ParaNorman

Or, 28 Decades Later.

ParaNorman is Coraline's little brother: born at Laika Studios in Hillsboro, Oregon, he inhabits a stop-motion world that will stop your heart. 

Most of the 3-D animation we see today is characterized by straight lines and elegant curves, jewel-box colors and a feeling that the world is made out of plastic. ParaNorman is different. It feels like you fell asleep and all the inanimate objects in your house came to life. In most computer-generated movies, the test of their artistic success is whether each strand of hair flows luxuriously with every toss of the character's head. Norman's hair sticks straight up and never moves, but the toilet-paper ghost that appears to him in the boys' room at school is a work of genius in a class by itself.

I didn't see this film in 3D, and I regret that now, because Coraline is the only film I've seen in 3D that didn't make me feel like I'd wasted the five-dollar surcharge. ParaNorman feels more like Jan Svankmajer than John Lasseter, and as much as I love Pixar that's a good thing. It also means that, just like Coraline, there are parts that are genuinely scary and not Disney-scary. My six-year-old loved it in the end but spent a good part of the movie in my lap.

Not that I'm complaining.

Norman is a sensitive kid who lives in a twenty-first century Salem, a kitchy witchy tourist trap with a distinctly New England lower-middle-class vibe, only without the pahk your cah accents. He has an overbearing father, a dimwit mother, and an obnoxious teenage sister who don't understand him. Since he sees ghosts all the time, that's not so surprising. It's also not surprising that he's bullied at school.

As he wipes the word FREAK off his locker, we see another kid wiping off the word FATTY in the same handwriting, and we know they're destined to be friends. What's surprising about Norman's new friend Neil is that his disposition is so sunny that no amount of bullying can cloud it over. He doesn't rail against it or the kids who perpetrate it.

ParaNorman has a more nuanced view of bullying than your average kids' movie. In the world of the television series Glee, it's only a matter of time before the geeks, gays and goths are embraced by the jocks and the jerks, because once they realize they're hurting your feelings, how could they possibly continue torturing you?

The first half of ParaNorman seems to embrace a different, almost Gandhian philosophy: you can't keep them from hating you, but you can insulate yourself from their hate with the love of your friends and family. As Norman's dead grandmother says: "it's okay to be scared, as long as you don't let it change who you are."

This world is so new and interesting, and so lovingly constructed, that it's a pleasure to be immersed in Norman's loneliness and oddity. From the trailers you'd think this movie was funny, but actually humor's not its strong suit--all the good gags are in the trailer. It's more successful when it's being sentimental. A scene where Norman plays medium to help Neil connect with his dead dog is touching, and you can see Neil's positive energy affecting Norman–literally: for a moment the brilliance of a blue sky invades the neutral gloom of the film.

Once the actual plot begins to intrude the film gets somewhat less interesting. We're told everyone in the film, including his parents, are scared of Norman because he's different. That doesn't ring true, because Norman's not scary in the slightest. But it's necessary in order to create a very artificial parallel between him and the seventeenth-century girl who was sentenced to death by a group of Puritans who were scared because she was different.

So Norman's crazy uncle appears to him and demands that he deal with an ancient curse, and Norman tries, eventually involving his curvy teenage sister and Neil's hunky triangular teenage brother, and if you think you know how that plays out I guarantee you're wrong. There's a sassy African-American female cop who teeters just on the edge of stereotype, and maybe falls over the edge, I'm not sure; a drama teacher who's a boring caricature; a dumb bully who adds nothing to the film; and an amusing group of Puritan zombies.

It's too much, and Norman and Neil get crowded out. It all reaches a goofy climax in a scene in the woods between Norman and the witch girl that just has no energy in it despite the desperately pulsing yellow streaks. The bigger the movie tries to be, the smaller it becomes; the more action it tries to inject, the more flaccid it gets. 

The irony of ParaNorman is that unlike its hero, it's trying to be something it's not. Still, half a brilliant movie is worth the full price of admission.

The Artist

Or, The Silence of the Frogs.

I love what André Bazin called the "exquisite embarrassment" of silent films. Freed from the fetters of speech, silent film was a more universal medium, a more transfixing one. When the images tell the entire story, you can't close your eyes or look away.

The Artist is a loving hommage to the golden age of Hollywood silent film. And heaven knows Hollywood loves nothing more than a loving hommage to itself, except maybe an hommage made by the people who invented the word hommage. 

