Life of Pi (***1/2)

Like Cast Away, much of this story is about a man stranded and alone, but instead of being American he is Indian, instead of an island he is on a small boat, and instead of a volleyball his only companion is a non-human predator called Richard Parker. Director Ang Lee and screenwriter David Magee’s (Finding Neverland) adaptation of the Yann Martel bestseller is faithful to the novel’s spirit, though it omits many details about how to survive alone on a lifeboat.

Perhaps unnecessarily, Lee preserves the novel’s structure — a grown man, in Canada, telling the story of his distant childhood in India, and then his perilous voyage, to a curious stranger — and adds frequently gorgeous visuals: shimmering skies, glowing seas, and pastel cityscapes suggestive of a fable. Pi’s is a story  “to make you believe in God,” the stranger has been told. Pi (played winsomely by newcomer Suraj Shjarma), the son of an atheist, himself subscribes to Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam, and an element of spirituality runs through the movie, which can alternately be seen as a kind of magical realism. In some sense, both book and film draw a parallel between religious faith and storytelling, suggesting that the power of a good story is more important than certainty or literal truth. One need not agree to enjoy this existential story of adventure.

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viewed 2/11/13 7:00 pm at Ritz East

The Giant Mechanical Man (***1/4)

The two main characters (Jenna Fischer and Chris Messina), who are sincere and sincerely written, make up for slightly exaggerated supporting ones in this gentle comedy-drama. He’s the mechanical man — a street performer wearing stilts and blue make-up — and she’s a temp worker when the story begins, but things aren’t going well. (The location is an unnamed city, but this was shot in Detroit.) The title also refers to the way people act falsely to fit in, something neither of them is good at. The supporting characters — her sister and, especially, the self-help guru who wants to date her, seem too much like props for her to react against, but the writer-director, Lee Kirk, doesn’t overdo the inevitable climaxes, one confrontational and one sweetly romantic.

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viewed via Amazon Prime and posted 1/3/15

We Bought a Zoo (**3/4)

It’s not often that a title so well sums up the plot. Benjamin Mee, played by Matt Damon, is a real guy who actually did buy a zoo and write a book about it, which has been adapted by Cameron Crowe (Almost Famous, Jerry McGuire) into this very drama. The real Mee was English and was living in France when he decided to buy a zoo. Crowe has unimaginatively turned Mee into an Angeleno and transplanted the zoo to Southern California. Just like the real Mee, the one here is a grieving widower with two children. One is an angry fourteen-year-old boy, the other a seven-year-old girl who spends the entire film being adorable, and it’s probably her lines, not her delivery, that makes her seem just a little too child-actorish. Elle Fanning, the second youngest female in the cast, also spends the entire movie being adorable. Probably the movie is a little too adorable. Damon and Scarlett Johansson, who plays the head zookeeper, are mostly adorable too, but their best scene is the one where they’re in conflict.

Crowe is a filmmaker who favors characters who boldly gesture—his most famous scene might be John Cusack’s holding up a boombox to woo Ione Skye in 1989’s Say Anything—but a more intimate approach may have better suited the material. (The soundtrack, featuring songs by Jónsi, is appropriately quieter, on the whole.)  Or it might be that Crowe makes everything about owning a zoo seem surprisingly unsurprising. Here’s what I learned about animals from the movie—you have to talk to them the right way. Also, someone with experience can tell when a tiger is suffering.

This is a movie with a nice feel to it, but everything feels a little too simplified. The way the movie Mee buys the place is that, having decided that moving would help him get past his grief, he goes house hunting, spots the place the first day, and decides to buy it immediately after seeing how much his daughter likes it, even before seeing the photogenic staff (including Patrick Fugit, barely recognizable from his starring role in Almost Famous) that comes with. This was easily the most transparently false scene. I guess the real story, that Mee carefully researched before buying, seemed dull or complicated, but it seems to me that with a story like this, it’s the odd details that would have made it more compelling. Instead, most of this movie is simply sweet and pleasant, a good family movie if the kids aren’t too young or too cynical.

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viewed 12/13/11 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 12/13/11

The Wild (**1/4)

New York Zoo animals go on a rescue mission to the jungle. The plot may confuse children, and the characters are nothing special, but Disney’s animation shines.

I guess the easy way to dismiss this animated-animal clunker would be to say I liked it (slightly) better when it was called Madagascar. Both movies feature a group of animals who travel from a zoo to the jungle. In each case, it’s the New York Zoo. Ho hum. But the movies are different. The zoo and the characters in this one are a lot more fanciful. The NY Zoo here features several phyla engaged in the largest curling match south of Medicine Hat. The younger kids may already be lost at this point. I will say that Disney’s animation was spectacular. I would have been scared of the lion, Samson, except he’s cowardly. Another thing different about this is that there’s a male squirrel trying to put the moves on the female giraffe. There were no intimations of anatomically improbable bestiality in Madagascar. This is, sadly, the best running gag in the movie. The most amusing character was the British-accented koala, who, like a lisp-less version of Ice Age’s Sid, fails to earn the respect he craves. The main story is about how Samson (Kiefer Sutherland), a single dad, has some communication gaps with his young son, who runs away, and also runs up against some uppity wildebeests. Ho hum. This movie made me think, although mostly as an alternative to listening to the dialogue. I was thinking the same thing as after I saw the credits for Hoodwinked, which is that Janeane Garafolo, who voiced the giraffe, sounds just like Anne Hathaway. Also, why is the male-female ratio in all of these animated animal films about four to one (even higher here)? Are all of the females home baking? So many places to let the mind wander when watching this.

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posted 8/24/13