Movies: Two To See

by Ellen Sterling

Friday, December 4, 2009

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Now Playing: Fantastic Mr Fox
Poster courtesy of American Empirical Pictures

When I was a kid I hated cartoons. When people or, usually, Bugs Bunny, would get run over by a steamroller and lay there flat as a pancake — I hated that! But, somewhere along the way, cartoons became “Animation Art” and, after seeing Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away I began to look at animation in a whole new light. Now, these films are a regular part of my movie-going or Netflix queue. When I see something like Fantastic Mr. Fox I am grateful for that.

This is Wes Anderson’s (Rushmore, The Royal Tennenbaums, The Darjeeling Limited) first try at animation and all those qualities of archness, irony and way-understated humor I found kind of irritating in his other films, I enjoyed here. I also enjoyed the trip back into another time — a time when animation was hand-drawn and “digital” referred only to clocks, watches and fingers.

Roald Dahl’s story is voiced here by George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Michael Gambon, Willem Dafoe and Jarvis Cocker, among others. The film was written by Anderson and Noah Baumbach. (Baumbach wrote the wonderful The Squid and the Whale.) The tone of the film is resolutely old-fashioned. Instead of using expletives, for example, the word “cuss” is substituted, as in “What the cuss is he doing?”

This is the tale of Mr. Fox, a charming guy with a larcenous soul. After a near miss, he promises the missus that he’ll give up stealing chickens and settle down. He becomes a newspaper columnist. Their son Ash  doesn’t live up to dad’s expectations of having a child who is athletic and multi-talented. But nephew Kristofferson does. As the story unfolds in somewhat predictable fashion, the husband-wife strife, parent-child relationship and the blithe way in which Mr. Fox places everyone in his community in danger, make it an interesting adult film with lots of real-life moral ambiguities. Very interesting..

The voices that actuate the main characters are so easily recognizable that you seem to be watching any old movie with a wonderful cast. This is a quiet movie — no raised voices, loud music and even the few action scenes are comparatively subdued. The suspension of disbelief is, if you allow yourself to get into it, complete.

Fantastic Mr. Fox may be a bit slow for small children (and there’s one very violent death), but if adults allow themselves to enjoy it, this is a fun departure from the usual for them. I recommend it.

2012

2012: The movie
Poster courtesy of Columbia Pictures

Since Entertainment Weekly assured me that scholars say the Mayans never predicted the end of the world in 2012, I went to see this merely expecting to enjoy bang-up special effects, lots of noise and OK performances from people who I know usually do a lot better with different material.  And that’s what I got.

2012is a formula disaster film with formula characters — the hapless unwitting hero who has his heroism thrust upon him by circumstance (John Cusack), the noble scientist (Chiwetel Ejiofor ),  POTUS (Danny Glover) and his evil, smarmy chief of staff (Oliver Platt). The lone surprise is Woody Harrelson almost unrecognizable having a great scenery-chewing time as a mountain man who sees all this coming.

This is, of course, a film by the master of the disaster-brings-about-the-end-of-the-world genre, Roland Emmerich, who began his run as master with the glorious Independence Day. In 2012, Los Angeles falls into the sea, Yellowstone turns into a volcano, India is destroyed by a tsunami, crowds in St. Peter’s Square are buried under rubble from collapsing churches and, of course, Las Vegas is also obliterated. The effects are….effective. In fact, they’re pretty amazing.

At more than two-and-a-half hours, it’s a long journey into oblivion for the people watching on the screen, but — I almost hate to say this — it’s heaps of fun.  And, you know, with all this talk of climate change, which is the cause of the action in 2012, I think I believe this kind of stuff can happen. Just maybe not as soon as 2012.

–Ellen Sterling

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