So it's no surprise that Hollywood was wracked with ecstasy over The Artist. And it's a superbly crafted film, a cinematic wedding cake; you wouldn't want to eat it every day, but it's perfect for a special occasion. Silent film star George Valentin, on his way down, meets rising talkie star Peppy Miller on her way up–in fact, in one scene, he does so literally. The Artist is filled with  clever moments like that. An exquisite cut on the drumming of fingers; a riff on the famous montage of Charles Foster Kane and his first wife at breakfast; a wink at Garbo's most famous line.

If silence awakens creativity, it has aroused a sleeping giant in director Michel Hazanavicius. He has chosen the perfect collaborators: actors Jean Dujardin, who gives Valentin a megawatt silent-movie star smile; and Bérénice Béjo, whose Peppy Miller embodies the word ingénue. Perhaps more important is his third star, Uggie, who plays Valentin's valorous pooch. Dujardin and Béjo adapt well to silence; but only Uggie speaks it natively, and at times he almost trots away with the film.

Actually, there isn't a false note in the international cast, which finds American superstars playing the supporting roles–John Goodman as the ruthless studio head; Penelope Ann Miller as the faithless wife; and James Cromwell as, of all things, the faithful chauffeur. Where else but in a silent film could a director get away with that?

Like Charlie Chaplin, Valentin's downfall is his inability to talk. Which begs the question: why make this movie, anyway? Gus Van Sant's remake of Psycho wasn't just bad because it was poorly executed and occasionally just plain silly; it was bad because it was attempting to xerox genius. 

As a lover of silent film, I wanted The Artist to point the way to a new era of silent film. Unfortunately, it points resolutely backwards instead of forwards. It's almost as if it needed to be made because people haven't seen the genius of The General or Sunrise or Man With a Movie Camera. And that's a worthy goal, I suppose, but it wasn't enough for me. There is one exception–a Trojan Horse of sound inside the silent city walls, a comic nightmare–that at once violates the film's code and redeems it. 

I look forward to Hazanavicius' next film with quiet anticipation.

The Queen of Versailles

Or, "Cinderella, Foreclosed."

A successful documentary often requires sheer dumb luck: sure, choosing the right subject is important, and finding the story in the footage is critical. But sometimes a filmmaker starts out to make one film, and ends up making something quite different. The Queen of Versailles is one of those films.

David Siegel, the King of Timeshares, was a very rich man. When he and his wife Jackie set out to build the largest single-family house in the United States, modeled on the French palace of Versailles, filmmaker Lauren Greenfield set out to document the construction.

The collapse of the real estate market in 2008 took David's empire with it, and what begins as a story of jaw-dropping opulence gradually becomes a not-quite riches-to-rags story. The house, during the course of the movie, remains an empty shell. The Siegels, just like so many people in America, found themselves at the mercy of the banks. That's both its singular power and its greatest flaw: the Siegels do not, of course, wind up on welfare. But the story is still tremendously revealing. Greenfield has a knack for pulling out moments that will stay with you long after the film is over; the dull parts will be easy to forget.

You might wonder why the film is called The Queen of Versailles. Isn't it about a couple, after all? It is, and it isn't. Jackie Siegel is a fascinating character: a beautiful girl who grew up in a working-class neighborhood and eventually married one of the richest men in America; a woman who got an engineering degree and went to work for IBM yet still isn't quite the brightest pixel on the plasma display; a model who went on to have seven children; a generous woman who took in her niece and sent a check to a high school friend who couldn't pay her mortgage. It doesn't take an MFA to recognize a character like this when you see her.

Meanwhile, whenever David shows up, the movie seems to transform momentarily into Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. David is only interesting as long as he's rich. Towards the beginning of the film he takes credit for putting George W. Bush in the White House (and he's a Florida billionaire, so you have to at least consider the possibility that this is more than mere boastfulness). He doesn't quite sweep the audience off its feet, but you can at least understand the appeal, as Greenfield investigates the epic grandeur of the timeshare business. As the family fortune spirals lazily down the drain, though, David quickly becomes a grumpy grandpa, huddled shirtless in the TV room surrounded by boxes of papers.

If you think Jackie's a golddigger–and come on, of course you did–this is where she will surprise you. Partially. She's neither as shallow as your suspect nor as plucky as you hope. On the one hand, she clearly isn't going to leave David, and in fact she refuses to despair or even to raise her voice.

On the other hand, she clearly wasn't cut out for the drudgery of taking care of a Brady Bunch-plus of rugrats in house which (we learn early on in the movie) has seventeen bathrooms to clean, to say nothing of a few dogs. As Jackie herself puts it, in one of the previously-mentioned moments that will stay with you, she'd never have had seven children if she'd known she had to take care of them herself.

