Nanny McPhee (***1/4)

Emma Thompson wrote the screenplay for this odd little gem about an odd-looking nanny (Thompson) who magically teaches five lessons to seven unruly children.

Emma Thompson, whose previously screenplays include Wit and Sense & Sensibility, brings a similar degree of literacy to this effort pitched at a younger audience. As well as adapting a trilogy of books by Christianna Brand, she plays the title role, though you might not realize it to look at the grotesque makeup effects applied to her. Colin Firth is the other star. A kind widower raising seven kids alone, he’s proven inadequate to the task. We might now call him overly permissive, but this is back in England, a somewhat art-directed England like the one at the beginning of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in a time before Dr. Spock and cosmetic dentistry. The kind widower’s children have driven away 17 consecutive nannies with their appalling behavior. The scenes of hurly-burly that establish this point are not really so different from the ones in Yours Mine and Ours and the Cheaper by the Dozen movies (and that’s three remakes I’ve referenced). Yet I found them so much less annoying here. One thing different, besides the setting, is that this odd little gem is told much from the point of view of the young folks, less from that of the exasperated grown-ups. At the same time, it doesn’t seem like a “kids’ movie.” Adult problems with money and family relations (specifically a half-wicked aunt played by Angela Lansbury) intrude. The adults sometimes use words that kids (the ones in the audience, too) won’t likely know. At the same time, they will be able to easily follow and delight in the story of the mysterious nanny who teaches the children five lessons with the help of her magic cane.

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posted 9/17/13

Castaway on the Moon (***1/2)

This Korean gem may or may not be inspired by a similarly titled Tom Hanks film, but it has a unique approach with even more of a fable-like quality. Instead of an island in the middle of nowhere, the luckless hero winds up, after a botched suicide attempt, on an uninhabited islet in the Han River, in sight of the skyscrapers of Seoul. His calamity is also a refuge, and, in a way, unites him with a shut-in young woman on shore. The humor in the early part of the movie is slightly to the goofy side (there’s no talking with a volleyball, but something like that), but the conclusion is heartfelt. An American remake is planned.

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viewed 11/8/11 [Netflix streaming] and reviewed 11/8/11

Fantastic Mr. Fox (***3/4)

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viewed 1/2/10 at Ritz Bourse

Slumdog Millionaire (***1/4)

A potentially cheesy rags-to-riches story becomes an urban folk tale in director Danny Boyle’s foray into the mean streets of Mumbai. Boyle has made films in a variety of genres, nearly all of them morality plays in one fashion or another. Best known are Trainspotting, a tale of heroin addiction, and 28 Days Later, the post-apocalyptic zombie hit. Here, he grafts the punky attitude and gritty urbanism of Trainspotting onto a quasi-fable reminiscent of Boyle’s 2004 Millions. Screenwriter Simon Beaufoy, best known for a couple of other urban fables, The Full Monty and Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, adapted an Indian novel.

British actor Dev Patel plays the lead role of Jamal, suspected of cheating on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, with all of the other roles filled by Indian actors. The childhood scenes of Jamal, his brother, and their female friend Latika are so natural that they anchor a fairly hoary plot later on. The children, non-professionals, speak Hindi with colored supertitles floating on screen. Jamal loses track of his childhood friend, but not his hope or lack of guile. The plot’s structured as flashbacks tied to the questions asked by a host who seems more like Simon Cowell than Regis Philbin. On the threshold of winning the 20 million rupee top prize, Jamal is interrogated because of the unlikeliness of an ill-educated teenager gathering the required knowledge. (In fact, the explanation is only partly convinving, but I went with it, discovering along the way my own ignorance of Indian culture.)

Almost as much of a character as Jamal is the incredibly diverse city of Mumbai (formerly Bombay). Frequently employing handheld digital cameras, Boyle infuses the film with the sounds and sights of this metropolis of 20 million, though never in a travelogue sort of way. A couple of cruel scenes, one involving a child, earned the film a probably unfair R rating in the US, but the tone is never pitiful, despite the great poverty (and intermittent violence) depicted. It’s a crowd pleaser, mostly in the best sense of the term.

IMDB link

viewed 11/19/08 [screening at Ritz 5]; reviewed 11/21/08

Pan’s Labyrinth (***3/4)

? Guillermo del Toro is a Mexican director who’s alternated between dark Hollywood fare like Hellboy and Blade II and more individualistic Spanish-language movies such as The Devil’s Backbone, a mixture of social tragedy and fantasy set during the Spanish Civil War. This follow-up of sorts mixes similar elements. It is 1944. Even as the fascists are losing ground in the rest of Europe, dictator Francisco Franco is consolidating his power in Spain. An army captain (Sergi López) commands a small outpost that is trying to rid the area of a small band of rebels that stubbornly remains. Meanwhile, a girl (Ivana Baquero) unhappily arrives with her widowed mother, who has married (and become pregnant by) the captain. As the horror of her surroundings become apparent, the girl is led by a fairy to a strange world in which she learns she is the reincarnation of a princess.

