Film Reviews

112 posts

Bee Minus

Film Film Reviews

Bee Movie (Steve Hickner & Simon J. Smith, 2007)

Nearly a decade ago, in 1998, Dreamworks released Antz. It marked the emergence of the first major competitor to Pixar in the field of computer animation, a rivalry highlighted by its superficial similarity to Pixar’s release for that year, A Bug’s Life. While both were good films, the Dreamworks offering was exciting for the alternative perspective it offered: where the Pixar film advocated a comfy theme of community solidarity, Antz satirised the hive / mob mentality and offered a more cynical voice than the Disney-backed Pixar studio could. This diversity of approach seemed an eminently healthy start to the computer animation boom. It’s a little disheartening, then, to now be confronted with Bee Movie, a lightweight and mediocre retread of Antz that sees almost everything of interest leached from the Dreamworks recipe. Pixar are still making interesting (if uneven) films, but Bee Movie is a telling example of the mediocrity that has characterised their competition.

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Not Actually About the Animals

Film Film Reviews

Eagle vs Shark (Taika Waititi, 2007)

A lot of the time, when you hear observers of the film business talk about how particular films are likely to perform, you hear them theorise about how a particular film might attract a fervent cult following, but has no prospects for wider commercial success because the central characters aren’t “likeable” or – more obscurely – “relatable.” Like most attempts to explain the mysterious alchemy of commercial success, I haven’t generally been impressed by the worth of this notion as a predictor (as opposed to its undoubted value as a self-perpetuating rationalisation for marketing gurus). Yet I kept thinking about it as I mulled over my reaction to Taika Waititi’s comedy Eagle vs Shark.

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State of the Artless

Film Film Reviews

Beowulf (Robert Zemeckis, 2007)

Beowulf is a test-bed for a combination of technologies that might be the future of the movies. It utilises “performance capture” animation, which some think will revolutionise computer animation. In many theatres it is being exhibited in 3-D, and that technology is acting as something of a trojan horse for the accelerated roll-out of digital cinemas. And its regular theatrical release is paired with showings in IMAX. It’s all very reminiscent of the 1950s, when extreme widescreen processes and early 3-D were used to try to give theatrical exhibition a competitive advantage against the threat of television. Today, the threats are DVD and illegal downloads, but the impetus is much the same. And Robert Zemeckis, in particular, has devoted much of the last decade to this technology: he hasn’t made a live-action film since 2000’s Cast Away, and won’t for some years (with his next picture locked in as the computer-animated A Christmas Tale, due in 2009).

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Rats!

Film Film Reviews

Ratatouille (Brad Bird, 2007)

Pixar’s newest film, Ratatouille, sees the studio’s gun director, Brad Bird, try his hand at saving a troubled production. The result is a somewhat messy and not completely satisfactory film, but still one that sees the studio expanding the horizons of the form.

Bird is an exciting figure. He worked with Disney in the 1980s, and was mentored by legendary animator Milt Kahl, before becoming one of the key creative personnel in the early years of The Simpsons. He then directed the acclaimed (but underseen) The Iron Giant for Warner Bros before joining Pixar to helm The Incredibles. It’s a career progression that moves from a start under one of animation’s great figures, to a key role in the renaissance of television animation, and then a shift to theatrical features just as that area was growing moribund again after a revival in the nineties. As everyone else’s features have grown more and more alike – with jive-talking animals, fart jokes and pop culture gags galore – Bird’s films have remained distinct. They stand apart from even the generally superior films produced by Pixar: while the other Pixar films show a clear house style that is very much driven by the sensibilities of Toy Story director John Lasseter (and which in Cars had started to slide towards mediocrity), Bird’s films are distinguished by their more adult tone and adventurous subject matter.

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Plonk!

Film Film Reviews

Dr Plonk (Rolf de Heer, 2007)

Rolf de Heer’s new film, Dr Plonk, is built on a brave and irresistible premise. De Heer has made a real, honest-to-God silent movie, evoking about as closely as possible the feel of a silent comedy from the 1920s. The only remotely similar project I can think of is Mel Brooks’ Silent Movie, from 1976, but that film did things by halves: shooting in colour and (typically for Brooks) showing only the vaguest sympathy for the genre he was supposedly channelling. De Heer, by contrast, brings to Dr Plonk a serious filmmaker’s urging to get the little things right: the film is shot in black and white using hand-cranked cameras; the camera moves only occasionally, and is shaky when it does; there are intertitles, written with a good ear (eye?) for the style of period titles; and there’s even a slight variability in the brightness of the film that matches that seen in silent prints. The illusion is remarkable, and in the early passages, before the time-travel plot kicks in and the eponymous doctor travels o the present day, there’s really little other than the familiar face of Magda Szubanski to give this away as a contemporary production. At that level, it’s a remarkable achievement, and as a fan of silent films I really, really wanted to enjoy Dr Plonk more than I did. Unfortunately, de Heer’s film also shows up the difficulties of reviving what is basically a dead form.

