Love on the Battlefield

I'll thank every God ever worshiped for giving me a weekend where I can first visit all the pitfalls of blockbuster filmmaking and become filled with the bitterness and distrust that most critics feel towards these films on one day, and on the next I can see a film that reminds me of everything I love about big films and why my eternally losing battle to champion these films is worth the gunshot wounds and flashbacks.

As I made staggeringly, irritatingly clear in my piece on The Princess and the Frog, I've got a thing for animation. It offers its filmmakers complete and total control over every visual element of the production and a talented filmmaker will use that level of control to create a landscape to compliment and deepen the audience's understanding and emotional involvement with the story and characters. A live-action film can do this, but the best few are rarely even close to as successful as the most mediocre animated films. And while it's more upsetting to see a creative team fail and squander that opportunity, it's not a commentary on the quality of How to Train Your Dragon, but rather a general handjob I give out to animated films just for being animated.

In the past I've avoided Dreamworks productions because they fucking suck (any of the Aardman Animation productions being the obvious exception). I liked Shrek when I was ten because I was ten, but beyond that I have no affection for their films, which have always been the commerce-obsessed cousin of Pixar, the one who always hangs out with Pixar at family reunions, but who Pixar really can't stand. They use cheap, gaudy gimmicks like casting celebrities just to put names on the marquees. Who casts Ewan McGregor for his voice? Or for any other reason?

That is one of the very few things I can hold against How to Train Your Dragon, a splendid motherfucking film for the whole family. It weaves the story of Hiccup, a skinny, anachronistic teenage outcast in a viking village plagued by dragon attacks. In this world, a viking's life is dedicated to dragon fighting, something Hiccup's frail little girl-arms were not slopped into existence for. He's instead become an apprentice blacksmith, something he is casually outclassed at by the one-armed, one-legged Gobber. Hiccup's routinely disappointed father Stoick leads the vikings and, thanks in no small part to Gerard Butler's naturally hostile voice, always sounds like he's ready to drop Hiccup and his chicken-legs into a vat of lava for viking soup. Hiccup employs his lamentable engineering prowess to wound the most dangerous of all dragons and to prove his success to his skeptical fellow vikings, goes out to put his prey in a sack and skin it into a fashionable belt. Being the girly boy-lover he is, Hiccup's first instinct is to befriends and exchange a few knitting patterns with his prey, a dragon named Toothless whose ability to fly Hiccup has destroyed. As the shroud of mystery lifts around Toothless, Hiccup begins to understand the woefully misunderstood dragons, never once exploiting their trust for a surprise strangling.

I won't defend the film on the basis of a plot outline because it's a genre film, where the true value is found in the details and in this case it's the relationship between Hiccup and Toothless, which builds from the ground up and takes the entire length of the film to develop in its entirety. It's a rare thing to see a film aimed at children with so much patience for its characters. Not even Ratatouille, which had a similar relationship between its two protagonists, built its story on the spine of a bond growing and strengthening. The animated "performances" for the characters are first-rate and the film would lose half its impact without them. While Hiccup is strongly written, interesting and well animated, his arc is mostly the rack upon which we hang the plot and is a lot more straightforward than Toothless's. Toothless is a totally mute character whose every ounce of character depends on animation, not droning exposition, and the animators sustain a level of mute emotiveness found in only the best animated films animated by the very best animators. He'll almost certainly be the finest animated character to be found in a 2010 film.

As for those genre sensibilities that drive the narrative, the story makes several advanced leaps that I didn't expect from the moment the conflict or thread was introduced. In fact, a brief aside: right off the bat I was enthralled with this movie for--what else?--its action. The opening action scene is likely to be on my list of favorite action scenes of the year, featuring some voice-over narration explaining the world and conflict while keeping the visuals swift, kinetic and exciting. I grew a bit worried, however, when they started to introduce threads and conflicts that will obviously fit in to the narrative in the most played-out, cinematic way possible. For instance, the obligatory love interest, Astrid, whose charmingly anachronistic ensemble could introduced to the fashion world as "viking-chic" and is marketable because it includes Ugg Boots, is introduced in front of an explosion in a slow motion moneyshot establishing her as the chick in the movie. Again, I expected a typical "Oh she hates me, oh we have some stuff in common, oh let's resolve the conflict together and close the movie with our first kiss hooray the nerd got the hot chick" arc, but it was far less typical than that. Much like Hiccup's relationship with Toothless, it builds from the ground up and the narrative never betrays its characters. While it ends the way you expect, their relationship remains combative and truly hostile. When I say "hostile", I don't mean "playfully hostile" like we've come to expect of movies, I mean genuinely hostile. She insults him and belittles him publicly and really despises him, and their relationship is the devolution of that relationship and the ascension of a relationship built on a foundation of respect, and from there a small pubescent spark forms. It's shockingly genuine, it's just that it's played out in a stylized world.

