ParaNorman (Chris Butler & Sam Fell, 2012, USA)

A young boy who can see and speak with the dead must save his Salem-esque town by resolving a 300 year old curse, which ultimately means learning how to forgive bullies. To be honest, I found it tedious for the most part, and intermittently grating. The stop motion animation is creepy and weirdly ugly. It was like looking at ugly carpeting for an hour and a half. A promising enough cast is wasted on recycled storytelling and unappealing animation. Really, the animation reminds me of that hideous animation you see these days on children's television programs. The basic shell of the story is compelling, but it's buried in so many cliches and under so many shrill characters spouting so much bad dialogue that even the things I liked about it started to wear thin. I have friends who liked this, so I guess other people like this sort of blander than Tim Burton childhood kitsch. I didn't see anything particularly interesting or engaging though.
D

Brave (Mark Andrews/Brenda Chapman/Steve Purcell, 2012, US)

I confess that I've never been particularly enchanted by Pixar films, and off the top of my head, I can't think of the last animated Disney film I cared much about. I guess for me, they're about as empty as an old Care Bears movie, but with less charm. Anyway, this film got attention for featuring Disney's first female hero. If Disney was trying to step into the modern age with this film, I can't say they met their mark. Sure, this princess is tough and can shoot an arrow straighter than any boy. But she's still a princess. And the main struggle is whether or not she'll be forced to marry some idiot she doesn't know. I guess it's interesting that the main conflict here is with her mother since research seems to indicate that it is usually other women who enforce social norms among women.

In this film, the fiery princess is something of a tomboy, much to the annoyance of her mother. She comes of age, apparently, although she seems pretty young here. All the same, it's time for her to choose the first born son from one of the three rival clans, and thus ensure further peace among the clans. She decides she's not going to cooperate and the mother tries to force her and the witch in the forest makes a spell which turns goes awry. Blah blah blah. It was marginally engaging, but eminently forgettable. I also thought the CGI looked like a video game. I can imagine children liking it though.
C

Our Children / À perdre la raison (Joachim LaFosse, 2012, Belgium)

Belgium's submission to the Academy Awards foreign film competition, this film is apparently based on a true story. Perhaps if I had known that going in, it would informed my viewing in such a way that I didn't find the film such a downer. It kind of uses the Lars Von Trier template where you start out with this great woman, and this case a very likable new husband, and drag her through endless unpleasantness until something dramatic happens. The film starts with the woman ( Émilie Dequenne) in an emergency room telling the nurses that her children needed to be buried in Morocco. We then see some small coffins being transported and then we start at the beginning of their friendship. She's a school teacher dating this resident at a hospital or something, played by the guy from A Prophet (Tahar Rahim). The old guy plays his friend/mentor is the old guy from A Prophet (Niels Arestrup). For financial reasons the couple move in with the older friend, who turns out to be married to the guy's sister, and the wife starts banging out kids while the audience is left wondering what kind of strange relationship is going on with the two men. The husband gradually becomes less and less sympathetic, but the movie still seems to expect us to sympathize with him and his desperate family. I just read a review that called the film emotionally draining and that's exactly how I would describe it. Maybe it's because I'm not particularly interested in all this breeding stuff, but I didn't find anything particularly appealing about the film as a whole, though I like most of the actors well enough.
C

A Diary of Two or More Snow Whites

In the past few days I finally got around to watching the two Snow White films that came out earlier this year. They're both mildly entertaining and more or less inoffensive, but personally I favored the darker Snow White and the Huntsman to the silly Mirror Mirror. What I found most intriguing about the films is how much they had in common.

Both feature a cast of adult actors hamming it up and actresses in the Snow White role who seem peculiarly miscast. Generally, I don't like to pick on an actress's looks, but in this particular role where so much is made of the character's beauty, it was weird to see the Show White in Mirror Mirror ruined by poor makeup and in SWatH, well, I don't find that Kristen Stewart has the kind of traditional beauty that one would associate with Snow White. As much as I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of her performance, I was distracted by her thin lips and angular features. I also felt that she came across as too contemporary to work in that role, although I'm sure the intent was for her to be more relatable to the modern viewers. I think this is the first time I've ever seen her onscreen and to me she came across as though she were Keira Knightley's little sister who everyone tries to pretend for a while is as talented and as pretty as the older sister. Lily Collins was also likable in her performance as Snow White, but the I also found her incredibly forgettable.

In fact, I guess I found Mirror Mirror forgettable as a whole. Julia Roberts is sometimes fun to watch. Nathan Lane does what Nathan Lane does, which some people seem to like. I think the main thing I'll actually remember is the way the Stepmother goes through the mirror into another world. In general, I'd probably sum it up by saying it's an intermittently bland adaptation spruced up by the presence of Julia Roberts and some Burtonesque touches.  I also thought Armie Hammer was good as the prince even though his name is Armie Hammer and he's an Arm & Hammer heir who made his start in a Billy Graham biopic (oh brother).

I found the other film more imaginative, overall, although I preferred Mirror Mirror's handling of the mirror. I found the prince to be bland, but I liked the Huntsman even though he's that goofball from Thor. In general I like that they mixed things up and seemed to have her fall in love with the commoner even though there's no clear indication of what happens with them. That change aside, if I hadn't read Snow White (aka, Schneewittchen) in a German class many years ago I'd have thought that maybe they went back to the original material or something, but in fact the original is relatively spare and lacks many of the details we come to associate from the story. Therefore it's really strange to me that the films so share many common plot elements that weren't in the original story. (one thing I didn't care for in Snow White and the Huntsman was the bit about the fairy land or whatever. It could have been interesting, but I don't think it was executed very well.)