+ Del Toro brilliantly sets a brutally realistic historical drama against a grotesque netherworld where a girl can become a heroine and control her own destiny. The historical part is fairly straightforward but suspenseful all the same, and López is a fine villain. The fantasy element is more appealing than the one in Devil’s Backbone. It’s weird and fun and gruesome and whimsical. Pan’s Labyrinth is like The Fountain if it hadn’t been incoherent and pretentious, or Lady in the Water if it hadn’t been dreadful. Del Toro visually contrasts the literal and the fantastic to great effect, and has a real find in the twelve-year-old Baquero.

- More literal-minded people might wonder why the netherworld creatures look the way they do, and I’m usually that sort of person, but mostly I just accepted it all.

= ***3/4 In a holiday season full of terrific movies, this one stands as among the best and most original, a modern Grimm fairy tale that takes you somewhere that only fiction can.

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Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (***)

? Tom Tykwer’s (Run Lola Run) English-language adaptation of Patrick Süskind’s 1985 novel tells the tale of a Paris orphan, one Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw), born in 1738 with no assets, not even a sense of empathy, save a preternatural sense of smell. This, we know, will not prevent him from being sentenced, some years later, to death for crimes at which the title grimly hints. After an unpleasant childhood, Grenouille discovers the most intoxicating scent of all and seeks the counsel of a learned perfumer (Dustin Hoffman) on how he can preserve it. Some years later he can be found in a faraway town whose most beautiful resident (Rachel Hurd-Wood) resides with her wealthy, doting father (Alan Rickman). There Grenouille’s gifts, terrible and wonderful, reach full flower.

+ This is one of the more perfectly realized films I’ve seen. That is, I felt after seeing it that Tykwer had produced exactly the film he’d meant to, and I couldn’t say how the story might have been better told. The vividly disgusting opening sequence is a veritable flurry of filth that reminds us, as few historical films do, of the squalor attendant to European city life in centuries past. Throughout, sight and sound produce a stunning approximation of the more elusive sense of smell. Even if the producers had brought back the once-used Smell-O-Vision, it wouldn’t have been superior, since the smell Tykwer wants to conjure is beyond reality. It’s a shame he had to excise the novel’s more detailed descriptions of perfumery techniques, but the story itself is well preserved with an ending, or two of them, as fitting as it is bizarre.

- Obviously, this Perfume won’t be intoxicating to those who like their fairy tales sweet and light. The title character is the only one with much dimension, but he can be described generously as creepy and less so as sociopathic. Hoffman’s casting as a French perfumer is, let us say, offbeat.

= ***1/4 I admired this movie more than I liked it, and I’d bet a lot of people would like it less than I, but it was never dull. The penultimate scene, which can be described but oughtn’t to be, is at once wondrous and absurd, provoking both tittering laughter and wide-eyed awe from the audience at my screening. As befitting the fable this is, all is open to interpretation.

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viewed at PFS screening

Hoodwinked! (***1/4)

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A fresh reworking of the Red Riding Hood tale that mixes classic and modern elements.

Following Chicken Little by just a few months, this is the another film providing an animated twist on an old fable. (Additionally, the live-action Brothers Grimm reworked Rapunzel.) The debut animated feature by brothers Cory and Todd Edwards, Hoodwinked is a reimagined Little Red Riding Hood that deftly mixes classic fairy-tale elements with new ones without seeming to try too hard. Reworked as a police procedural, the tale gets retold by Red (Anne Hathaway), the wolf (Patrick Warburton), Granny (Glenn Close), and the woodsman (James Belushi). Along with original songs by the brothers, there’s electronic music in the score that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on a old Miami Vice episode. Compared to the Grimms’ version, Red’s savvier, Granny’s spunkier, and some additional characters, like the speed-talking squirrel (Cory Edwards) and the frog investigator (David Ogden Stiers), are funnier.

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viewed 1/13/06 at Moorestown

Breakfast on Pluto (**1/4)

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Cillian Murphy is convincing as the star of Neil Jordan’s 1970s fairy tale about an Irish congenital cross-dresser, but his coy, fey character may be annoying.