I love the way conflict is introduced and resolved in this film, and I love that the narrative and works for the characters, is driven exclusively by the characters and evolves out of the characters desires and actions. My only major complaint with the film is a little late-second act conflict dump. It leads to a pretty standard "clear-cut good guys vs. clear-cut bad guys" climax, and while it's visually stupifying and rousing and exciting and climactic and all the things I hoped it would be, it's also disappointing in its standardness. The whole film has been characterized by understanding for all its different characters and a disregard for typical conflict setup that the climax rings a bit hollow and hypocritical. We're supposed to root for the destruction of the antagonist when this whole film has been building our respect and attachment to the dragons. It's a little revision to the thematic palette that I did not appreciate, but god DAMN it was pretty.

Oh yeah, the whole film is ridiculously pretty. As pretty as, or even prettier than any of Pixar's efforts, thanks to The Roger Deakins, who consulted on this film as he did for Wall-E. The film's colors and cinematography is the other 50% that gives it the emotional heft that Dreamworks' films have been missing for so long. Let's hope this gets remembered Oscar time. If Avatar can get a Best Cinematography Oscar, I don't see why How to Train Your Dragon can't.

One last thing: I love the title. It's charmingly simplistic in the face of the film's thematic complexity. Hiccup surpasses the notion that he's "training" toothless after maybe their second time together and their relationship being a genuine friendship has become sort of forgone. When the title card appears just before the closing credits, it's almost more of a question: How to Train Your Dragon? With compassion and respect, that's fucking how.

9/10

But I Don't Want To Go Among Dull People

Something has happened. I don't know if it really is the result of focus group evil or if it was truly an accident, but Alice in Wonderland is quite possibly the most vile formula picture I've seen in a theater. Top to bottom it's the safest possible picture that could have had $150 million dollars thrown its way. Let's go down the check list. Familiar source material that won't scare anyone? Check. Huge star? Check. Tiresome moral about being yourself? Check. Stock characters whose back stories were pasted into the script with stickers? Check. Epic battle finale? Check. Horrible love story jaw-droppingly crammed into the middle of the movie but not completed in a bizarre acknowledgment of the audience's horror? Check. 3D surcharge? Check.

Don't get me wrong, Tim Burton and I have a great relationship. Especially his early films. I love Pee-Wee's Big Adventure and Ed Wood, The Nightmare Before Christmas and Edward Scissorhands are the classic pieces of Tim Burton style that he has now beaten to death, and even some of his more recent films, like Sweeney Todd (based on my favorite musical, so, you know) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory I liked more than I probably should have. But the recurring theme in his career is his inability to choose a script. When he stumbles into a truly great script, like Ed Wood, and assembles a great cast, like Ed Wood, there's no stopping him. His weakest efforts have always been his weakest efforts because of their poor script. Batman and Batman Returns have more script issues than I can count on my molecules, not to mention the fact that they hollowed out a Michael Keaton-sized action figure (only slightly larger than a normal action figure) and stuffed Michael Keaton in it, making Batman a statue that waddled everywhere. Oh no, it's Batman! but we can finish counting the loot first. He's all the way on the other side of the room.

Anyway, yeah, scripts. The worst crime Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland commits is to try and expand characters that are not only iconic, but were written specifically to work in the context of one setting, one scene, one set of dialogue. The Mad Hatter is the perfect example. What Burton and Depp and the writers do to that character is unforgivable. A truly bizarre character is makeup-ed to meet a studio focus group's definition of "weird", has all the edges shaved off by a hack screenwriter and is then given a dash of Johnny Depp's signature mannerisms and sets it out on a warmer to be lazily chewed by cow people. Here's the background to the Mad Hatter: He was a happy little hatter, and then the Evil Red Queen killed all his friends and now he's mad. He doesn't do anything especially mad, he just mostly talks about being mad.

Oh yeah, and the fucking Red Queen. I don't know if the Mad Hatter really the worst thing about this film. It may be the way the film takes all the vaguely defined characters of the book and uses whatever characteristics they can extrapolate to put them in the most formulaic roles. The Red Queen seemed sort of evil, so we'll make her a tyrant that must be toppled. The Caterpillar had a hookah. I think that makes him wise. The Cheshire Cat could disappear. Make him a superhero with the power to evaporate. The Doormouse had a sword, so she'll be an action hero. I could do this for all the characters. So I will. Alice is a young lady in late-Victorian England, so we'll make her stand up to the aristocracy and be herself and do absolutely mad things like wonder what it would be like to fly or become head of a trading company in an afternoon. Tweedledee and Tweedledum were argumentative weirdos, so let's make them comic relief bullshit. The White Queen is a benevolent ruler, presumably based on her name and nothing else. And Crispin Glover, oh my beloved Crispin Glover, is delegated to the most awful of villains, the Queen's right hand who has no mercy for the allegedly charming creatures of Wonderland.

How can Hollywood have no idea how to use Crispin Glover? While their target audience was people who wear shirts that say things like "normal people scare me" or call the "cool kids" (a mythical band of travelers I've never been able to find) sheep, they tried to net fans of the truly bizarre by casting Crispin Glover, and this isn't the first time that's happened. What will it take to get him another Willard?