In the original story the father is never really discussed again after he marries the Stepmother. He doesn't fall victim to any enchantments or murder plots, he's just a nonentity who supposedly loves his daughter but clearly doesn't seem too interested in her disappearance. Even at the end when Snow White marries the prince they go to the prince's kingdom and though the evil queen shows up at the end for her just desserts, the king does not. There is no discussion of everything dying after the queen takes over or of the dwarves becoming thieves. There's no mention of her exploiting or otherwise affecting her subjects. The enchanted forest we remember from the Disney film is not in the book. Hell, there's not even a kiss that breaks the spell (the coffin gets knocked over and the apple chunk gets dislodged from her mouth!), though of course that's clearly part of the cultural understanding of the story by now. It's also interesting that both stories invoke this idea that the evil queen's magic sucks the youth out of her and brings about downfall.

I don't know, I guess my point is that I can't say how interesting I'd have found the films on their own, but it was fun to wonder about the weird similarities and so forth...

How to Train Your Dragon (Chris Sanders & Dean DuBlois, 2010)

Another overpraised mainstream movie I didn't get, I suppose. I thought it was a big boring mess. The animation feels as wooden and lifeless as the inconsequential plot. It occurs to me that the one curious thing about the movie is there weren't any adult female characters. I didn't believe the relationship between the kid and the dragon so much. And I guess I didn't really care about any of it. C-

Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich , 2010)

Toy Story 3 is one of those movies about which I feel so at odds with the prevailing opinion about (even among my friends) that I start to psychoanalyze myself as a result. I thought this movie was at least as dull as the others. I found a couple of the toys cute and I liked the girl and thought the movie would have been more interesting if she had been closer to the center of it. I thought the ending was unforgivable schmaltz and I thought the plotting seemed almost color-by-numbers. I guess one thing that's always bothered me about this franchise is its aggressive lowbrow Americana. It's nostalgia and kitsch and the exultation of empty consumerism and smug bourgeois mediocrity. Whenever people talk about these movies I always think to myself, "Is this really how you want to program your children?" Fortunately, I've grown polite in my old age and I've learned to use my alienation as a springboard to the comforts of endless introspection.
As my best friend shockingly took to the defense of this film, I turned toward introspection. It occurred to me that I didn't care for any of these toys as a child. I got to thinking about how I didn't have many toys as a child, how we grew up in the middle of nowhere and how playtime meant going out and making believe in fields and forests or communing with horses, barn cats, and other animal life. This led me to my troubled childhood and something I've realized at least since high school, which is that I have always felt at odds with the physical realm. This is naturally a problem but although a film like Toy Story 3 calls a number of related issues to mind, I'm pretty sure I don't want any remedy nor any solution to which the appreciation of empty crap like this is part. D+

PS: Give me a hollow Care Bears redux over this quatsch any day. :-*

Alice in Wonderland (Tim Burton, 2010)

I got a chance to see the new Tim Burton update of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland at the IMAX at Navy Pier in Chicago tonight. I have to say I tend to agree with the reviews I've read that characterized it as a letdown because it certainly was for me. I mean, apart from the Cheshire Cat, which was enchanting, and the Dormouse, which was cute. The real world story was dull and the "Underland" story was uninspired. It almost seems like the writer and the director were bored, as though they had been there to pick up a check, though I doubt that's the case. Perhaps they were too distracted by the technology and the mise-en-scène. The Mad Hatter is definitely sympathetic here but it's just kind of blandly weird. It sort of reminded me of Harry Potter goofiness but less entertaining. I love Helene Bonham Carter but not in this movie. I didn't know she could be boring but in this movie I just didn't care. I also thought it was a very strange choice to cast dog-faced Anne Hathaway as the beautiful White Queen. Um, excuse me? She makes a good junkie but she was so wrong for this part it's unreal. And what is up with this movie tying beauty to goodness? I sort of thought Tim Burton might be above that sort of thing. It was all right, I suppose. I mean, the visuals keep you watching. It's just that the story is so bland. I feel like the critics of Avatar should take their knee-jerk contrariness and see this movie. I think the comparison highlights a lot of what Avatar did right. That Cheshire Cat deserved a better movie! C/C-

Edit- I don't know how I could have forgotten to mention that horrible Avril Lavigne song at the end credits. The movie was not strong enough to withstand the weight of that awful song being the last thing you remember...

Where the Wild Things Are (Spike Jonze, 2009)

It was okay. Kind of blah. Too violent for children, it seems geared toward adults with unresolved childhood issues of the playground/broken home varieties. I liked a lot about the visual style but didn't find the movie particularly engaging or insightful. I liked the Karen O music, too, but thought that the pattern of talky adventure interrupted by interludes of frolicking to quirky Karen O music was laid on too thick. I'd find myself thinking: Here we go again.

That's what I posted on Facebook when I got home from seeing the movie this morning. It's funny, ever since I saw that stupid Funny People movie I keep seeing that trope that was mocked in that movie, where the character in the fake Adam Sandler movie has to be a baby to learn how to be a man. I thought it was a nice change to have the boy need to be the mother to be a good boy or something. Much of the stuff seemed kind of shallow to me but I guess that's true to life. I mean, I look at the way people interact and maybe the movie is pretty right about that. I didn't identify with it though. C-