Animated Heroines Who Aren’t Princesses

Over at NPR.org, Linda Holmes, while praising Pixar’s latest film Up, asks Pixar to create a film with a female lead who is not a princess. It’s an interesting read.

Floating in Authenticity: Up Review

Pixar makes films that capture one of the primary reasons I love going to a theater, sitting in the dark, and staring at a screen for a couple of hours. I love all sorts of films, including those gritty and realistic stories that speak directly about our daily lives. Pixar’s films, on the other hand, are wonderful escapism and enjoyment. Like all good art, no matter how fantastical the subject matter may be, the Pixar movies do show us something about ourselves, they help us see the world differently. I go into a Pixar movie expecting great things and to this point, I have not been disappointed. Some films soar higher than others, but even at their “lower” moments, the movies Pixar produces are better than most other films released. With their ability to craft wonderful stories and worlds inhabited by memorable characters while pushing the technological envelope, I can say that with each Pixar movie, I have always seen something I had never seen before.

The streak continues with Up, which is not one of Pixar’s lower moments. The film is Pete Doctor’s second directorial project for Pixar. (His first was Monsters Inc., which somehow gets overshadowed by the other Pixar films.) It is hard to write a review about this film because I want to give nothing away. It is best experienced with as little knowledge as possible so that the viewer can ensure maximum surprise. Briefly sketched, the film follows Carl Fredrickson (Ed Asner), a seventy-something curmudgeon who sees the wonderful life he had lived for several years taken from him in a series of setbacks. Doctor and his screenwriting partner and co-director Bob Peterson set up the movie with deftness and aching beauty in just five minutes. The opening sequence of Up is one of the most moving film beginnings I have ever seen. It is not hard to get me to cry at a film, but I cannot remember the last time I cried within five minutes of a movie starting.

The Road Has a Trailer…

And I’m not impressed. Did they read the book? Thankfully, an article in Esquire says that the trailer does not reflect the film that well — the film is much closer to the novel in its pacing and dialogue. According to the article, the film, like Cormac McCarthy’s novel, offers no explanation for the post-apocalyptic setting. The trailer makes it look like another post-apocalyptic action story like, I Am Legend, rather than a beautiful story of the love between a father and his son in the midst of a harrowing future. I hope that the trailer truly does not give us a good picture of the film and that The Road merely goes down as another example of a bad trailer for a good movie. My hall of shame includes trailers for The Truman Show and Cast Away, which gave away significant plot points that the films try to keep hidden for, you know, dramatic purposes. The trailer for Master and Commander made a cerebral epic look like Gladiator at sea. Then there is the all-time king of a bad trailer for a good movie: The Princess Bride. “It’s as real as the feelings you feel”? A saxophone? Really?

Standing Against the Tide: Changeling Review

Clint Eastwood needs a hug. He makes some of the most sure-footed films in American cinema, with memorable characters facing real problems. But if we trace his latter career work from Unforgiven to Mystic River to Million Dollar Baby to the two Iwo Jima films and Changeling, we find films of spectacular beauty and chasms of despair. His films seem to continually make the point that we are alone in the world, fighting a battle we cannot win against death. I am surprised he has not adapted any of Cormac McCarthy’s work since their outlooks seem to match each other so well. Eastwood comes across so sweet and cheerful in interviews that I am nearly always shocked by the violence and darkness of his films.

Eastwood’s recent work Changeling tells the true story of Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie), a single mother in 1920’s Los Angeles. One day she returns from work and finds that her son Walter is missing. She begins to work with the Los Angeles police department and months later they say that they have found Walter. When Christine sees the boy, both she and the audience knows immediately that the boy standing before her is not her son, Walter. As she challenges the LAPD during one of their most corrupt eras, she fights against an organization that will do nearly anything to keep their image in the press in a positive light. The Reverend Gustav Briegleb (John Malkovich) befriends Christine and publicizes her plight. The LAPD retaliates by having Christine institutionalized for psychiatric reasons without any due process. As Christine continues her fight, the LAPD discovers a horrific series of crimes that take place in Wineville (near Riverside). These crimes are of such an evil and infamous nature, that the town of Wineville changes its name to Mira Loma. Christine’s story and the Wineville crimes may or may not be related.

Out-Dickensing Dickens: Slumdog Millionaire Review

I saw Slumdog Millionaire back in November and now that it just won several Golden Globes, I suppose I should write my review.