The movie makes a token effort to contrast the lifestyles of the not-quite-so-rich with the lifestyles of the servants-of-the-not-quite-so-rich, notably the filipino nannies and the limo driver with a secret. These make for some of the movie's most important moments, and the only really touching ones. It simultaneously leaves you wanting more and undercuts the entire narrative. 

The nanny hasn't seen her son since he was seven (he's now twenty-six). That makes it really hard to feel anything at all for the Siegels. Greenfield was extremely lucky to find both a memorable character in Jackie Siegel and a once-in-a-lifetime story in the disintegration of the Siegel empire; but she doesn't really manage to universalize that story. At one point Jackie says that if the family had to move into a three-bedroom home it would be fine; but that only makes you feel for the people who might have lost a three-bedroom home so that the Siegels could move in.

Brave

As the father of a very independent little girl who wears pants, I've been excited about Brave for about a year. Her world is filled with Hermione Grangers–strong, independent, second-fiddle female characters.

And Brave truly is all about the female characters. It's about the tension between mothers and daughters, in this case Queen Elinor (Emma Thompson) and Princess Merida (Kelly Macdonald). And the conflict isn't about them having different ideas of who Merida should marry (although it's kind of about whether she should marry at all). Theoretically I applaud the choice. It's almost like the movie was designed to pass the Bechdel test. My only objection is: does she have to be a princess? Is that some kind of unbreakable Disney rule? Sigh.

Because the princess thing is feeling a little tired. If you've seen the trailer for Brave, you can pretty much arrive forty-five minutes late and miss nothing. Elinor just wants Merida to be all princessy and sew and sing and get married, and Merida just wants to ride through the forest and shoot arrows. It feels like a movie that would have been very progressive in 1972. What mother in 2012 wouldn't just go ahead and enter a daughter like that in all the archery contests? She's a better archer than Hawkeye from The Avengers. If nothing else, she might grow up to get a part in The Hunger Games!

And surely a really caring mother would never make her daughter marry anybody as buffoonish as the three prospective suitors who come seeking her hand? Here Elinor hints that Merida's being selfish and endangering the peace by refusing to marry, but suggesting that she's pimping her daughter out for the good of the realm hardly makes her seem like a better mother.

So a conflict that should be interesting becomes a conflict between a three-dimensional teenage girl (nudge nudge, wink wink) and her two-dimensional mother. There is, however, one truly breathtaking shot in which Pixar's superb animators show us exactly how alike these two stubborn women are. A lot has been made of Merida's red hair, but it is a real artistic achievement. I don't know if anything else about the animation really stands out, which is either a mild criticism or a backhanded compliment acknowledging that Pixar movies are all so visually stunning that we've become totally jaded.

Once the movie moves beyond the trailer, Merida does something she shouldn't out of teenage anger at her mother, and spends the rest of the movie trying to undo it. Part of the trick of making a children's movie is sweeping the audience away so thoroughly that they forget that the happy ending is guaranteed.


Brave never quite does that. We've waited so long for the movie to actually get going, and then it sort of limps along. Maybe the problem is that there's not really a villain. Merida is a wonderful character, brimming with energy, and she's breaking down an open door. She's so good with a bow, and yet she never actually shoots anything except a target. Where's the Angus McGhastly standing in the way of her dreams?

More critically, it feels like this awful event is just an excuse to teach Elinor the error of her ways. If Elinor had been less of a cardboard character, maybe this wouldn't have been necessary. Is it possible that Disney has finally bumped up against the limits of the princess genre? First we had princesses who waited for their prince to come; then we got princesses who wanted to choose their prince; then we moved on to princesses who got to fight for their prince. Now, finally, we have a princess who really just doesn't want a prince at all.

Merida repeatedly misses a good opportunity to take responsibility for what she's done, which, considering that she's a teenager, seems realistic–but, of course, movies aren't about reality. Screenwriting convention requires that Merida change, and I didn't really see that.

Instead, the rest of the world changes to accommodate her, which is a nice thought. The world is always changing to accommodate men, after all. But there's usually a price to be paid for that, even for the guys, and it's almost as if the writers were afraid to exact that price from a girl.