Its use of 3D is probably more effective and coherent than it was in Avatar, but not by much. Coraline is still the all-time champion of the technology, and Alice in Wonderland's superiority to previous applications of the technology is simply a matter of money and time for R&D, not any major artistic achievement, and if there's anything we can give Alice in Wonderland credit for it's for having a lot of money behind it. Still, it's Tim Burton's ugliest film, looking not unlike a five-year-old's vomit after eating a box of crayons with that unmistakable CGI sheen rubbed on it (still, it's nowhere near as ugly as last year's A Christmas Carol). It's such a stark contrast to the gobstopping but gaudy beauty of Avatar that really shows that where Burton's talents and eye end, Cameron's stretch far beyond.

Its desire to puke all over the legacy of Lewis Carroll's books is sometimes admirable, and Tim Burton being a studio puppet is sometimes fascinating, and Johnny Depp turning himself into a saleable commodity is sometimes sad, but mostly I wanted to be one of the people in my sold-out audience smart enough to walk out of this film. I didn't because I wanted to see it through the end, but then something happened that was so nightmarish and unwatchable I had to cover my eyes. And the audience loved it. If you end up being dragged to this movie, try and figure out what it is. It's my gift to you, a small human kindness to make the experience endurable, but I hope to God you don't have to go through what I did.

1/10

Looking Up

Two things:

First, that's not the theatrical poster over to the right, it's an alternative poster done by Eric Tan, whose blog can be found here.

Second, I most admit that I have made a mistake. A week or so ago I wrote up my top seven films of the year with Up at #6. Upon rewatching it for this review I have realized how wrong I was. I regret not watching it again before writing that because I hadn't seen it since May and its effect had dimmed in my memory. I would like to make amends and declare Up my second favorite film of 2009, making my official list:

1. Inglourious Basterds
2. Up
3. A Serious Man
4. The Princess and the Frog
5. Observe and Report
6. Coraline
7. Star Trek

It seems like madness that I would put Up so low on my list when I so vehemently declared it the best film Pixar has yet produced. Oh, yes, I know that's a big statement, and after all, there's no genre-bending or gap-bridging or technology-striding in Up. It used to be a pretty solid punch-out between Wall-E and The Incredibles for the title of Best Pixar Film, but I think Up manages to come out on top . Maybe I need to watch Wall-E again; after all, I keep a Wall-E figurine on my desk.

Picking a favorite Pixar film is stupid, though. To watch a Pixar film is to be shot in the head with quality and have your brains paint a wall that is exuberance. Up is simultaneously Pixar's most emotionally potent, most fun, most exciting and funniest film. It's the tale of a lonely old widower named Carl Fredricksen. The world is moving fast around him and he has no reason to change. When his wife died he lost not only his wife, but the person who had been his life partner since they were children and the more willfull half of his existence. In his depressed stupor he commits assault and ties 20,000 balloons to his house in honor of his wife's memory. He kidnaps a child named Russell and escapes to Peru. Little does he know that the United States has had an extradition agreement with Peru since 2001, but that never really comes up.

Mainly the narrative is thus: Man lives entire life promising himself and his wife adventure. They lead a happy, if ordinary life and then she dies. He goes off to find adventure and has adventure. He feels rejuvenated by the relationship he has with a young boy, bereft of fatherly influence.

The opening of the film is very realistic and then we introduce the unrealistic Adventure! aspects to bring Carl's arc together. This would be an easy pitfall for any creative team that wasn't Pixar, but they manage to ground the Adventure! and merge it with the more tragic elements of the story. Sure, it's jarring, it's meant to be jarring, but the film never loses sight of its story or characters and is all the richer for managing a huge tonal shift right in the middle and knowing that the best way to do that is to anchor the film with strong characters.

Carl himself is a wonderfully squatty little creature, seemingly composed entirely of squares. He's introduced in that most emotionally wrenching of opening montages that you've obviously heard praised endlessly, so I'll avoid analyzing that particular scene. I hypothesize that his entire character, and therefore the entire film (remember that we established the entire film rests on the shoulders of the characters to keep the mad tone shift from tearing it in half like a smilie face earthquake) rests on this montage. If we didn't feel and understand every bit of Carl's pain, it would be easy to dismiss him as a crochety old fucker and an unpleasant protagonist (a common critical loophole if you haven't gotten your quota of negative reviews filled for the month).

The supporting characters are all magnificent, including Russell, the innocent, excitable wilderness explorer who stows away on Carl's house, Kevin, the giant multicolored bird that Russell adopts and who speaks in squawks and whose movements provide some of the funniest physical comedy I've ever seen, and Dug, the dog who has been given the gift of speech and says exactly what a dog would say if a dog could speak, which is so fucking awesome that I want to kick every filmmaker that made a movie with a talking dog and it wasn't like this right in the fucking shins.