No one is ever going to fault director Danny Boyle for making boring films. His movies brim with energy while never flinching from the harshness of life. Boyle makes movies in the same vivacious stream as Baz Luhrmann and Martin Scorcese. All three directors make highly charged films shot with fervency, edited so that the pace never slows from a sprint, and that use music as another plot-driving device. Boyle’s latest film, Slumdog Millionaire is a Dickensian story of Jamal Malik (Dev Patel), an orphan who grows up in the slums of Bombay (later Mumbai). The story follows Jamal, his brother Salim, and their fellow orphan Latika through three periods of their young lives. We meet Jamal as a contestant on the Indian version of the game show, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? As Jamal progresses through the questions, the show’s producers suspect that he is somehow cheating since they believe an uneducated slumdog could have no way of knowing the answers to all these questions. His interrogation by the local police inspector (Irrfan Khan, who gives another excellent performance after The Darjeeling Limited and A Mighty Heart) allows Jamal to tell the details of his hard life from his early youth to the time on the show, when he is eighteen and working as a tea-gofer at a telecommunications firm.

“Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write.” John Adams Miniseries Review

Director Tom Hooper screenwriter Kirk Ellis teamed with HBO to create a mini-series adaptation of David McCullough’s biography of John Adams. The gigantic scope of McCullough’s book suits itself well for a multi-part telling rather than a two or three-hour film, which would have felt like a greatest hits version of the biography. The book and the mini-series follow one of the most important thinkers and shapers of the United States of America beginning at the Boston Massacre and ending with his death. The miniseries’ scope is large, following Adams from his farm in Massachusetts, to the Continental Congresses in Philadelphia, to his work in Europe as one of the new nation’s primary diplomats, to his work as Vice President and President of the union, and finally to his retirement, again, back at his family farm in Massachusetts.

Overall John Adams makes good on its high aims of recounting history and exploring the characters who shaped this nation during some of its most tenuous moments. Ellis’ scripts appear faithful to the time while remaining accessible for modern ears. The characters express their thoughts and emotions believably without resorting to annoying soliloquies or civics lectures. Ellis must have had the most fun with the second installment, “Independence,” which shows Adams defending the product of Thomas Jefferson’s work, the Declaration of Independence. In the biography McCullough writes that no transcript or record of Adams’ speech before the Congress was made — since these meetings were supposedly fairly secretive — but that it was likely the finest speech he had made in his career. Because no record exists, Ellis had free reign to craft Adams’ words.

Screwball Nihilism: Burn After Reading Review

It seems whenever the brothers Joel and Ethan Coen release a full-fledged work of film noir, they often return with a screwball comedy. After Blood Simple they came out with Raising Arizona. Then, after Fargo came The Big Lebowski. They followed The Man Who Wasn’t There with Intolerable Cruelty. And now, after their Oscar-winning adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men, they bring us Burn After Reading. While the humor moves to the front in their comedies, they are often just as philosophically bleak as their more serious films. Likewise, their dramas always contain a certain amount of humor. The people of the Coen brothers’ films are selfish, often stupid, and get themselves into situations beyond their capacity. Life in their films is random yet intertwined, violent, and ironic.

Their comedies also serve as farces of different film genres. For example, The Big Lebowski sends up the Los Angeles private eye story. Now Burn After Reading skewers the spy thriller, beginning with a satellite view of the Washington, D.C. area as the credits come across the screen in electronic type. It is a character-driven comedy, so it takes time for the humor to build. Initially, there are not many laughs, but by the film’s end, the theater laughed at almost every other line. Burn After Reading stars John Malkovich as Osbourne Cox, a Balkans expert in the CIA who has been “reassigned” (read, fired) because of his temper and drinking problems. He tells his wife Katie (Tilda Swinton) that he quit his career and he wants to begin writing his memoirs. Katie secretly begins divorce proceedings against Osbourne while having an affair with the serial and married philanderer Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney). Seemingly unrelated, we meet Linda Litzke (Francis McDormand) who is in search of love via internet dating and personal improvement via several costly plastic surgeries. When her co-worker at the Hardbodies gym Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) finds a compact disc containing special information that belongs to Osbourne, Linda sees an opportunity to extort him for the money she needs for her surgeries. If that doesn’t work out, she’ll resort to committing treason to get the cash. Linda’s dating service eventually hooks her up with Harry and thus the relationships in the film become more complex. Because this is a Coen brothers film, no one is bright enough or capable enough to carry out their plans. Everyone is equally earnest and that commitment to fulfilling bad ideas leads to everyone getting in over their head. Burn After Reading is a Coen brothers comedy, so be prepared for lots of profanity and some very shocking violence. The plot is difficult to explain, but not to watch, unless you’re one of the CIA operatives charged with keeping tabs on the story’s events. The point of the film is not to examine causes and effects. Rather, the viewer should allow the Coens to work their magic, resting assured that everything and everyone will cross paths, or more accurately, everything will crash into everything else. And meaninglessness will win over meaning.

