Reflections on a Sunday Evening

I love Twitter, am on it every day, and always get a kick out of interacting. Having said that, at least once a week, I am privy to conversations that have no reason to be in a public forum. I have no examples to provide here--partly because I don't recall the specific instances, and partly because it would be hypocritical to rehash things I shouldn't be seeing to begin with--but it's always borderline obnoxious when I read, for example, various film writers sniping at each other in ways that should be kept to face-to-face conversations or phone calls. Hell, use IM if you want to bitch at someone else. Twitter's not the worst place for this kind of thing, but it always makes me feel uncomfortable.

...I know it's common every once in a while for there to be backlashes against popular culture standbys, but after watching some 1980s-era animated movies this weekend, Pixar needs to be kept out of it. Yes, if you read this blog, you know I am a Pixar apologist (well, not completely; I have little love for Cars and cannot muster up excitement for its sequel), but the movies I've seen this weekend--including Balto, The Land Before Time, and Oliver and Company--prove that Toy Story is not only a clearly influential film on a new type of animation, but is a truly unique, special, and brilliant film. The animation in the three older films is flat and dreary; the scripts are catered to children only, and stupid ones; the characters are bland. Nothing in these films is worth pointing out. Clearly, things changed with The Little Mermaid in 1989, and last year's The Princess and the Frog proved that great animated films don't have to be done by computers all the time; still, these three movies filled me with more respect for Pixar than ever before.

...It is incredibly disheartening to think that nearly 30 days will go by with nothing in multiplexes that I want to see. There's The Town and The Social Network, but that's it for the next 8 weeks or so. And the arthouse cinema is too far to justify a casual drive. Pity.

...The same goes for television. Aside from Mad Men, Louie, and Childrens Hospital, the TV world is slow going for another month. Doldrums of August indeed.

The Kids Are All Right

I don't like Julianne Moore or Annette Bening. Not as people, of course, but as actresses. While they are two of the better-known actresses over the age of 40 these days, I find them both to be extremely mannered on screen. To put it simply, when I watch them, I can see them acting. There are exceptions, of course--I love, love, LOVE Far From Heaven--but for the most part, these two are like nails on a chalkboard. So put them together as a lesbian couple with two teenage kids, as the main characters of their own movie, and you can imagine how excited I am. But, as I referenced in my previous post, the film of which I speak, The Kids Are All Right, is getting rave reviews, has done well at the box office, and will likely be a contender for Best Picture at next year's Oscars. I rarely avoid Oscar-bait movies, even if I'm not excited, so it was with trepidation that I saw the film last night.

While I was relatively lukewarm on the overall movie--mainly thanks to the funny but weak script by director Lisa Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg--I'll say that, with no reservations, Bening and Moore were both excellent. They played characters who I'm pretty sure I wouldn't ever want to spend time with, but they were great. The entire cast of the film--specifically Bening, Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Josh Hutcherson, and Mia Wasikowska--is great, but they are woefully underserved by the script. The plot of the film is high-concept, very 21st century, and also nothing more than a high concept: Bening and Moore play Nic and Jules, a married couple with two kids, Joni and Laser. Laser wants to know about the man whose sperm was used to conceive both kids, so Joni, who's older, gets in contact with him. Paul, a charming, rumpled restaurant owner, is the man in question, immediately charms his way into the family and ruffles Nic's feathers in the process.

I don't have a problem with a slight plot; what I have a problem with is how poorly developed each character is. Nic is a doctor, but she's mostly identified by being dominant in her relationships to the point of nearly coming off as a monster in some scenes. Jules is a flighty person, flitting from job to job; now, she's starting a landscape design company but even that may fall through. Paul owns a restaurant and likes to talk about himself. Again, one-dimensional characters aren't uncommon to Hollywood movies (and make no mistake, indie cred or not, this is a Hollywood movie through and through), but it's hard for me to buy some of the decisions the characters make with bare-minimum backstories.

Still, mostly thanks to some well-timed humor throughout and the sheer charm oozing from the five leads, The Kids Are All Right nearly manages to gloss over its flaws. Ruffalo has always seemed like something of a troublemaker in the movies he stars in--a notable exception is his performance in the superb Zodiac--and the role of Paul provides him plenty of room to make mayhem; it's subtle, but he's wreaking havoc with each move he makes in this family. Moore does a better job than expected as Jules, someone who's known better for being pretty than for being smart and has just realized it. Bening is also remarkable, but not surprising, as such a hard and harsh mother. Wasikowska and Hutcherson are both very good, but they lose out most of the five characters, having been given subplots that go nowhere. Joni, we are told by her friend, likes a certain boy, but that doesn't even get out of the gate; Laser's saddled with a friend who's a jerk (and wants to urinate on dogs, which is just charming), and his parents thinking he's gay. Wasikowska and Hutcherson do a great job acting like siblings, but they've got far too little to do.

There's no question that The Kids Are All Right is a movie that's worth watching; whether it's worth you paying money in the theater is up for debate. If you're turned off by gay people--well, get over it, please, it's the 21st century; having said that, this movie is barely about gay marriage and never flaunts Nic and Jules as a standard for being the right way to have a gay marriage work. The Kids Are All Right isn't as good as some people think it is, but it's also not as bad as I'd thought it would be. Movies don't often exceed our expectations, so it's nice that it happens once in a while.