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Big and Yellow

Film Film Reviews

The Simpsons Movie (David Silverman, 2007)

One of the first gags in The Simpsons Movie is a joke about the foolishness of going to see a film of a TV show that we get weekly for free, and it’s true that there is something borderline illegitimate about a film of a TV show that’s currently in production. It isn’t just that it risks being seen as a rip-off: it’s also that it is impossible to separate the film from the series to fairly assess it as a stand-alone work. How can you judge character arcs and narrative of a film like this without placing them in the context of our familiarity with the characters and the grand serial narrative that has been The Simpsons since 1989? It’s probably foolish to even ask what sense this film would make to someone who hasn’t seen the show, since the situation will hardly arise. But that ubiquity means that in some ways The Simpsons Movie can never be anything other than a particularly long episode of the TV show, since we can never come to the experience “clean.”

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Harry Potter and the Adults Who Read Children’s Books

Film Film Reviews

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (David Yates, 2007)

As a fan of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, the biggest struggle in trying to evaluate the movie series has been in trying to evaluate them as stand-alone films. This is always a problem when looking at adaptations of familiar books, but I think it’s particularly so for the Harry Potter series. Rowling’s plotting is complex, and she fleshes out her world by indulging in numerous subplots and diversions. Her novels have therefore proven difficult to adapt: they don’t easily smooth out into the neat through lines of a typical Hollywood narrative. And while I recognised the virtues of the third and forth Potter adaptations – I didn’t think much at all of the first two, directed by Christopher Columbus – there was something inherently unsatisfying about them. I think the biggest problem is that the fun of the novels is in mulling over Rowling’s puzzles over the time it takes to read a book; Rowling can drop the clues in casually over several hundred pages, so there’s a pleasure in finally getting to a resolution. The films, constrained to two and a bit hours, have to hit every vital plot point with so little room to breathe that there’s no time to think over the main plot, let alone take pleasure in the asides or humorous details Rowling could enjoy. So even more than for most adaptations, I felt the films were simply highlights packages, like watching a trailer. I know there are many who have only seen the films and who have enjoyed them a great deal, so it must be possible to get something from these films in their own right. Yet I always find it a little bewildering, as I felt I had to put the story together in my mind by reading back in elements from the books.

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Spidey Senseless

Film Film Reviews

Spider-man 3 (Sam Raimi, 2007)

There’s a really good scene at the end of Sam Raimi’s second Spider-man film that embodies everything I liked about that film and hoped for from the third one. Peter Parker, having battled with this belief that he can’t balance his life as Spider-man with his relationship with childhood sweetheart Mary Jane Watson, has just been told by Mary Jane that he can have it all. The happy ending of that film is that Mary Jane declares she will stand by his side, despite all the compromises this will involve. Just as they kiss, there’s a siren outside the window, which distracts Peter. “Go get ’em, tiger,” says Mary Jane, and we get an exultant shot of Spider-man whooping in joy as he jubilantly swings down the street. Yet Raimi doesn’t finish on that shot. Instead he cuts back to Mary Jane, watching him go, as doubt spreads across her face, and it’s on that note of ambiguity that Raimi rolls the end credits. It’s a little thing, but it’s a sign of the extra thought and attention to character that distinguishes the best genre movies. Those kind of small touches made Spider-man 2 one of the best genre films of recent years, and had me eager to see how Raimi would resolve his plot threads in third instalment. So it’s really disappointing that Spider-man 3 has turned out to be a bit of a mess.

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The Feel Bad Movie of the Year

Film Film Reviews

Tideland (Terry Gilliam, 2005)

When I saw Terry Gilliam’s Tideland at the Melbourne Film Festival last year, my immediate reaction was that the film was unreleasable. Its appearance in Australian cinemas has obviously proven me wrong. Yet its exposure to a wider population allows the opportunity to see how many, like me, find the film virtually unwatchable. Gilliam is an enormously talented filmmaker, and Tideland isn’t bad in any of the usual ways. It’s not reprehensible, or stupid, or poorly made. But it’s a deeply unpleasant experience that just doesn’t work at all.

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Deep Space

Film Film Reviews

Sunshine (Danny Boyle, 2007)

Danny Boyle’s Sunshine has a guaranteed cult following already. It’s a seriously intentioned, adult-oriented science fiction film, and these are few and far between. There’s a sector of the nerd audience out there that latches onto any science fiction film that moves even slightly beyond Star Wars style space pyrotechnics; this is a fan base that gets its regular sustenance from literary science fiction but which will eagerly devour the few scraps of “hard” sci-fi that Hollywood gives it. Sunshine, unfortunately, might need this fan base to keep it going. Boyle has made three quarters of a great film, but I suspect those not predisposed to enjoy this genre are going to struggle to forgive its flaws.

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