I Never Went in for Afterglow

Photo courtesy of PixarPlanet.com

Pixar’s WALL E was my favorite film of last year. I love it so much that I feel protective of it, and was disappointed that it wasn’t nominated for Best Picture. It seemed that no matter how good an animated film was, it was impossible to get the consideration it deserved.  Then came UP.  And then came the buzz all over again.  Roger Ebert predicted it would be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar and I was curious to see how good it could be.  Loving Pixar films as I do, I hoped it was worthy of the success that had just eluded WALL E.

Things start off well. We’re introduced via newsreel to famous explorer Charles Muntz and his canine companions just returning  from an expedition to the remote regions of Venezuela where they have brought back skeletal remains of a mythic bird. This delights the boy watching in the front row of the movie theater, who wears aviator goggles just like his hero. On his way home, he meets another fan of the explorer; a girl about his age. She’s forward. He’s shy. They decide they like each other, and hatch schemes to move to Paradise Falls, the mythical land where their hero has disappeared to. Over the years, they get married. They work at the zoo, she in the birdcage, and he selling balloons. They buy a house.  They want to have children. They can’t have children. Their dreams deferred, they still work at the zoo. They get older. She gets sick. She dies. And he is old, left in the house alone with their book of unfulfilled plans  

(A word about me: Pixar movies have a way of turning on the waterworks so to speak.  I spent the duration of WALL E behind a layer of mist that occasionally spilled over. It’s like they have the red phone directly to me, and can crack my heart open in a second. At this point in the movie, my chin was quivering.)

Rather than be chased out of his house by a greedy development company to a retirement home, he ties every leftover balloon from his job to his house in the hopes of flying  to Paradise Falls, and  finally bringing Ellie there.

Except, there’s a problem. An unexpected stowaway knocks on his door.  The boy scout who pestered the old man looking to earn his assisting the elderly badge was on his porch during lift-off. So, they’re stuck together; meddling hyperactive chubby kid and crotchety old man who thinks about dangling the kid from a rope onto the roof of a building before deciding, “That’s not gonna work”.

The film was beautiful in its imagery and poetic in its visual storytelling. A joke about the old man turning down his hearing aid to drown out the annoying kid flows into a suspenseful storm scene seamlessly. And if it didn’t exactly make you see the stars the way WALL E did, it was still–on its own considerable terms–a smashing success.

They reach their destination and Up takes a turn.  The film introduces talking dogs chasing a goofy roadrunner-type bird.  The dogs are the descendants of the explorer’s original benevolent canine companions. They, like he, have grown twisted and are obsessed with capturing the mythic bird. The bird finds the boy and the old man, and the movie becomes about the struggle to protect the bird from the evil hunter, Charles Muntz.

This turn doesn’t seem to do justice to the emotion of the first half of the film. It was an impossible shift for me to make . I didn’t respond to the attempts of humor or sympathy. After real poetry, we were treated to dogs flying little planes in formation like spitfires? Not that there couldn’t have been comedic moments, of course; it is a movie for kids, after all.  I never felt that these moments were integrated successfully with the bittersweet elements of the story. So the experience of seeing Up, was on the whole a strangely unsatisfying one for me. I felt as if the storytellers didn’t have enough faith in the story, and decided to cop out by pandering and putting everything heartfelt through the meatgrinder of “cute.”

Animated films don’t need to be good to make money. Just look at all the Madagascars, Over the Hedges, and whatever the Weinstein company has put  out. Studios assume (usually correctly) that parents will bring their kids to see anything that’s made for them.  So good for Pixar if Up gets its Best Picture nomination because Up is certainly in a different league than those films. But, Like everything the Oscars do, it’s too late. Up is a good movie, but its bright skies can’t touch the luminosity its forerunner.

Custody Battle

 

Image courtesy of scenicreflections.com

Taken tells the story of Bryan Mills (Neeson). Who is the loving, estranged father of a spoiled, teenage American girl,  Kim. Finding a father who is loving and not estranged or estranged and not particularly loving is nearly impossible in these types of movies.  In addition to being a dad, Brian is also an ex-CIA operative who plays poker and has barbeques with all of his ex-CIA buddies.  They joke about old operations, and they all pull for Neeson in his post-retirement quest to get re-acquainted with his daughter.  In one scene, they joke about the time when Neeson bailed out of a top secret mission, not wanting to miss his daughter’s birthday.

 His fatherly quest is thwarted at every turn by, of course, his bitch of an ex-wife, Lenore played by Famke Janssen (who must be hearing ‘it’s between you and Catherine Keener’ a lot from her agent lately), and her decadent, ultra-wealthy, new husband, Stu. You read that right: Stu.  Case in point, when Bryan shows up for his daughter’s birthday with a Karaoke machine, which he painstakingly researched before buying, he is shown up by Stu’s gift of a horse. And when the little darling wants to go to Paris with her friends, Neeson is brow beaten by his ex into relenting.

And it’s here that everything goes wrong. Kim is kidnapped, just as Neeson seemed to suspect she would be. He finds out that the scum who abducted his daughter are Albanians running an international prostitution ring. They kidnap foreign girls straight from the gate at Charles DeGaulle airport, get them hooked on drugs, and auction them off to wealthy bidders. So Neeson hops a plane, hunts them down through whorehouses, projects, construction sites (don’t ask me how, like a car accident  it all happens so fast) and inevitably, a high society gala during which kidnapped slave girls are sold, including one particular “certified pure American” (Ewww).  Ultimately, Neeson rescues his daughter just before she is violated by…what else? A fat Arab shiek.