In Which I Memorialize the Summer Movie Season

Though it's become something of a cliche to say so, the 2010 summer movie season was, for the most part, a complete wash. I say it's a bit of a cliche not because people have been saying this about the last few months' worth of films (though they have). It's a cliche because someone feels the need to say this about ANY summer movie season, at least within the past decade or so. I post this on a day when five--count 'em, five--new movies were released at the box office, and if one of them makes more than $15 million, it'll be lucky. The summer season is officially over, and it went out whimpering.

Of course, there were highlights. Most summer movie seasons aren't perfect--2005 and 2006, if I remember correctly, were particularly boring--and 2010 had three truly great films, films I'm going to be thinking about years from now: Toy Story 3, Inception, and Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World. Each offered something different; two of them are among the most successful films of the year, while the latter is going to be a box-office dud. None will be forgotten--though it could be successfully argued that Scott Pilgrim won't be forgotten because its most ardent fans (by which I mean geeks) won't let you forget.

Unfortunately, based on where I live and where all the independent films get shown, I can only cop to having seen one of the big indie films of the last few months in theaters, and I did so just last night--The Kids Are All Right. I went in knowing that this was a movie I am supposed to see. Why? A) I'm a movie lover. B) I'm liberal and, what's more, a supporter of gay marriage and gay families. C) Relating to the first reason, this is a movie that's probably going to get nominated for Best Picture at the next Oscars ceremony. So why was I dreading it? Over the years, with few exceptions, I've come to loathe two of its leads, Annette Bening and Julianne Moore.

I'll get into a more detailed opinion of the film in a following post (short answer: Bening and Moore were much better than I've seen them in a while, but the movie is just...well, all right), but movies like Cyrus, Winter's Bone, and Get Low (all of which I want to see) will probably have to wait for Netflix. Maybe the worst realization I came to this summer, one that was a gradual notice, is that I am officially an old man. I saw, really, a handful of movies at the multiplexes: Iron Man 2, Get Him To The Greek, Toy Story 3, Inception, The Other Guys, and Scott Pilgrim are the ones I can remember off-hand as being, at the very least, OK. Movies like Eclipse or Robin Hood or even Salt have just not stoked my interest.

The problem is simple: there was nothing to get excited for this summer save for the three movies I loved and the latest installment in Marvel's attempt to make movies out of every comic-book hero they've ever invented. Iron Man 2 was good, but it wasn't close to the first film, something I came to accept in the days after seeing it. In the next few summers, there will be major tentpole films that I can't wait for: the next Star Trek film, the final Harry Potter film, the third Batman movie, pretty much anything Pixar makes, and so on. But a large majority of the movies that hit or were supposed to hit big this year were so drab, so dull, that they left me cold.

The advantage there, of course, is that those movies not only pale in comparison to my three favorites of the summer, but they also elevate those films in my mind. We always say that, with each subsequent entry from Pixar Animation Studios, the bar is set too high for them to reach. How can a movie hope to equal the emotion of the opening sequence of Up? The answer is provided in the final 15 minutes of Toy Story 3, a movie that had me doing something I don't ever do at movies: cry. It's a testament to the film's director and writer, Lee Unkrich and Michael Arndt, respectively, that the landfill sequence--and yeah, spoilers--is as emotionally taxing as the following scene where the toys are played with for one last time by Andy.

It's a Disney movie. It's beloved characters like Woody and Buzz Lightyear. There is, of course, absolutely no way that they're going to get incinerated in a fiery pit at the end of the third installment of one of the most popular franchises of the past 20 years. But damned if I wasn't freaking out in my seat, wondering how the hell they'd get out of it. Of course, the solution is not only fitting to the series, but one of the great movie moments of the year, as rousing and satisfying a moment as Joseph Gordon-Levitt's zero-gravity fight in Inception. What Toy Story 3 did was something no other third movie in a trilogy can say it's done: stuck the landing without any problems.

Inception is completely different, an electrifying, dazzling film that's able to entertain without being idiotic. People have complained about the dreams not being dreamlike enough (the answer to which is clearly spelled out in the film--if the dreams ARE too dreamlike, the mark's subconscious will realize it and attack the dream thieves), about there either not being an emotional core or it not being emotional enough (a problem I did not have, and one that I find interesting--how often do we complain about our summer movies not having enough heart?), and about the characters not being fully drawn (a fair point, but there's a reason for it, I think). What the naysayers are ignoring is the sheer audacity Christopher Nolan has to create a full-blown spectacle with the mind of a low-budget psychological thriller. Folding cities in half, snowbound gun battles (and yeah, that scene works very well for me), zero gravity, spinning tops, and another soulful Leonardo DiCaprio performance; where else do you get a movie with a huge budget that's about solving the problem of spousal guilt?

I've explained in a recent review at Box Office Prophets about how much I love Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, but a quick recap: you don't have to love comic books, you don't have to love video games, you don't even have to love Michael Cera. Do you love movies? Watch this one. It's made by a man who is clearly in love with the art of filmmaking, and it's also a film that can tip its hat to popular culture in many ways without being just a pastiche of movies, music, video games, television shows, and graphic novels. Edgar Wright is as impressive here as Nolan is in Inception or, reaching further back, Paul Thomas Anderson is in There Will Be Blood in being a confident, assured, and wildly talented director who's finally made the movie he's been working towards for a long time.

The summer movie season, yes, is a wash. That the three films I've just highlighted got greenlit by studios, and were made without any studio interference, is lucky for all of us. You may not love the three films I've gone over here, but they made my summer movie season worth sticking around for. Fingers crossed that the fall movie season picks up the slack.