With Felicity Huffman in Transamerica and this film, this year’s Oscars may offer the odd possibility of both the male and female acting winners playing men trying to become women. Neil Jordan’s (The Crying Game, Interview with a Vampire) version of a Patrick McCabe novel features pretty Cillian Murphy, he of Red Eye, Batman Begins, and 28 Days Later. Murphy plays a character variously called Patrick, Kitten, and Patricia. Left as a foundling on the doorstep of the local priest (Liam Neeson), and raised by a shrew in an Irish hamlet, Kitten wanders as Red Riding Hood through the forest of 1970s British Isles cultural phenomena like glam rock, IRA bombings, and the Wombles. And too there are wolves come to prey on an innocent who wants only the love he never had. Talking birds (subtitled!) and cute little chapter headings are there to remind us that it’s only a fairy tale, though. I should probably think of some other reason to justify my low rating, but really, it’s that, for at least the first half of the movie, I was irritated, not charmed, by the fey, coy Patrick/Patricia, even if Murphy’s portrayal is very convincing.

IMDb link

posted 9/17/13

King Kong (***1/2)

 Beauty and the Beast meets Jurassic Park in Peter Jackson’s remake that brilliantly updates the special effects while retaining the essence of the 1933 story.

I guess I’m in the minority who thought Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy pretentious and overlong. (Heavenly Creatures, his 1994 psychodrama is to me his masterpiece, and this comes close.) Though featuring the same screenwriting trio (including Jackson) as LOTR, Jackson’s remake feels altogether less serious, and that’s all to the good. For those who missed the 1933 classic, it’s the story of a New York City filmmaker (Jack Black) who hopes to shoot on an uncharted island that turns out to be inhabited by a huge ape. (The ill-regarded 1976 version made it an oil company that goes there.)

The epic (at 187 minutes nearly twice as long as the 1933 version) divides into three parts. There’s the part before they get to the island, mostly the tale of Black’s character, P.T. Barnum crossed with Cecil B. DeMille. He cajoles, lies, and bribes to get his leading lady (Naomi Watts), his writer (Adrian Brody), and the ship’s crew to do his bidding. Then there’s the longest section, the tale of beauty meeting beast on some sort of freak Galapagos island. (The black “savages” present in the earlier versions are there too, though they disappear as soon as they’re no longer necessary to the plot.) About an hour is pretty much an orgy of CGI effects at least the equal of Jurassic Park, of which you might be reminded.

Finally, there’s the climax back in Gotham, the tale of tragic romance. The smitten Kong, enraptured by Watts, spurns other women (“spurns” in this context meaning “flings to certain death”) and wreaks general havoc. He says, “I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of a beast and a girl don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” Okay, he doesn’t say that, and, as tales of problematic romances go, it’s not Casablanca, but is in its way touching. “We’ll always have Skull Island,” his computerized face seems to say. The decision to retain the 1930s setting (unlike the 1976 version) is wise, as it retains overtones of an old adventure film, and the story would be less believable set later on.

IMDb link

circulated via email 12/22/05 and posted online 9/20/13

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (***1/2)

 The first feature-film adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s children’s book beautifully transports the viewer into a magical, frozen kingdom and delivers an emotional experience while keeping the fantasy intact. Georgie Henley, as the youngest of four siblings, and Tilda Swinton, as a wicked queen, are respectively adorable and imperious.

Although generations of schoolchildren have read C.S. Lewis’s 1950 book, the first-written of his Narnia series, this is the first feature-film adaptation. (A couple of TV adaptations, one animated, preceded it.) The idea of being transported into a magical world is a staple of fantasy and of children’s literature, and in fact this movie very much reminded me of The Wizard of Oz. Although there are four children, not one, it’s the youngest girl, Lucy, who discovers the frozen kingdom of Narnia, and there is a wicked White Witch (Tilda Swinton), who frightens the populace, in this case mostly (talking) animals. Those who prefer literary adaptations to hew close to their sources will be fairly pleased. A chase sequence is reimagined, and a battle elaborated (pushing the PG boundary), but in all important respects Lewis’s template is followed. (Brought to life, some parts will frighten younger children.)

Lewis (who died in 1963) is said to have objected to a non-animated version of the movie because it would emphasize the unnaturalness of the talking animals. I’ve usually not cared much for this myself, but the digitized ones here seem as natural as possible. (The director, Andrew Adamson, has some experience with computer animals, having helmed the two Shrek movies.) The human actors are also well-chosen, particularly the imperious Swinton and Georgie Henley, who debuts as Lucy. As for the Christian aspect of the story, while the lion Aslan (voiced by Liam Neeson) is clearly enough a Jesus figure, the movie can be enjoyed with or without thinking of it that way. Lucy and Aslan are characters that are more touching on screen than on the page. They give the movie a greater emotional force than the book, I think, while keeping the fantasy aspect intact. Beautiful to look at, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is likely to be watched by generations to come.

IMDb link

circulated via email 12/15/05 and posted 9/20/13