This movie is a real button pusher. I believe that its popular success owes to the fact that it is so traditional in its sexual and racial politics. Neeson’s character is the father as king of the castle; chief protector of the family; the lion who will hunt and destroy those that threaten his cub. In Taken this father is here to protect his daughter’s virginity, and in some sense there is an almost romantic light cast on the attentions of the father to his daughter. When she phones him and says that she wants to have lunch with him the next day, his buddies all cheer like he’s gonna get laid.  Alas, when he shows up at lunch, he is disappointed to find his ex-wife is there as well and the only reason she wanted to have lunch with him is that they need his permission for her to leave the country.  I feel that this is a critique of contemporary divorce’s marginalization of the father and the marginalization of the father in modern society in general.

Bryan takes on a pathetic, emasculated quality in this world.  His worth is no longer recognized by his family and his society. This is the women’s world, the world of divorce courts, expensive presents, and (Stu is here to remind us) submissive males. They can treat him cruelly here, and he’ll suffer it. The movie accuses modern society, and the modern family, of devaluing the father. His job is to provide for whatever material trappings his family wants, and then kindly stay away from their lives.  But once these women step outside the comfort of this world, away from the plush estate and–good Lord– the pony, it becomes a dangerous world. This is his world. The one they never understood.

Thus the movie becomes two revenge fantasies. On the superficial level, it’s the story of Bryan’s restitution against the scum that kidnaps his daughter; through beatings, electrocution and torture. On a subtler level (though hardly subtle enough), it’s the story of Bryan’s revenge against his ex-wife through the kidnapping, exploitation, and general misery of their daughter. The movie is a big, violent, protracted I told you so, in which the perceived male values of violent subjugation, discipline, modesty, and authority are avenged against the perceived feminine pitfalls of luxuriousness, permissiveness, promiscuity, naïveté, and a certain flabby weakness in the face of urgency. 

As far as ethnic or racial attitudes are concerned, Europe is often depicted as a hostile foreign continent; overrun with gypsies and whatnot. In fact, about halfway through the film, I was struck by how similar the setup of Taken was to the much maligned Hostel films; Americans abroad get ensnared by dangerous, shifty -eyed Europeans. And, just like in that film, the true danger comes not from western Europeans, but from the mysterious east; Albanians. The movie even makes a point of saying these Albanian gangs are an immigration problem the French can’t control. They are like an infestation of coyotes: get rid of one and ten more take their place.

As evidenced by its hefty take at the box office, Taken was appetizing, titillating stuff for American audiences. It’s straight out of white slave sensationalism and Indian captivity stories of women being put into sexual danger by a heathen race and the John Waynes who rescue them. The re-enforcement of all of these racial and sexual norms combined with a PG-13 rating (the lack of gory violence, just wholesome titillation), goes a long way towards explaining the appeal of this movie.

Bent? Broken?

Can Woody Allen make a truly good Woody Allen movie again? Hear me out. I’m a big Woody Allen fan. I spent many years digesting his movies, and I’m  being precise when I say digesting. I didn’t think about the movies, I didn’t really analyze them or anything. They were like food to me.  I absorbed them through osmosis like tapes you listen to while you sleep to enhance your vocabulary. I did and still do, in fact, watch them in my sleep.

Photo Courtesy of the Institue of Contemporary Arts

I think my first Woody Allen movie was Play it Again, Sam, or Bananas. I was completely enamored; not just of the writing and the Woody Allen persona, or delivery, or the technique, but of the world that they created.  Woody Allen’s movies from the seventies and eighties were a whole experience and universe unto themselves. 

What brought these thoughts on? I was watching one of Allen’s critical successes, Manhattan, on TV last night.  My earliest memory of this movie was helping my mother fold laundry while she watched it, and wondering why she laughed at the line “It feels like the mosquitoes sucked all the blood out of my left leg.” It turns out that it’s not really a joke you get. Anyway, I always liked parts of Manhattan very much, the black and white photography, and the Gershwin, and the general chutzpah that you can’t help but respond to on some level. But its vaunted reputation was still a mystery to me.

Until last night.

 I wish I could tell you exactly what changed my opinion. I’m not sure, but a few things jumped out at me. The characters are very sharply written, and their words are theirs (and not just Allen’s). I enjoyed Diane Keaton’s performance much more. She cuts through the academic phoniness of her peers and the easy self- pity of her married lover with a jab of obscenity, while being herself an academic phony and self-excusing liar in love. It’s a performance of fantastic contradictions.  The movie is vital. Sexy. Edgy even. It may make us queasy now, when Woody’s character runs back to his newly eighteen year old girlfriend and essentially  tries to stop her from following her dream to be with him, but it comes from a real place.

And that’s what’s been missing from most Woody Allen movies these days; even his most respected recent features like Match Point and Vicky Cristina Barcelona. He may be working in more sophisticated classes, more fanciful locations, and deal explicitly with grand themes, but he’s essentially working in genres now. Match Point is the night-time telly murder story and Vicky; the high class Euro short term affair-athon. As much as I enjoyed those movies (and I did), and as much as I still respect and marvel at his work, I can’t help feeling he’s making movies about things he supposes, instead of things he knows. 

All of this is on the heels of a return to New York and an even more exciting partnership with Larry David (who is at the height of his powers) in his new movie Whatever Works. After watching Manhattan and walking my dog, I found myself thinking about Whatever Works and hoping it was as good as Match Point, or Vicky. Maybe it will be, but I realized his days of making Manhattans are over.