The Illegal Critic

Ironically I hadn't been to the movies that often since moving here, so I decided to go for the Fourth of July.  Sometimes I go to more than one movie on one ticket, and I pay for the one I want my money to go to--I vote for the film.

 

I went to the Grove at Farmer's Market.  They charge $9.75 for a matinee, so it'd be criminal not to sneak into another movie.  I remember when I went to the matinee with my friends after a game stick ball, saw an A-picture, a B-picture, a cartoon, a newsreel, and bought a gallon tub of popcorn all for a nickel.  Ah the 30s!

 

The one I did pay for was "Ratatouille," then I saw "Knocked Up," already a successful film, and "Live Free or Die Hard," a film I was indifferent to (though I enjoyed the earlier entries in the series).  I saved "Transformers" for Saturday so I could watch it at the ArcLight's Cinema Dome.

 

Ratatouille

I've been a fan of Brad Bird since "The Iron Giant" in 1999.  His animated films aren't the kind that involve singing and dancing, they're intelligent films about humans.  His films are also not road movies, which tends to be the case with almost every family or kid oriented animated film I've ever seen.  Instead, in his films, the characters deal with dramatic events and real relatable problems, are made with intelligence, and are highly entertaining.

 

Here, Brad Bird opens the film in a similar manner as his previous effort, "The Incredibles," wherein television news reports serve as a prologue.  It's a bit expository, but I like it because it sets the tone.  These prologues work because, since they're news reports, they serve as subjective introduction to the outside world in these films--the point of view of the conformers, the folks that form the society that our heroes are outside of.

 

In this case, the judge of that society is Anton Ego, played brilliantly by Peter O'Toole.  He's a food critic so harsh that he was in danger of demonstrating only two of his computer-generated three dimensions.  Fortunately that was not the case, though I won't explain how since it would spoil the ending.

 

We're then introduced to August Gusteau, the famed chef played by Brad Garrett.  Someone with as distinctive a voice as his was unrecognizable in this film, a tribute to his voice acting talent here.  The celebrity chef wrote a popular book called Anyone Can Cook, which serves as the motto for the film, and a metaphor for art, for self-expression, and also possibly a reference to Bird's defense of animation's state, not as a genre, but as a medium in its own right that can produce work in any genre.

 

In a neat freeze-frame introduction to the mice characters in the film we get introduced to Remy, a mouse with a passion for the diversity in foods and ingredients, who's read Gusteau's book and idolizes him.  This is the mouse that the marketing department insist the film is about.  Though we spend quite a bit of time introducing him, I don't believe he's really what the film is about.

 

He gets separated from his clan and ends up at his hero Gusteau's restaurant after discovering he's no longer alive.  On the same day Alfredo Linguini, a young man with a letter for the head chef, walks in saying that his mom said he would probably be able to get a job there--to help clean.

 

Very quickly the two are introduced to each other when Remy improvs the soup that Linguini inadvertently meddled with.  It becomes the first hit dish the restaurant had since Gusteau's death, so the head chef reluctantly appoints him as a new cook.

 

What develops from this is a story about the relationship between the mouse and the new chef, and the complications that arise from it.  But beyond that, the beauty of the film is that it's really an ensemble piece in which nearly every character has an arc.  Every character has motivations, ambitions, and personalities that drive their interaction with others.  There are maybe one or two characters that could be seen as villains, but even they are not pure evil.  Even the protagonists are complex enough to have selfish streaks and human misunderstandings.

 

Not only are the character dynamics...dynamic, but so are the visuals.  The film had some of the most realistic water and hair effects I've yet seen in a CGI cartoon.  There is also a wonderfully witty shot from the ceiling looking down at Ego's office, like its slightly macabre looking owner, the room is in the shape of a coffin.  Of course, it being a family cartoon, there is plenty of slapstick, due to a plot device in which the master chef mouse operates the slightly more dim-witted human like a marionette.  It takes a considerable amount of suspension of disbelief, but I was willing to let it pass.

 

The only other minor quibble was the obviousness with which Linguini was set up with one of the kitchen's female cooks (one of the few female characters in the film), but their relationship is complex so it's easy to forgive.

 

In short this film has instantly become one of my favorite films--the story is just incredibly well-crafted.  It may be Bird's first film with talking animals, but he wisely made these characters just as human.

 

Knocked Up had a tough job to compete...