Rounding out the supporting cast is my favorite Pixar villain, Charles Muntz. I have a special place in my heart of Gaston from Beauty and the Beast because his stake in that film's plot is purely emotional. Similarly, Muntz has spent decades hunting the mythical Beast of Paradise Falls (Kevin) and is the owner of Dug and the inventor of the collar that allows him to speak. The Adventure! plot is just so damn well-constructed and so full of exciting action sequences and so well connected to the rest of the story. Dug and Kevin are easily my favorite Pixar comic relief characters.

And those action sequences, oh my those action sequences. With so many films trying to be throwbacks to 1930s adventure serials, it seems a stroke of simple genius to set the film in present day but employ elderly characters using antique machines, allowing the filmmakers to posit the showstopping climax on top of a zeppelin. I don't remember thinking that the climax was so marvelous when I saw the film in theaters, but it's received three individual viewings since I rewatched the film this morning. The most shocking and effective moment in this scene is the reveal of the gun, which works for a few reasons. First, how common is a gun in an animated film? Second, not a single weapon is shown throughout the film. It is, after all, an adventure film, not an action film (learn the difference, Hollywood). But I don't want to demean the actual reveal, the use of music and cinematography, the reactions of the characters, the soundscape. All of these things work in harmony throughout the film and appropriately peak at the climax.

Of course, that's the case with all Pixar films. Up is stupidly, ridiculously gorgeous as as piece of cinematography and is the primary argument for those retarded awards ceremonies to share some of that Cinematography gold with animated films (the cinematographer's guild just gave a nomination to Avatar; we may be getting somewhere). That is, if Wall-E didn't already convince you. And as always, Pixar gives us the best original score of the year, this time courtesy of Michael Giacchino, one of the best composers working today.

But I'm wasting my time. You know all this, you don't need me to tell you. Pixar doesn't make bad movies. They just don't. If Cars were a Dreamworks film (and that's a fair criticism), it would be Dreamworks' masterpiece. Every time they release a film it's a masterpiece to topple their previous masterpiece. If you don't like Pixar, you're fucking stupid.

10/10

Waking Nightmares

I'm not ashamed to say that if I'm asked what I thought the scariest movie was of 2009, I say Coraline without any hesitation. For this review, I watched it with my four-year-old brother and ten-year-old sister and both of them nearly wet their skulls in terror. While my ample body hair will weave together and crush my skeleton as a defense mechanism against fear, I understand the sensation from a scientist's position and think Coraline would be the best candidate to inspire the sensation should I be a weaker man one day.

Horror for children sounds a bit derogatory, so let's clear something up: films should not be made with a demographic in mind. The marketing campaign is the one that decides the demo, but because a film is animated, or features a child as a protagonist, or isn't rated R for extreme skull fucking, doesn't delegate it to being played on repeat in an orphanage until rug pirates do something made of chocolate.

Coraline is the very Gaiman-esque story of a little girl who encounters a magical creature in her house, one that assumes the form of her mother and populates a world almost precisely like her own. But where Coraline's home world is as dull and boring as anyone's (except she lives in a STOP MOTION WORLD, which would be cool, the little brat), this Other world is a fantastical world where everything is tailor-made to Coraline's wishes. Before long, this Other world starts to show its seems and Coraline's Other Mother begins to show some nasty intentions that would get her reported to CPS by any responsible neighbor.

The film is based on a Neil Gaiman book from 2002, and while I'm not familiar with that particular book, I'm familiar with Neil Gaiman and I'm familiar with Dave McKean's cover art, and I'm familiar with the crushing disappointment I felt when I discovered that the film wouldn't be in the style of McKean's art. As much as I love seeing stop-motion animation, and I love stop-motion, I can still lament what a visual handjob this movie would be if it had been done with traditional 2D animation in this style.

Yeah, yeah, we all know (Maybe. Who are you?) how much I love hand-drawn animation, but its underappreciated little brother, stop motion, is pretty fucking incredible as well. It's also the most labor-intensive form of animation. When I was nine or ten or something, I saw a featurette on the animation process behind Chicken Run where they explained that a really good day saw a little less than one second of animation being shot. I know to this day that I would probably hang myself after the first week, which would give the desperate animators a chance to cut some corners and use my dangling feet as a piece of set dressing.

It's unfortunate that, unless James Cameron's home-theater 3D is the real deal, I'll probably never be able to see this film as it was intended ever again. In 3D, Coraline is truly impressive. As I mentioned in my brief writeup for my 2009 in Review, stop motion offers the perfect venue for 3D: while it fails to add a realistic depth to a cartoony CGI film, and it looks too cartoonish for a live-action film, stop motion is the perfect compromise between animation and live action, and therefore provides the most seamless 3D experience.

And look at that, the 3D does something in this movie. Instead of eye candy, it becomes a visual cue that we have entered the Other world (that's not to say Cameron didn't do something similar in Avatar, but I think that the jungles of Pandora were marked more by a specific color palette than use of 3D, although there was some of that). Our first glimpse of this world is a wide, deep-focus shot of a kitchen, lit with the glowing amber and bright reds that will also come to characterize the Other world, just as the dull blues and grays will come to characterize the real world. Coraline's wonder, in this case, is our wonder.