On the flip side, Chris Heller in the Atlantic says that it can't really be a coincidence that Merida stands up for young people being able to choose who to marry in an era when gay marriage is front and center in the national political arena, and he may have a good point.  Pixar films have always been good at appealing to adult sensibilities where humor is concerned, but maybe this one just wants to make the adults go "hmmmm...." while the kids clap with delight.

Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present

The performance artist Marina Abramovic declares in a manifesto, "an artist should not fall in love with another artist." I followed her advice, which often makes it difficult to convince my wife to watch movies about people like Marina Abramovic. I'll let my wife tell it: "if you'd told me you wanted to watch a movie about a woman who sat in the atrium at the Museum of Modern Art and stared at people for three months, I'd have said 'What? No way.'"

Performance art is a little like documentary film in that both are often obscure, hard to appreciate, and let's be honest, a little boring. But when well done, both are mesmerizing; and both Marina Abramovic's art and Matthew Akers' documentary are. 

Akers chooses to document an installation where Abramovic sat on a chair all day, six days a week, for three months, and museumgoers could sit on a chair opposite her and look at her, for as long as they wanted. This is a big challenge for a documentary, because film is about movement and Abramovic doesn't move. 

Thankfully, Akers is a cinematographer and he has made a beautiful film. Usually documentaries can't compete with narrative films visually–they're shot on crummy formats, they're underlit, poorly framed, and the camera is moving around like it's 1994 and NYPD Blue is really avant-garde. Digital video has made documentaries so much cheaper and easier, but often it doesn't do the genre any favors. Sometimes you feel like you're watching The Eleven O'Clock News: The Feature Film.


The Artist is Present does none of that. It's easy on the eyes, but don't get the idea that I'm so grateful I'd watch a documentary about anything if they used a tripod. It's a beautiful story, during the course of which you come to understand just what performance art really is. Maybe the most telling moment in the entire film is when James Franco comes and sits in front of her; Akers doesn't identify him, but he does show Franco talking with audience members afterwards (one of whom asks innocently: "are you an actor?") One woman says that what Abramovic is doing is very much like acting; Franco denies it, and having come to this place in the film, you realize he's totally right. The actor is playing a role, and the artist is playing herself. Actors may be motivated by realism but not reality; they may talk about exposing themselves, but they can't do it as truly as Abramovic does.


Or as bravely, or as selflessly. You may not leave the film understanding her art any more than you understand credit default swaps, but you will certainly appreciate the grit and fortitude that it requires. There is a religious aspect to Abramovic's performance, and there are many shots of people moved to tears by it, or inspired by it to stare intensely at each other in the hope of finding the same fleeting feeling. 


That's not to say that The Artist is Present doesn't have its tangents and its dull moments. Personally, I found the story of her romance with fellow performance artist Ulay to be a little thin, although it does eventually provide a huge payoff, which I wouldn't want to spoil. The film finds many such small moments of beauty, and it is refreshing to see a movie that can move an audience by crooking a finger rather than unleashing an earthquake. 

The Avengers

If all genres eventually end in satire, then The Avengers is the logical evolution of the superhero genre, and Joss Whedon is the perfect person to helm a superhero movie. I wasn't sure if Whedon could make the transition from Dollhouse, which for all its brilliance often felt like it was filmed in someone's basement in the Valley, to a $200 million blockbuster. 

The answer is that he definitely can. Points for the additional degree of difficulty afforded by having to write around incredibly boring characters like Captain America (Chris Evans), whose main weapons are a shield with a bullseye painted on it and a deadly earnestness; Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), who wears phylacteries and shoots arrows at things that don't seem to be bothered by guns; and Thor (Chris Hemsworth), who talks like Yoda and wields a weapon that looks like something you'd play whack-a-mole with. 

The Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) shows up tied to a chair in her underwear, and in a charming set piece, um, answers the phone–to say any more would spoil it–and really sets the tone for the movie. For the rest of the show, Johansson does her best to act out from under a harrowing dye job and a character who doesn't actually have any super powers at all, although she is super-sexy. Her specialty is allowing men to think she's weaker than she is and using their assumptions to her advantage.

It only takes one thing to make up for all of this: Tony Stark, aka Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) We meet Tony in the penthouse of the Stark building, bantering with Gwyneth Paltrow's Pepper Potts, and the two of them ignite the movie, like a modern Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. 

In fact, it's a tribute to Whedon's writing skill, and Downey's acting, that the movie doesn't collapse like the Golden Gate Bridge in a disaster movie when Paltrow and her cutoff shorts get into the elevator and leave the building. For that, we have Dr. Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) to thank, since he gives Stark somebody to talk scientific twaddle with, and somebody to needle. 

