Rango

I had heard that Rango was a good animated movie for people besides little kids, but I didn't expect to like it as much as I did. It's probably the best non-Pixar American animated movie I've seen since The Iron Giant, which is a lot of qualifications, but it's still a solid accomplishment. It's definitely not a movie designed to appeal directly to children; I'm sure plenty would like it, but the story and characters have enough maturity and older-skewing references built into them to make it probably appeal more directly to someone with at least more knowledge of the history of film. There's a lot of Western character archetypes and homages to a bunch of different sources, the stuff that's supposed to be fun for parents who brought their kid to the theater. It goes beyond that here, though. The whole movie seems more designed with the parent in mind than the kid.

Again, not that I don't think kids would like it at all. It's a pretty silly movie in places, and not very difficult to follow. I just thought it was aimed at me more than I expected it to be. The cast is pretty outstanding and varied, with the right idea being used when the voices were picked - they do use celebrities you've heard of, but they're cast to play characters, not to be famous and recognizable. I know Johnny Depp at least was moving around on a set to help create the character, and his Rango is pretty loveable. He's a pet iguana who ends up stranded in the desert and meets up with a small community of wild animals who are struggling to find water. There's a love interest played by Isla Fisher, and a cute little girl played by Abigail Breslin, and a wise but suspicious authority figure played by Ned Beatty. It could pretty much have been a live action Western with the same general characters and worked the same, and that's what's interesting about it. The animation enhances the movie though, providing great opportunities for little moments of humor and some pretty spectacular action sequences. There's just something about complete freedom and control of moments of excitement that really brings out the potential of the form. It's kind of a simple and predictable story, but it works because of the solid humor and charming cast. I certainly wouldn't mind seeing it dethroning Pixar in the Best Animated Feature race early next year.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a pretty bad teen horror comedy that is notable for two reasons. Obviously, it led to the much better and more successful television series and media franchise with the same title. Also, it stars some surprisingly talented actors, and features an abnormally large number of people in bit parts who would later go on to reasonably big careers. There's a pre-multiple-Oscar-wins Hilary Swank as a vapid high schooler, a pre-being-more-famous-than-he-should-be David Arquette as a punk-turned-vampire, and even a pre-Good-Will-Hunting Ben Affleck as a basketball player with one line. There's an early Stephen Root performance as a school administrator, and Thomas Jane apparently played someone named Zeph. Paul Reubens and Rutger Hauer play powerful vampires, Luke Perry found time to play a deadbeat who finds himself thrust into the sidekick/love interest role while he wasn't filming 90210, and Donald Sutherland is Merrick, a Watcher like Giles who is immortal for some reason. Star Kristy Swanson is practically the least currently famous person in the cast.

But anyway, I'm getting away from the movie, which was not very good. The script is credited to Joss Whedon, and while apparently several changes were made, I read the comic that was based on the same script, and a whole lot of it is the same, particularly the dialogue. The fact that the film is so amazingly unfunny despite using a lot of the same lines as the decent comic further proves something that was revealed in Alien Resurrection - as fun as Whedon's dialogue can be, in the hands of the wrong director and cast, it can be disastrous. Without the right attitude, it comes off pretty awkwardly, much more like somebody reading a script than talking. With the right talent it shines, but otherwise it can be bad. Buffy is the only character shared between the movie and show, and Swanson's interpretation just doesn't work. She's a pretty blond, but that's pretty much the extent of her similarity to Sarah Michelle Gellar's version. Buffy begins the series as a fairly normal teenage girl, but there's always that snarky undercurrent that kept her interesting right from the start, and the Buffy here is just too much the stereotypical popular high school student. Reading the comic in the show's voice showed how the material could have worked fine, but they just go another way with it that fails.