Coraline herself is exceptionally expressive for a stop motion character, something that I haven't ever really expected from this medium. Her emotions never seem out of place for an eleven-year-old girl and the filmmakers are tasteful enough to not juxtapose moments of inhuman maturity and clarity for the sake of plot-building against more realistic eleven-year-old

Like all of Gaiman's work, it's rooted deep in mythology, and if he has aspirations to be a modern myth-maker, he'll never come closer to success than with Coraline. His inclusion of so many mythological elements, such as talking animals with personalities based on that animal's traits (the laconic cat, the scheming rat), the abundance of the number three, and lots of other stuff that you don't need me to list. As a hero, Coraline is a very typical eleven-year-old (I'm guessing) girl, and the film doesn't jump around that to try and stuff her into the mold of the hero. She's bratty, argumentative and impulsive and has the interests and dress sense of a little girl raised by professional gardeners.

But the real triumph, the real terror of the film is the Other Mother. With buttons sewn over her eyes, she at first appears (aside from, you know, the buttons) exactly like Coraline's real mother. Slowly over the film, she becomes more insect-like and the buttons more like the beady black eyes of an insect. In her final scene, the set dissolves into a nightmarish spider web and she into an enormous spidermonster (?) that will send your children to the therapist for years. Maybe it's because I never expect a movie marketed towards children (I know, I know) to even attempt horror, but that scene has never not given me the fucking spine-tingles.

In the end, my love for this movie comes down to a simple matter of taste. This sort of subdued horror, especially in animation, is something that appeals endlessly to me. There are things in this movie that are truly inappropriate for children, not because of the content, but because of the execution. Some of the creatures designed for this film and the world they inhabit is exactly the sort of thing that inhabits a grown man's nightmares. Where most horror films try to startle you and give you a murder boner, Coraline gives you nightmare imagery and claustrophobic editing, and I'll consider those scares far more genuine any day.

10/10

Candy Coated Hell

I've been thinking I wanted to do some sort of tribute to Disney's traditional animation, not just in some lame "these are my favorite Disney films" way, but rather in the tradition of Herr Machine.

So naturally I settled on "most horrifying Disney villain deaths". I figure I'm a fan of Disney and a fan of death, so it's a good fit. Spoilers abound.

Dr. Facilier Dances With the Devil in the Pale Moonlight

I think it's pretty natural to start with the most recent and the one that so kindly reminded me of Disney's unquenchable thirst for the innocence of little girls. I took my little sister to an evening showing of The Princess and the Frog thinking there wouldn't be many other children in the audience, but it was packed with drooling human larvae. For the most part they were well behaved, but audible gasps and shrieks rang out when the film's villain, Dr. Facilier, met his end. Apparently Dr. Facilier has been making deals with demons, and particularly spiteful demons who won't accept a well-structured, four-part apology and a gift certificate to Chili's when you let a plucky young heroine destroy their favorite soul-harvesting necklace. Dr. Facilier gets dragged into a purple voodoo Hell for his trouble. Apparently you can afford to burn through witch doctors like hash in Haiti when you're in New Orleans.

Ursula the Sea Witch in: A Very Disney Disembowelment

The magnificently evil Ursula (who is up their with Cruella and Malificent for best Disney villain, but god damn it don't ask me to choose) seems to have gained the upper hand and acquired King Triton's Trident (she was doing something devious and magical - I haven't seen the movie in a while and don't remember how exactly the exchange goes down, but I'm pretty sure she didn't win it in a sit-up contest) and is doing the usual villain stuff in a romance film like damning true love and punching rainbows in half when, out of fucking nowhere, Prince Eric shows up with a ship and runs her through with it. You can see the scene here and you ought to because you probably don't realize how shocked everyone seems by it. It's like when some jerkoff cuts in front of you in the cafeteria and you press his face into the scalding hot lasagna. We were rooting for you until you did that. Even Ursula's face seems to reflect that sentiment. Sure she was being devious and trying to steal some voices and usurp the crown, but it's just the ocean. Who cares? It's a stupid thing to be king of, anyway. Hey, speaking of which...

Scar Has Awful Friends, Is an Awful Friend

Scar sets into motion the mostly stupidly complex and murderous plan to take control of the Pridelands, a crappy piece of undeveloped land in Africa with nothing fun to do when not lazily chomping on zebras. There only seems to be lionesses around, making Scar the most qualified lion for the job, a deck he clearly had to stack with the murder of his brother. Scar has somehow managed to drive the whole outfit into the ground and turn the Pridelands into a festering desert swampland/lesbian haven, and has even managed to chase out the fucking sun within a few years, or however long it takes for a lion to get facial hair. It takes his wussy vegetarian nephew a whole ten minutes to come back and usurp him, although a popular vote probably would have worked just as well. Still, Simba tosses Scar off a cliff and down to his hyena enforcers, who clearly have no qualms about eating another carnivore. Or maybe they're not eating him, because as far as I can tell, they're just wantonly tearing him limb from limb.

