. It's contains a relatively mediocre lead performance and it's not terribly scary, as the nature of its premise lays out that the would-be scares are without consequence. But what it does have, energy, an eagerness to entertain, and an old-school 80s fun house spirit, it has in spades. For one thing, it's the rare theatrical horror movie that isn't a remake or a random 'dumb kids get lost in the wood and get butchered' narrative. It is a real movie, with a real plot and plausible characters at its core. Drag Me To Hell may not be scary, but it is quite a bit of trashy B-movie fun.
A token amount of plot - Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) is a young loan officer pining for a promotion to assistant manager. Wanting to avoid appearing too emphatic in front of her boss (David Paymer), she declines an elderly gypsy's request for a mortgage extension, dooming the woman to foreclosure. As a result, the old woman (Lorna Raver) lashes out in anger, cursing Christine and condemning her to an eternity in hell, but only after three days of psychological and emotional torture (you know, for fun).
The majority of the narrative concerns Christine's attempts to rid herself of this damnation, all while trying to appear normal to her boss, her boyfriend (Justin Long, in his first purely straight role), and her boyfriend's theoretically disapproving family. Needless to say, the gypsy curse gives director Sam Raimi an excuse to throw whatever whacked-out effects work he wants at the screen, all in the name of startling the audience into nervous laughter. Since the premise dictates a certain lack of onscreen physical violence or gore, Raimi uses his PG-13 instead to show all kinds of old-fashioned gross-outs, jolting 'gotcha' moments, and plenty of ick. It works more often than not, but the underlying premise dictates that nothing will actually happen to our heroine until the three days expire (assuming she can't break the curse, of course). Save for the brutal and terrifying prologue, all of the subsequent scares will simply be false alarms or intentional mind games on the part of the various evil forces at work. It's popcorn-flying fun, but it's not scary.
Whether this is an issue is up to you, but the picture works on other levels to compensate for the lack of bone-chilling terror. The characters are relatively fleshed out, which is a refreshing change of pace in this genre. If anything, Justin Long is almost too supportive, coming off as the perfect boyfriend almost to the point of caricature. But Long is quite good here, giving Clay Dalton a strong but plausible protective streak. Even Clay's would-be villainous mother is given a scene of redemptive humanity. Rham Jas is terrifically engaging as a believing psychic, especially as this is his feature-film debut (next up, James Cameron's Avatar). And while David Paymer flirts with cliché as the snarky bank manager, it is awfully nice to see this underutilized actor in a high profile movie again.
While this is being hailed as director Sam Raimi's return to the horror genre that made him a legend, this is a very different kind of picture than the Evil Dead series. While the visuals and the camera work will remind even the casual fan of Bruce Campbell's various horror pratfalls, this is, if anything, an attempt to put those kinds of cinematic tricks into a movie with an actual plot and actual characters. By all objective standards, this is a genuinely better film than any of the Evil Dead pictures. Amazingly, Bruce Campbell does not make a cameo in this one, although that 1973 Oldsmobile Delta Royale does.
The film will not leave you feeling icky or ill-at-ease. It's not that kind of horror film. But despite the somewhat overdone performance by Alison Lohman, the film works splendidly as a comic homage to 1980s supernatural gross-out pictures, the kind that you barely remember watching when your parents weren't looking (think The Gate). Despite the lush 2.35:1 wide screen cinematography, I actually think that the picture would work best when viewed on a basic cable station at 2am in the morning. Drag Me to Hell is certainly a jump out of your seat good time as a theatrical experience, but I'd only imagine that it would have scared the hell out of me if I had seen it when I was nine, on Channel 43 at 1am in the morning as I struggled to stay awake to see what happened next.
Grade: B
Pontypool
By Scott Mendelson
There is something inescapably terrifying about witnessing something horrible from a completely plausible point of view. Most films, especially horror films, give the audiences a sort of 'eyes-of-God' point of view, giving us the full picture of what's occurring onscreen even when the characters do not have such benefits. However, in recent years, we have seen a sub-genre of sorts that one might call the 'information withheld' horror picture. In these variations on tried and true stories, we only get as much information as the main characters and we generally only see and hear what they see and hear.