And with the dialogue failing so badly, a lot of the comedy gets shifted to the physical side of the movie, which just doesn't work either. There's a certain cheesiness to the martial arts action on the show, with some obvious stunt doubling and overly elaborate movement for simple results, but the tone makes it seem like an old action movie rather than a big joke, which is what it is here. There's hardly any real fighting at all - Buffy does some flips and hand springs and a limited bag of tricks, but any time there's actual physical scuffling it's just incompetent. Reubens' character was probably supposed to be intimidating, but it doesn't work because he's god damn Pee Wee Herman, and the best we get out of him is a weird piece of anti-comedy where he is apparently killed by repeatedly fails to actually die. Hauer's character's evilness is also told more than it's really shown, and the role is a major waste of his innate menace as an actor. And the changes made to Merrick and what the Watchers are for the movie add up to a whole lot of nothing.

I watched it because I wanted to see the background of what causes Buffy to move to Sunnydale and let the series begin, but some cuts to the script remove a couple pivotal events anyway, and the few people besides Buffy who are mentioned in the series that appear aren't really the same characters, so it doesn't serve that purpose well. It was pretty much just a waste of my time, even if the movie was shorter than a two-part episode of the show. There are no real likable characters, it's not funny, it's not scary, it's not exciting. And it's not capable of building an ironic cult following because something that was actually good grew out of it. All it can be now is a curio for fans of the series. Without Fran Rubel Kuzui the Buffy franchise probably wouldn't exist, and she deserves some credit for that. But the film she actually made was poor.

Finding Nemo

I feel like the first several Pixar movies were good but not quite exceptional like their more recent output, and Nemo sort of marks that transition to true brilliance. It's not a favorite, but it's really quite good, capturing the right combination of humor, excitement, and heart. I guess they really figured things out when they started making things sad. The movie doesn't linger on it, but the opening scene where Marlin loses his wife and most of his children is probably harder than anything else the studio had done to that point, and it works very well to inform the character for the rest of the film. Marlin searching all over the ocean for his son isn't a terribly different story from say, the toys trying to rescue Woody after he gets stolen, but the knowledge of that earlier tragedy gives everything a greater weight and urgency. You want him to find Nemo because you know it will destroy him if he doesn't. One of the best family relationships the company has done.

It doesn't take over the whole movie though, as there's plenty of opportunity for the expected clever action sequences and windfall of entertaining celebrity voices. Sequences like Dory reading the address by the light of an anglerfish and escaping from the seagulls in the beak of a pelican are a lot of fun, and while I think having famous people do voices because they're famous can be damaging in pointless, everyone here seems really well cast. Albert Brooks and Ellen DeGeneres make a good leading pair, it's surprising hearing a very young Shane from Weeds as the titular character, Willem Dafoe is entertaining as the gruff leader of a group of aquarium fish including Brad Garrett and Allison Janney, and you'll probably hear a few more recognizable voices at some point. It's a nice looking film if not as eye-popping as what they've done in the last few years, and it tells its story and wraps it up at a very nice pace. Not my favorite animated movie, but a pretty good benchmark for what family films should aim for.

The Men Who Stare at Goats

Goats is one of those quirkier comedies that just lets you enjoy the slight air of absurdity around it for a while instead of hitting you over the head with wacky moments. It's mostly propelled by good, off-beat performances, especially from its two leads, Ewan McGregor and George Clooney. McGregor is a down-on-his-luck reporter who spends a lot of the film in awe of the strange stuff he keeps seeing, though he also has a strong humorous streak whenever it gets too crazy and he has to lash out. Clooney does one of the best jobs I've seen him do, as an army man on a mission obsessed with his special skills which may or may not be totally fictional. The movie's based on a book about an apparently very real government program to train psychic soldiers to do things like see into distant locations and even kill things with the power of their mind. The film itself can't seem to decide whether to make it real, because half the time they really do work and the other half it's just the hopelessly narrow way they look at it. Maybe that's what it's really about though, just your perspective at any moment.

Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey also turn in solid work as other members of the special unit, though they're mainly seen in flashbacks to when it was still in its prime. The whole movie's structured a bit oddly, bouncing back and forth between mostly the 80s before the program was shut down and earlier this decade, when the author/narrator was in Iraq finding all this stuff out. It really has the feel of one of the Coen Brothers' more light-hearted movies, which is totally cool by me. It's the kind of thing where I enjoyed watching it a lot more than you might guess from just monitoring my laughter, although there were definitely plenty of times I chuckled. The ending was a bit weird, and it's an unusual situation because it would have been pretty much perfect if they just cut it literally a few seconds earlier. It has the feel of being based on a somewhat troubling book to adapt, though for what it's worth the writer did a pretty good job at it. I can't remember many comedies from this year and there are definitely a couple I want to see, but this is one of the better to come out as this decade closes.

No Country for Old Men

The Coen brothers are probably my favorite directors, although Ethan had only been getting producer credit until a couple years ago. He and Joel seem to be able to work successfully in any style. They traditionally write everything they do, although their last few screenplays have been based on other peoples' stories. The last couple weren't that great, but they were able to buck that trend with this adaptation of a novel of the same title by Cormac McCarthy. As a piece of normal entertainment, No Country doesn't work that well. It's not designed to be simple fun like a lot of their work. It's a return to a dark mood they last dabbled in with Fargo (unless The Man Who Wasn't There is like that) and only really explored in their very first film, Blood Simple. There is some black humor, and some of it's pretty funny. But at its core, No Country is a mean-spirited, depressing film, and a slow paced one at that, so it's definitely not for everyone.

A large part of my appreciation for the movie comes from the brilliance with which it's filmed, edited, and acted, and not from enjoying some parts of it. It's the kind of movie that puts off a lot of normal people while it gets nominated for critic awards. Not to say it's a boring or bad movie, though. Ignoring the deeper themes, as a thriller, it works quite well. Javier Bardem is one of the best movie villains in years, deeply psychotic in his calm determination to kill anyone who even gets a good look at him. There are some extremely tense scenes as he pursues Josh Brolin, who's also good as a likable, resourceful normal guy who ends up in an unlucky situation. Tommy Lee Jones plays an old sheriff getting ready to retire, and a lot of the story is really about him coming to terms with what his life's been. The movie takes a strange turn near the end, and I know some really hated the way it closed out. But it does all make sense if you view it in the context of what they're trying to say. I don't think it's the kind of movie I'd watch many more times, but real fans of cinema should see it.

Idiocracy

We went to see Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer for a buck as part of the promotion I mentioned when talking about Knocked Up, but it was sold out. We decided to rent a movie instead of seeing Wild Hogs, and decided on this. It's unfortunate that test screenings didn't go well and FOX blackballed it, giving it an extremely limited release and quickly shoving it onto DVD. It might not be for everyone, but it's a silly, fun movie with a lot of pretty good laughs. The premise is actually a little more scarily realistic than the average science fiction movie. We can already see that intelligence correlates negatively with number of offspring, so it wouldn't be inconceivable that in time the entire planet will be technically retarded. It wouldn't actually get this bad or happen this quickly, but it's still something to wonder about.

It's pretty incredible how long Mike Judge was able to keep stupid funny. The movie could have easily run out of steam and been one-note, but it stayed pretty fresh the whole time. Luke Wilson isn't an especially talented or funny actor, but that actually works to his favor here, as he represents the completely average person who finds himself a genius among idiots. Maya Rudolph is fairly good as the other person from the past, although the whole romance subplot with her and Luke seemed tacked on and pointless. Although the jokes about her pimp "Upgrayedd" were worth it. A lot of the humor in the movie comes from new uses of words and the way businesses from today have drastically changed. Police constantly refer to their suspects as "particular individuals" and the greeter at Costco greets customers with "Welcome to Costco. I love you." Judge did a good job of mixing up all the ways they're stupid and it came out as a really funny movie that didn't get the chance it deserved.