Judge Frollo Goes to Hell

This one gets my vote for "most clearly inappropriate film ever made by Disney and aimed at children". I'm a fan of Victor Hugo's novel and the film manages to gimp a lot of important thematic framework by adhering itself to the most gut-wrenchingly wrong-headed formula that ever could have been applied to this story, so needless to say I don't have much affection for the film. I think we can all agree, though, that Judge Frollo's death scene is sweet. He falls into a pit of lava (why?) that is at the bottom of a sentient cathedral (really) that seems to know it's in a Disney film, or maybe it's a freshman English major who thinks it needs some heavy-handed symbolism for its villain to burn in. Whatever the case, Frollo's death is the stuff a child's nightmares are made of. For those of you who don't remember, he's dangling off a gargoyle when it suddenly comes to life, resembling nothing if not the most common iteration of a hellhound before breaking off and sending him into the lava (still not sure why that's there, maybe the local steel mill is on strike) below.

The Queen is Punished for Months of Ineffective Rule as She Hunts Nubile Innocent

Most of the deaths on this list are pretty logical. Scar is eaten by hyenas for abusing their loyalty, Frollo falls to his death for thinking that a medieval stone gargoyle could support the weight of a grown man. The Queen's government sanctioned murder party is cut short by a group of protesting midgets and deer. Yeah, you may have forgotten that part. If there's any argument for Snow White being one of the greatest films of all time it's that there's a scene where midgets and deer chase an old hag up a cliff and to a death most elaborate. When she is chased to the top of the cliff by the midgets and deer she attempts to push a boulder down the rocky slope and onto them when a lightning bolt hits the piece of rock she's standing on and sends her down the cliff and the 8-foot boulder chases her to the bottom. What sort of horrible, Old Testament trickster god exists in the world of Snow White is absolutely beyond me, but for a death this elaborate, she couldn't have just pissed the Gods off, she had to have confused them. And the only scenario I can imagine is that, in her prayers, she asked the Gods to "give me a sign" and "define 'overkill'" in very close proximity. Oh, and she gets eaten by vultures.

Honorable mentions include Clayton of Tarzan, excluded because I haven't seen that film in ten years, Sykes from Oliver and Company, excluded because MY name is Oliver, Shan Yu from Mulan, excluded because Mulan sucks, The Horned King from The Black Cauldron, excluded because I've never seen The Black Cauldron, and Malificent from Sleeping Beauty, excluded because I'm not qualified to discuss a film that great.

I hope to have your insults penetrate my heart in the comments, but I won't get my hopes up.

The Last Rainforest

First of all, I fucking called it.

Just wanted to get that out of the way before I got into anything else. All you faggots saying it looked retarded and that it was going to be the biggest flop of all time, commercially and artistically, can go to hell.

Okay, so my excuse for posting this so late: I bought my IMAX 3D tickets way the hell ahead of time, like two weeks in advance. Dragged some kids who didn't think it looked good with me to see it. As we were watching it, we leaned forward and had a little powwow session. We all three agreed that the 3D was really distracting, didn't look that good and was detrimental to the success of an otherwise very, very pretty movie.

Then we had an intermission, which the theater manager said we weren't supposed to have. Apparently they had assembled the print wrong because when it came back on the 3D looked just fine. I then made it my mission to see the film again because that unpleasant first half had messed with my perception of the film, and that was the fault of the theater owners, not the filmmakers. Also because the dicks at the IMAX 3D theaters don't let you keep the space goggles.

So the best place to start, for more than a few reasons, is the story. On the distant planet Pandora, a corporation has taken to mining for a valuable resource and has hired out mercenaries to deal with the hostile environment, namely a 10-foot tall humanoid species known as the Na'vi, the very dangerous, very tough and very intelligent dominant species of Pandora. In order to better relations, Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) has been involved in developing the Avatar Program, a program wherein a human remotely pilots a Na'vi body, grown in a vat. When one driver is killed, his twin brother Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is brought in to pilot his avatar, avatars being linked to drivers by DNA for full nervous system immersion (or some other sci-fi technobabble).

The human forces are led by the most evil man they could possibly have found for the job (Stephen Lang), who reminds me too much of my dad. He wants to use Jake's in with the Na'vi to acquire tactical data for the impending conflict. Unfortunately, Jake is being seduced by the Na'vi's natural lifestyle, in tune with the elements of Pandora, meant in no small way to remind you of Native Americans. He quickly falls in love with the strong-willed Neytiri, a hunter of the forest folk and heir to a seat of power in the Na'vi tree house gang. I don't think I'm giving anything away if I say that Jake eventually sides with the Na'vi against the humans.