 

Knocked Up

...and it very nearly did.

 

Judd Apatow has become very well received over the last decade, first for his cult-TV shows "Freaks and Geeks" and "Undeclared," and then for the sleeper hit "The 40-Year Old Virgin," a film a loved for its sensitive handling of the subject matter without losing sight of the idea that making a funny movie was the priority.

 

And here, again, that balance seemed to be in place.  As in his previous film, Apatow liberally doused this film in filthy jokes, but, also as in the last film, it's mostly because that's where the sense of humor of his characters lie.

 

Ben (Seth Rogan), is a Canadian slacker who owns a house with a bunch of other stoner friends and they have a very vague idea for an adult website, with an even more vague business plan.  They don't mind because they don't have much responsibility.  Harold Ramis has a cameo as Ben's laid-back dad giving the audience some clue as to how he got to be as he was.

 

By total contrast, Alison (Katherine Heigl), lives with her sister Debbie (Leslie Mann), brother-in-law Pete (Paul Rudd), and their two daughters.  She helps out with the kids and occasionally mediates between her host couple: he's grown cynical, she's grown paranoid.  Alison's also gets promoted from working behind-the-scenes on a gossip show for E! to working on-camera.  In another delightful cameo, Kristin Wiig plays a passive-aggressive executive who shields her jealousy of Alison, in front of her male business partner, through feigned enthusiasm.  It was also a treat to see a lot of LA references in the film, though LA is in a lot of films, I notice more of the little things having been here a while.

 

When Ben and Alison's worlds collide and they decide to try to have a relationship as a result of their life-changing one-night-stand, the story begins.  As with "Ratatouille," this film is really about more than just the character(s) advertised the trailers.  Here, the film is about two relationships: Debbie and Pete's, and Ben and Alison's.

 

Also, without trying to be too self-conscious or dry about it, it's a study of gender disparity and adapting to the curve-balls life gives you.  There's heart and an almost unrelenting honesty to the dirty jokes; there's hilarty to the character interplay.  All four characters have stuff going on, they all have motives and goals and chemistry, so you could have them all say anything and it would turn out to be a pretty good film.

 

Live Free or Die Hard

I have seen the first two Die Hard movies, and I've seen enough of the third one to get the gist, I liked them and was moderately interested in seeing this new one.  I like Bruce Willis in most of the things I've seen him in.  To this film series he's brought a relatable everyman quality to the role that resonates with audiences, as well it should.  But nothing really excited me about the film.  As a result this was the film I was least interested in seeing; I had relatively low expectations for it.

 

I was not particularly disappointed, but I wasn't particularly surprised either.  This film was rated PG-13, where the other films were hard R-rated films.  The action was elaborate and clever at times, but the "free" part of "Live Free or Die Hard" was what suffered.  It's not so much that the swears were cut out of the script.  In fact I would have preferred that.  But here the swears were cut in post-production, in some of the most jarring cuts I've ever seen in film.  I almost had to ask myself if this was the year 2011 and "Am I watching this on TBS?"  In this film, the language's station was not super.

 

John McClane's everyman quality isn't quite as "every" as it used to be.  Here, John McClane is extremely confident about all the situations he's going through.  True to the nature of a film series that's gone on this long, he knows what he has to do and does it well.

 

Another thing I've noticed about Bruce Willis' characters is that a few of them are fathers of adult daughters.  I admit that at this time I can't empathize with him, but in this film and in "Armageddon," he forbids his daughter to date, and he also forbids any major male character in the film to date her.  It's something that seems to me to be a bit extreme of a policy, and detracts from someone who seems otherwise reasonable.

 

What saves this film from being a total disappointment is probably Justin Long's performance.  Evidently, both he and Mr. Willis improvised a great deal with regard to their lines, and it shows.  I mean that to be completely complimentary.  Their performances, especially Long's, are so natural one completely believes the dynamics of this relationship.  Kevin Smith also makes a cameo, as almost a stereotype of himself, but it too works because he's gaining confidence as an actor outside his own films.  It's not a complex character, but he commits to it well enough.

 

It was an alright film, but it turned out I saw the three movies that day in descending order of how much I liked them.

 

Intermission

I left the theater after that film and went to Johnny Rocket's for a burger.  It was the Fourth of July and I like nostalgic burger joints and diners, even if they're fake corporate nostalgic Americana.