Here's the plot: there's a glowing blue energy cube, and whoever controls it controls the world, and...oh, really, nobody gives a rat's ass. It's all just an excuse for the heroes to quarrel with each other, and then eventually team up against supervillain Loki (Tom Hiddleston, having almost as much fun as Downey). There might be a hidden message here about whether the superheroes are causing more damage than they cure, or whether the good guys are actually using the superheroes to help them build evil weapons, but if there is, the audience is pretty much guaranteed not to get it, because they'll be too busy laughing at Stark's nicknames for his fellow Avengers (Hawkeye the archer is "Legolas"; long-haired Thor is "Point Break"...you get the picture).

When the action scenes start, though, Downey has trouble projecting his mojo through the red and yellow suit, and Whedon's writing feels trapped in there with him. The heroes yell stupidities at each other, get thrown into a bus from a mile away, and arise breathing hard and lightly covered with dust. What finally saves these sequences is the animated Hulk; the incarnation of the character looks a little like Claymation, but the movement is so filled with life that it doesn't really matter. The Hulk is, in a word, hysterical.

Is it the best superhero movie ever? I don't know. It's certainly the best one that doesn't take itself seriously. And since comic books themselves often don't take themselves seriously–Spiderman is all about corny puns, isn't he?–that's probably okay. There's a little hint of backstory between Black Widow and Hawkeye that makes a perfunctory effort at drama, but overall it doesn't really aspire to more. Which is a shame, because usually Whedon does aspire to that. Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dollhouse, especially, had juicy layers of serious right underneath the crispy strudel of one-liners. Maybe now that he's proven his box office abilities, in his next movie Whedon will be able to give us, along with his trademark wit, the depth of, say, Chris Nolan's The Dark Knight.

Chronicle

Or "Heathers, if it starred teenage boys with super powers."


This movie is saddled with an unfortunate title–unfortunate because I had seen trailers for it and knew I wanted to see it, but kept forgetting the name.


It's also weighed down by the eye-rolling contrivance that one of the characters is filming all of the events in the movie. Thanks for nothing, Blair Witch Project. But if you make it past the first twenty minutes or so, Chronicle swiftly becomes a breathtaking film–visually and aurally stunning and emotionally wrenching.


Andrew Detmer (Dane DeHaan) is a shy high-school loser with a videocamera, an abusive father, a dying mother, and an alpha male cousin, Matt (Alex Russell) who feels compelled to hang out with him but clearly doesn't relish the job. 


At a party, Andy, Matt and student-council president Steve (Michael B. Jordan) find an alien-artifact Maguffin. It quickly becomes clear that the encounter has given them super powers, and we watch the trio's sophomoric glee as they use their telekinetic powers to pull adolescent pranks, and their genuine joy as they use their newly found ability to fly to play football in the clouds and hang out having incredibly awkward conversations on top of the Space Needle. While I wasn't fond of the found-footage conceit, I did find myself amazed at how much more interesting the special effects seemed when melded with footage that wasn't quite so slick. In that respect it reminded me a little of Neill Blomkamp's District 9 (and ironically, Chronicle was also shot in South Africa).


As I watched this unfold, I was struck by how much more feasible this superhero-origin story seems. If a sixteen-year-old boy was able to move things with his mind and fly, would his first impulse really be to put on a colorful costume and nab crooks?


From the beginning it's clear that of the three, Andy is the best at mastering his new abilities. One of the first things he does is learn to levitate his camera, which measurably improves the movie from a visual standpoint. At first he just basks in the respect he gets from Matt and Steve, and we cheer him on as he finds the strength to confront his dirtbag father. Gradually, Andy becomes the alpha male. Watching the teenage dominance pyramid invert is a barrel of monkeys.


It's only at this point that the real genius of Chronicle becomes apparent. In most superhero movies, an external threat would materialize and the new superheroes would save the earth. In Chronicle, the real threat turns out to be within. We realize that the source of Andy's power is actually the explosive rage that he has spent years repressing, and now that he's more powerful than anybody he knows, there's no reason for him to keep repressing it. As his mother gasps and wheezes frighteningly in the next room (some of the best sound design I've ever heard), Andy dies inside too.


All it takes is one brief Carrie moment, one public embarrassment he'll never live down, to snap him. As the film escalates, the visual effects up their game, as well--Chronicle is a $12 million movie that feels like it cost ten times that much.


Maybe the most interesting conclusion of Chronicle, in the end, is that all boys turn into their fathers.