This plot has come under a lot of fire for being too simple, but it works so goddamn well I don't see how the simplicity is even an issue. It's bare bones and elemental, and if there's one thing that Cameron has a real and true grasp on, it's the elemental. Col. My Dad doesn't have any redeeming human qualities, he's not even a character. He's just pure evil, not unlike Cal from Titanic. And as I said, Cameron has a problem with his leading men being ciphers, but for this film Jake Sully works perfectly and Sam Worthington's listless performance is a perfect match. It's like the performances in 2001 or Blade Runner, where the humans are intentionally played as bland archtypes to bring to the fore the personality of the environment or the other non-human elements. That the human element of the film is totally sterile is exactly the point, Jake even comments on it one scene, saying how much more surreal the human world is after spending so much time in his dreamscape. And the audience feels exactly the same. I wonder if the 3D element of the human scenes look strange and awkward on purpose, so that when we step into Pandora and it gels perfectly it feels natural and far more real, despite being a complete fantasy world.

And WHAT A FUCKING WORLD IT IS. Every plant, fern, rock or square inch of dirt pulsates with life in the most gaudy, colorful way possible. And when the lights went out and the world lit up with neon plants and fluorescent water, I had to take out my eyeballs and dunk them in a glass of water. The world may not work totally logically, but holy shit is it a wonder to look at. This may be the most stunning fantasy world ever constructed for film and my reaction to it is how I imagine people reacted to The Wizard of Oz back in the olden days. If this whole film is an excuse to give us vistas of Pandora, I am more than fine with that.

But that's not all it offers. First is, obviously, James Cameron's old pro hand at action. He stages masterful action in his sleep, which is why it's so surprising that an early chase scene through the forest (!) is pretty unspectacular, even a little bit bad. But I'll forgive that in a second for the epic climax, a battle tallying around twenty minutes that will overwhelm all five senses with the sensation of pepperjack cheese. I don't want to give anything away, but it's spectacular and if you have even a little bit of appreciation for action cinema, you're sure to love it.

And the other big thing is - hold on a second...

ZOE SALDANA FOR BEST ACTRESS

Okay. So Zoe Saldana is absolutely incredible in this film. The first truly great motion capture performance since Andy Serkis in Lord of the Rings. Her character is a combination of all the great things about actors mixed with all the great things about computer animation. It might well be one of the greatest combinations of actor and filmmaking craft towards the goal of creating a great performance. It's more than obvious that an inordinate amount of time went into animating her facial movements. Her performance is incredibly subtle, and while it's hard to say where Saldana's performance stops and the animation begins, I'd like to give equal credit to both sides. It's her strong, animalistic, sexual performance that anchors the entire film. It's a great example of a perfect performance and yet another marvelous female performance in a James Cameron film.

But the main character, if you'll excuse the faggotry, is Pandora itself. If there is an avatar in this film outside of the quite literal avatars, it's the Na'vi for Pandora. They represent the interests of the planet, commune with it and protect the balance of life, always acting with it and understanding it perfectly. It's the elemental tale of a world, not a people, fighting invaders. There are times when Pandora seems to even betray emotions.

The entire film would fall apart as anything but a visual exercise without Saldana. I'm no good at describing performances, but no female performance I have seen this year (despite being super behind, An Education isn't playing anywhere in my fucking STATE) even compares. I hope to god it isn't overlooked because it's motion captured. I hope the gorgeous production design isn't overlooked because it's in a big budget action movie. And I hope that James Cameron doesn't get overlooked for this sort of thing, the sort of thing that he's best at, that he excels at and that every other filmmaker in the world should sit down, shut up and take note of.

9/10

Of Love and Music and Beauty and Magic

I was born in 1990, meaning my exposure to Disney's animated films was largely of the Renaissance variety. I grew up with Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King, and so embedded are they in my life that I can't even watch them critically. So when Disney chose to make The Princess and the Frog, their glorious return to hand-drawn animation, it was almost a cheap shot that they made it in the tradition of those films from the early 90's. There was no way I wasn't going to love the Christ out of this movie.

I love the Christ out of this movie.

The decade or so since they last produced a worthwhile hand-animated film has given Disney the magical gift of hindsight and the ability to assess what worked and what didn't work about the films produced in the 90's and to narrow in on a perfect variation of their classic formula, with added grace and maturity. Disney's brilliant collection of animators, having been want of things to animate for several years, have exploded back onto the scene with the most infectious enthusiasm, and while, dare I say, the Princess and the Frog is an absolutely glorious little animated masterpiece, it's a particularly uneven glorious little animated masterpiece.

We open on New Orleans around 1910 or so, establishing the life of our protagonist, Tiana. Unlike her privileged friend Charlotte, she has simple dreams of one day owning a restaurant with her father. This dream, modest as it may be, is a quite lofty goal for a poor black family in 1910s New Orleans. Still, she persists, working hard and saving every penny she makes in menial jobs to make her dream come true, even after her father dies. And here we arrive at the main of the film. Handsome, vain and completely broke Prince Naveen has arrived with a rather dick-headed plan to marry into wealth, but quickly falls in with a Voodoo sorcerer named Dr. Facilier who transforms him into a frog and sets into motion a plan to acquire Charlotte's family's wealth with the help of Naveen's gullible manservant. Tiana is roped into the story when, due to some confusing fine print in the Frog Prince story, she also becomes a frog.