 

I went back to my apartment and heard an endless stream of illegal fireworks from across the street, and it was still light out.  At least my theatre-hopping was a bit safer.  I felt nostalgic for my summers in Boston, so at ten I turned on CBS to watch the Boston Pops fireworks special, apparently the last time it will be held at the Hatch Shell for a few years since some kind of construction project is going on there.

 

I checked my email and got Rick Jenkins' weekly Comedy Studio Spam and learned some sad news, Carlos DoSouto, a young comic, I knew from back in Boston, had killed himself in late June.  I didn't know him very well, but I checked out The Kvetch Board to see if I could find out more about what happened.  He always seemed like a nice kid to me.

 

Friday was more or less a typical night at IO West, not much to report other than that I suppose.

 

Saturday, after I went to see "Transformers" I went to the library to pick up two books I had ordered.  For some reason the librarian there doesn't like to demagnetize the books, but I carry the books around with me, sometimes back to the library (just because they happen to be on me at the time) without intending to return them, so I asked if I could get them demagnetized so that they wouldn't set off the alarm every time I go in and out.  She reluctantly complied.

 

Transformers

I saved this one for the Dome because I'd never been there before.  I thought, perhaps, it would be a standard film projected on a screen not unlike the Omni Theater at the Museum of Science.  Instead it was an eight-hundred seat theatre with a wide screen that happened to be on a curved wall.  I decided to buy the tickets at the kiosk, which had an Australian accent.  It was probably the first time I'd been to a movie theatre that wasn't general admission seating.  The kiosk wouldn't let me pick a seat so I just grabbed my ticket and went in, walking past the actual vehicles used in the film, displayed to the delight of the people going to the film (the marketing campaign in Los Angeles has been pretty wild for this film.  The tarp building had its tarp replaced with a giant tarp advertisement for the film for a couple of months).

 

The seat I had was near the back of the first tier and somewhat off to the left.  I asked if it was possible to change it to one I could pick, but there wasn't enough time.  I sat down and decided it would do.  The ceiling had an orange-yellow hexagonal pattern, two tiers, and plenty of room.

 

I was excited for this film.  The first draft was written by a friend of Rick Jenkins, John Rogers, and the subsequent drafts were by the two people writing the next Star Trek movie Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman.  I wanted to see if their script was director-proof.

 

I was also coming to the film as a non-fan.  I saw a few episodes of the show when I was a kid, but not enough to know what was going on beyond, the Autobots are the good guys, the Decepticons are the bad guys, and Optimus Prime got killed off a couple of times in the show's various incarnations.

 

It was a similar point-of-view as when I went to see "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."  I had read the first book a few years ago, liked it, but didn't see the BBC show or listen to the radio show or read the other books or anything like that.  That film successfully translated to the big screen for the general audience, which included myself.

 

This one started off with a prologue by Optimus Prime talking about a cube that landed on Earth thousands of years ago and that the Decepticons had landed there too.

 

Then, as Spielberg instructed Orci and Kurtzman to do with the script once they inherited it, the story focuses on a boy and his car.  Sam Witwicky does a project on his great-great-grandfather, Archibald, who explored the North Pole and was deemed insane for his ramblings about a giant ice man and unrecognizable characters scrawled on it.  This is all a setup for Sam to start selling his ancestor's gear for a new car.

 

There is wit and humor to this storyline, for when he finally gets his car, it turns out to be the Autobot known as Bumblebee.  This robot's speech synthesizer was damaged, so he must communicate through his satellite radio, causing goofy sitcom-style misunderstandings for Sam with regard to his peers, especially a girl he has a crush on.

 

This was a movie about humans, not robots.  And it had to be.  Some of the dialogue that the robots is a bit more laughable than funny, and two-thirds into the film, Michael Bay's trademarks rear their over-the-top heads.  At this point there are, of course, endless pans, slow-motion shots, and ridiculously fast cuts, which render some of the action scenes nearly incomprehensible.  But the film was worth seeing on the big screen (as in "Knocked Up" there were some neat nods to LA especially as most of the climax took place downtown), and it proved to me that the writers are talented enough to put together a big-budget popcorn picture.  Hopefully they'll be up to taking on characters, and a franchise with considerably more back-story and history.

 

Thank you, I'm Eric Cheung.  I'm on MySpace and Live Journal.