Whether it's an apparent alien invasion seen only from news reports on a tiny television set (Signs), or a monster attack seen only from the camcorder of owned by one of the random city dwellers (Cloverfield), these pictures put a premium on information, so that the slightest image of horror or nugget of knowledge is theoretically that much more frightening. Some of these films (Signs) are better than others (The Blair Witch Project), but they all are attempting to capitalize on the two hoariest clichés in cinema - what you don't see is scary than what you do see, and there's nothing more terrifying than the unknown.
Pontypool is a low-budget study in claustrophobia and creeping realization. The picture concerns a once big-time radio DJ who has taken a last-chance hosting job for a small-time news station in a very small town. Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie) quickly attempts to drum up 'controversy', much to the chagrin of his producer (Sydney Briar). But almost immediately into his first shift, news breaks of an apparent riot or mass panic outside a doctor's office. As small bits of information drip in, it quickly becomes clear that something has gripped the town in a state of madness or confusion. As eye-witness reports become conflicted and increasingly confusing, the DJ, the producer, and the engineer must figure out what is going on before it is too late.
Apologies for the vagueness, but the less you know going into this the more potent the experience will be. Needless to say, the situation is soon revealed to be something far more complicated than a route horror movie experience, and the picture becomes a sort of mediation on the power of words and the inherent influence of the English language itself. Holding this together is a dynamic lead performance by noted character actor Stephen McHattie. Looking like a cross between Don Imus, Lance Henricksen, and Dr. Gregory House, McHattie does little more than sit in a radio booth and speak for the duration of the 95-minute running time. But his richly detailed face and crackling voice dominates the proceedings in a fashion that might have earned Oscar buzz in a more high-profile picture.
The story never really leaves that tiny church-basement radio station, so the picture becomes increasingly tense as our three main characters realize that they may be 'witnessing' some kind of world-changing event without the ability to actually see any of it. For the first half, the film has a spellbinding hold on the audience, as we ourselves become desperate for any nugget of insight into just what is going on outside in the snow. Alas, at about the halfway point, Pontypool shows its hand. And while the more complicated explanation does add pathos and a subtext to the horror film narrative, said explanation is so convoluted that the picture has to spend much of the remainder of its running time explaining just what is going on. An additional character is introduced at about the hour mark for the sole purpose of expository monologue. While the film does conclude on a potent note of earned dread, this is the rare horror movie that almost tries too hard to be more than what it is.
Like many horror films that base their terror on what we don't know or don't understand, Pontypool loses much of its power once we fully understand (or think we understand) what the game is all about. It has a terrifically compelling first half, and an Oscar-worthy performance by McHattie. But the second half collapses under the weight of its own over ambition. Yes, director Bruce McDonald and writer Tony Burgess have much to say about the power of the spoken language, but they commit the cardinal sin of putting the message ahead of the medium.
Grade: B-
Spring Breakdown
By Scott Mendelson
If you are looking for a entertaining buddy movie then Spring Awakening is a good flick for you. There are crude jokes, funny tidbits and slapstick humor. The only twist is that these buddies are women. Women who were never cool.
A token amount of plot - The film concerns three lifelong geeks/losers (Amy Poehler, Rachel Dratch, and Parker Posey) who have remained friends up into their mid-30s. Becky (Posey) finds herself drafted to monitor the college-age daughter of a would-be Vice Presidential candidate as young Ashley (Amber Tamblyn) finds herself darting off to South Padre Island for spring break. Deciding that this is their chance to party like the popular kids that they always admired, Becky's other two friends decide to tag along. Much alcohol consumption, attempted sexual hijinks, and theoretical hilarity ensue.
The film is pretty generic, but what makes it watchable is the energy of the three leads and the obvious joy that the supporting cast (Will Arnett, Seth Myers, Missi Pyle, and Jane Lynch) get from playing in this particular sandbox. The film is worth a gander if you're a fan of any of the onscreen talent. Amy Poehler has the ability to make you laugh no matter what she does. She is very funny in this. Rachel Dratch is terrific as well.
The film is certainly worth checking out for a showcase for several justly revered comic actresses. It's definately worth a rental.