I mention that it's uneven, in spite of being positively brilliant, and I should explain myself. The first and third acts are as fantastic as anything I've ever seen in an animated film. We'd have to go back to Beauty and the Beast to find anything this good in a Disney movie, but the second act is just not up to par. It's fun and entertaining and has a few great songs, but you can see that all the writers' and animators' joy went into the beginning and the end, leaving a sort of confused middle section. It wouldn't be so noticeable if the beginning and the end weren't so extraordinarily great.

For one, Tiana just became Belle's equal for the title of "favorite Disney princess". Yeah, Snow White and Princess Aurora and Ariel are supposed classics (and one could make a good case for Ariel), but that's by virtue of being in classic films rather than being particularly well-defined characters. In fact, it's a common complaint that the message that these movies sends to little girls is "be pretty and shut up", which has always made Belle a favorite of mine. As a character, she's intelligent and sophisticated and, despite somehow not finding Gaston the coolest person on the fucking planet, very open-hearted. She's a good character first and a pretty doll second. Same with Tiana. As great a doll as I'm sure she'll make, she's a strong character first. She constantly harps on the importance of hard work, something I can't really recall seeing in the Pygmalion, wish fulfillment Disney canon. It's refreshing to see a Disney character with her life in her own hands, moving in the direction she wants even before all her dreams start to come true and her prince comes and finds her.

The musical portion of The Princess and the Frog is the most successful since Beauty and the Beast, anchored by a jazz-tastic score sung by people who can really sing, rather than big stars that will bring in the crowds but add nothing to their characters.

But the real success of this film can be summed up in two words: Dr. Facilier. Every time he's even near the screen the film's jazzy beat speeds up and grows darker, culminating in what may be the most jaw-dropping piece of animation I have ever seen with Facilier's showstopping number "Friends on the Other Side". Pitched with explosive, orchestral jazz against a frighteningly dark masterwork of color and movement, I can't exactly remember everything that happened in the subsequent scene because I was still reeling. Facilier himself is a bit of lanky charisma, a street magician and Voodoo practitioner of overflowing evil, captured so well by the animators and Keith David's distinctive voice.

At one point Facilier commits an act of such cold cruelty that I was beside myself with shock, as was the rest of the audience. Even Scar gave Mufasa the dignity of an epic, kingly death.

All the characters are exquisitely animated, with the other standout being Charlotte, the dolled-up spoof of classic Disney princesses. Born into money and ignorant of the difficult life Tiara leads, all she hopes for is to one day be wed to a prince. At one point, when things don't seem to be going her way, she decides "maybe I should wish harder" and starts begging the wishing star to bring her a prince. Her animation is as shapelessly cartoonish as I can imagine a realistic character being. She seems to explode with energy and exuberance in every moment of her existence, and she doesn't seem to have any fixed weight or even figure at all.

If the film has any concrete failings, it's in the comic angle, specifically the comic relief characters of Louis and Ray who are never as defined as the rest of the cast and seem to be there just to keep the little kids laughing. Although it's not all bad. Some of Louis' early scenes are quite funny, but his character especially never has a dramatic angle; he's comic relief through-and-through, making him feel like a flat stock character. And there's one scene involving a trio of frog hunters that struck me as totally out of place, despite being a fun throwback to Looney Tunes and all that--I don't think it really had a place in the movie. But since these two characters and that one scene are featured so prominently in the middling second act and do nothing to disrupt the absolute perfection of the first and third act, I'll forgive it all without a second thought.

I could talk for days about the animation. When was the last time animation of this quality was married to a story of equal quality? The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast had pretty limited budgets (I'm not arguing that those aren't superbly animated, I'm just saying that the limited budget didn't allow a lot of complex animation) and the more exquisitely animated films of the earlier days of Disney, like Sleeping Beauty and Alice in Wonderland, tend to be pretty rigid affairs. I'm tempted to go all the way back to Bambi for a film with animation that is in service of such an effective story, rather than for its own sake. But it could just be that I got out of the theater two hours ago and am still overjoyed by the experience.

There are so many things about this film that make me never want to watch another computer animated film again (and let me quickly apologize to Pixar for saying that--I'll always love you). I'm suddenly reminded of all the things that make hand-animated features a more joyous affair: the colors, the backgrounds, just the way the characters look. It's all so warm and welcome, and since this is the first time I've seen an animated film in theaters since Tarzan, the simple experience of seeing it on the big screen was exhilarating.

Only time will tell if it will become a classic, and only time will tell if this is the start of another golden age for Disney, but my God I hope so.

10/10

And considering all the mean things I had to say about the middle portion, that should illustrate how goddamn great the first and third acts are.