Fascinating and Flawed: In Cold Blood Review

The slaying of four members of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas in November 1959 and the subsequent investigation and trial attracted the attention of author Truman Capote. He painstakingly researched the case and conducted dozens of interviews. In the process Capote nearly created a new genre of literature, the non-fiction novel, in which a true story is told using the techniques of fiction writing. In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences is the result of Capote’s efforts.

From the outset, the reader knows of the Clutters’ murders as well as the capture, conviction, and execution of the killers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. Early on, Capote introduces the readers to Herbert Clutter, a wealthy and well-respected farmer in Kansas, and his family. Capote quickly sketches a biography of each of the victims: Herb, his wife Bonnie, and their two teenage children, Nancy and Kenyon. Herb and Bonnie had two older children, Eveanna and Beverly, who lived out of the house, and thus were not targeted in the murder. Capote builds tension by keeping two questions in front of the reader. First, what really occurred in the Clutter’s house during the morning of the homicides? And second, given the seemingly randomness of the murders and the distinct lack of clues or motive, how were Smith and Hickock were ever captured or convicted?

Running to Stand Still: Rabbit, Run Review

John Updike is one of our most celebrated and honored living American writers. I recently engaged his writing for the first time by reading the first novel of his series following Harold “Rabbit” Angstrom, Rabbit, Run. Since the 1950’s, Updike has returned to Rabbit at the end of each decade to tell a new story about him and about America too. It is easy to see Updike’s influence on American fiction and prose. According to Wikipedia, Rabbit, Run was one of the first novels written in the present tense. Updike’s language brims with energy and some of today’s best writers, like Michael Chabon and Jonathan Franzen, follow in his footsteps. The reader feels a drive to finish the current sentence as quickly as possible to get to the next one. In fact, it was hard for this 21st century reader to grasp how revolutionary Rabbit, Run was because so many of today’s books read like an Updike book. Only when I compared the narrative style to other novels I’ve read from the 1950’s or 1960’s could I appreciate Updike’s contribution to language. But Rabbit, Run is not just a watershed in prose. Thematically, the novel skewers the 1950’s suburban American dream about as thoroughly as F. Scott Fitzgerald debunked the American dream of the jazz age in The Great Gatsby. We can quickly find the thread running from Rabbit, Run to The Graduate, to American Beauty, to Franzen’s The Corrections.

On the first page we meet Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a 26-year old former high school basketball star. He’s now married to his high school girlfriend Janice. They have a son, Nelson, with another child on the way. Rabbit desperately misses the glory days of his youth as he believes he is in a failed marriage to a stupid woman and is completely dissatisfied with his job selling vegetable peelers. One day, as he goes to pick up his son from his in-laws, Rabbit decides to leave his life altogether. He takes the car and drives south from the Mount Judge suburb of Brewer, Pennsylvania. He quickly aborts his escape and returns to the town, but not to his family. Instead, Rabbit seeks out his former basketball coach Marty Tothero who introduces him to Ruth Leonard, a sometime prostitute, and they begin a three-month affair.

The Joker, the Problem of Evil, and Unanswered Questions

Over on Out of Ur, Skye Jethani has written an interesting reflection on Christopher Nolan’s second Batman film, The Dark Knight. He relates the film’s lack of an origin story for the Joker to the way the Bible discusses evil’s origin. Jethani says:

I wonder if the lack of a back-story for evil in the Bible is related to Nolan and Goyer’s rationale for ignoring the Joker’s back-story? Without an explanation or origin, God is emphasizing the utter meaninglessness and anarchy of evil. It cannot be understood; it cannot be rationalized. To do otherwise would be to legitimize its place in his creation or to create sympathy for an enemy that deserves none….

Answers to all of our questions about the origin of evil are not found in the Scriptures, which means that God, the Writer and Director of this cosmic drama, did not deem them necessary for the story he wanted to tell. Are we satisfied with that, or must we continue to contrive answers for ourselves? My guess is that Christians would find themselves in less trouble theologically, culturally, and politically if we stuck with the questions God has chosen to answer, and immersed ourselves in the story he has chosen to tell.

As a Christian who has listened to, read, and even made several attempts to explain why evil exists and who hasn’t been fully convinced by any of them, I like the direction Jethani takes. The Bible doesn’t seem to occupy itself with answering why evil exists or even asking the question. Instead, the Bible takes evil’s presence as a given and focuses on God dealing with it. This lack of an origin story may not be the most comforting message in my questioning, but it does redirect my focus to look for God’s redemptive work in the world rather than fixating on the evil’s existence.