Category Archives: Film

Pity poor Kevin Munroe. The writer/director had the unenviable task of crafting a coherent and, his studio masters hoped, successful Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film.

While comic book superhero films are always something of a challenge, seeing as their makers are often tasked with boiling decades worth of stories from several different media into a single story, in a way the turtles present an even greater challenge, as their fan base is so wildly divergent. There’s the adult fans of the original dark, violent indie comic book series. There’s the younger adult fan base who grew up with the cartoon and toys of the late ’80s and early ’90s. And then there are all the little kids who are fans of the current turtles cartoons and toys.

Yikes.

Munroe attacks the problem head on, trying to make his film all things to all fans. Trying to please everyone is almost always a recipe for disaster.

Now congratulate Kevin Munroe, because he succeeds wildly with the new TMNT, the fourth turtles film, and the first in fourteen years.
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Muppets can do much more than educate youngsters and reinvent Vaudeville-style variety shows for a new generation. The particular combination of puppetry and filmmaking that Jim Henson devoted himself to is also uniquely suited to fantasy world-building, as the second installment of Muppets, Music & Magic: Jim Henson’s Legacy demonstrates.

The day-long program will climax at 7 p.m. with back-to-back screenings of two of the brightest spots of ’80s fantasy film, The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, both of which owe a great deal to designer Brian Froud.

1982’s The Dark Crystal is an incredible visual accomplishment, creating an entire alien world without a single human being visible (Unless you count those long-shots of Jen running). The story seems birthed of the same post-Toelkein, Joseph Campbell-ian spirit of the ’70s that Star Wars was, focusing as it does on an invented universal myth. And it’s a myth that comes complete with a New Age-y lesson about living with others that wouldn’t be out of place on Sesame Street.
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Who knew a cautionary tale about illegal river pollution could be this wildly entertaining? In 2000, an American on a South Korean military base instructs his employee to empty hundreds of old, dusty bottles of formaldehyde into the Han River against regulation and, six years, later, a gigantic monster emerges to wreak havoc.

Said monster is an interesting looking creature. About the size of a small bus and tadpole shaped, it has two massive frog-like legs, a long, whip-like prehensile tail and a half-dozen other little tails jutting off it’s hulking body.

It’s impressively designed and even more impressively rendered on computer. Director Bong Joon-ho eschews the Jaws/Alien strategy of hiding the monster through most of the movie to build suspense; this amphibious beast emerges almost immediately, and engages a thrilling, broad daylight attack on a crowd of people enjoying the river. Bong’s confident in his monster–no hiding him in rain, darkness or fog ala the Jurassic Parks or that Godzilla abomination–the river monster is on full display throughout, and the animation holds up incredibly well, through the very end of the film (Its death scene is less than convincing in its veracity, but then, the movie’s over at that point anyway).
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I imagine I would have learned to spell and read and count just fine without the Muppets, just as I would have whiled away hours watching something else on television without Jim Henson there to provide it for me, but, as it turns out, my life was enormously impacted by the man who gave life to a sock-like frog.

I learned to count with the Count, and to spell with Oscar, Big Bird and Cookie Monster.

I learned about getting along with others (and about gay people) with Bert and Ernie.

The first prime-time show I remember watching with my family was The Muppet Show, which also introduced me to my first celebrities.

I used to be afraid of Skekses from The Dark Crystal stealing me from my bed during naptime.
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Julianne Nicholson, probably best known for her role as the hard-nosed, pixie-haired Detective Wheeler on Law and Order: Criminal Intent, is Nicole Reilly, a freckle-faced, devout Catholic New York transplant from Missoula. She has a drawer full of flannel pajamas, although she never wears them herself.

“I guess someone told my dad that girls liked flannel pajamas,” she explains to smooth-talking PR guy Stuart Sawyer (Weeds‘ Justin Kirk), “and nobody ever told him any different.” The exchange is just one small part of their courtship, an interesting moment in the relationship that the film chronicles, but is it the most important moment in the film?

No, not really. So why’s it called Flannel Pajamas? I don’t know – because Nicole and Stuart is a stupid name for a movie?
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If you go to the Wexner Center to watch this documentary about the Chinese clothing factories that provide the West with jeans, be careful what you wear to the screening.

If you’re wearing jeans or denim while you’re sitting there watching the story of Little Jasmine unspool, you’ll probably start to feel uncomfortable about ten minutes into it.

By the time the credits roll and the lights come on, you may feel more comfortable walking out of the theater in your underwear than in jeans that so many Chinese women suffered to put into your wardrobe.
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The legendary soldier culture of ancient Sparta and its battle at Thermopylae provided the perfect subject matter for comic book creator Frank Miller, an ideal story through which to express his manly-man worldview, his penchant for arresting violence and his increasingly right-leaning politics.

The former Batman and Daredevil artist tackled the topic in his late ‘90s graphic novel 300, and now writer/director Zack Snyder (he of the Dawn of the Dead remake) has turned it into a feature film, closely following Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City formula of sticking as close to the source material as possible, and doing most of the work in front of green screens.

It’s hard to imagine a more slavish adaptation. Snyder seems to have used the graphic novel as storyboards, and he’s lovingly re-created whole panels from it. He and his three-person screenwriting team have transposed all of the narration and dialogue, for the most party word for word. Absolutely nothing is subtracted from Miller’s comics, and relatively little is added or changed.
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“There’s something quite delicious about writing the first words of a story, ” the accented voice of Renée Zellweger rings out at the very beginning of Miss Potter, “you never quite know where they’ll take you.”

That might very well be true for a lot of writers, including the one she plays here, but it certainly doesn’t apply to this particular story. Given that Zellweger stars as Beatrix Potter, one of the most revered children’s authors and artists of the last century, we know exactly where this story will take us.

So there’s very little in the way of suspense in the early scenes of the prosaically titled Miss Potter (Wouldn’t The Tale of Beatrix Potter have been a more appropriate title, given the strict formula after which she titled almost every one of her own stories?).
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David Fincher has a lot to answer for.

While he’s not directly responsible for all of the formulaic, empty-headed serial killer and horror movies of the past decade, his stylishly directed 1995 Se7en proved so popular and influential that it heavily informed just about every movie about someone killing someone else that came after it.

In the absence of an apology, I’ll gladly settle for Zodiac, which sees Fincher returning to the subject matter that made him his name, but rather than a dour and demented creepshow, it’s a well-acted period piece police procedural; an endless episode of Law and Order with seventies style and occasionally virtuoso visuals packed between the suspect interviews of ever-changing date-stamps.
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MP3: “Stackolee” by Samuel L Jackson

Craig Brewer follows his 2005 critical darling Hustle & Flow with a deeply weird but ultimately (and improbably) fun and funny film, one which seems to need it’s own new genre just to be classified in—call it inspirational exploitation.

The title refers to one of the main characters’ name for the voice in his head that calls up negative emotions and can’t be dismissed, although drink, the blues and the friendship of someone similarly afflicted can certainly help drown it out.

It’s a voice that Christina Ricci’s sexually-abused Rae is pretty familiar with, and for her it means ominous flashbacks that somehow translate into a sort of raging, painful nymphomania that nothing save doing it with whoever’s nearest can calm.

I don’t know enough about human psychology to speak to how accurate Brewer’s take on the causes and symptoms of nymphomania really is, but my initial reaction is that it can’t be very; he studiously avoids ever actually using the word “nymphomania,” contributing to the tall tale-like unreality of the film, which is full of superstitious characters.
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