January Variety Pack (2)

A bit later than promised, but here’s the second January Variety Pack, containing all the snap, crackle and pop you could hope for, as well as Teutonic metaphysics and an ageless gnome who’s finally getting old.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Werner Herzog is one of those film makers I’ve been aware of for a long time but whose work I’d never seen. His name triggers childhood memories of zapping into Klaus Kinski films and being weirded out by the guy, and I definitely remember hearing about the epic, ongoing on-set battles between Kinski and Herzog – but I’d never seen more than a couple of seconds of the actual films. I’d heard good things about his earlier documentary, Grizzly Man – but again, if it was ever on I missed it. Cave of Forgotten Dreams hadn’t even been shown at cinemas here when I succumbed to the post-Christmas lure of Amazon.com and went ahead and ordered the film on Blu-ray. Hey, if people praise its amazing visuals, I want all the pixels I can get, right? (No 3D, though – it’s available on the disk, but my TV don’t do three-dimensionality.)

Herzog’s a weird one, at least on the basis of this film. Much of his slow, accented voice-over is heavy on the metaphysics, and while I wouldn’t necessarily say I like it, I cannot deny that I find it compelling – right down to the surreal epilogue featuring albino alligators. It becomes even weirder when Herzog cracks a joke, in the same slow, deliberate, strangely sad voice. (Imagine a voice with a heavy German accent that’s pretty much the aural equivalent of Tommy Lee Jones’ facial expression throughout The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.

As much as Herzog puts his stamp on the film, its real star is the cave itself and its amazing paintings dating back tens of thousands of years. Not all of the individual paintings are equally fascinating, but some show striking subtlety and artistry – and they look as if someone left them there just yesterday. Herzog’s film is highly successful at evoking both the age of the cave artworks and their immediacy – freaky amphibian reptiles with blood-red eyes are just an extra. The film is enjoyable even without smoking pot or drinking a bottle of cheap-but-nice red wine beforehand.

Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol

… or MI:4, to its friends. In spite of my pretentious-yet-middle-of-the-road film geek credentials (with a few dozen Criterion editions on my shelves I cannot really deny it) I like a good action movie. I’ve enjoyed the Bourne series, Die Hard is one of my favourite Christmas flicks (right there with It’s A Wonderful Life and Nightmare Before Christmas) and I have fond memories of the Californian governor relieving Bill Paxton of his boots, clothes and motorbike.

In those terms, is Em-Aye Four a success? There are moments in the film that I’d consider among the most exciting action scenes of the last ten years. (It helps that we’ve arrived at a point where you can’t always tell a green-screen shot from stunt work.) I sat on the edge of the chair, I jumped, my pulse went up, my breath caught, just as the movie intended.

Apart from that, though, the film fails in one fundamental way: I didn’t care about any of the characters. Is the problem that Brad Bird’s first non-animated movie doesn’t know what to do with its human cast (nor, cheap joke alert!, with Tom Cruise)? Perhaps. It pays lip service to characterisation, but the motivations it provides for its protagonists are uninterestingly written and the actors don’t make them come to life. In fact, you care more about the characters when they’re not angsting about the partners they’ve lost to the job – they’re more relatable when they shut the hell up than when they open their mouths and pretend they’re real people.

For what it’s worth, MI:4 is better than John Woo’s MI:2 – but then, watching a burning dove fly past pooing itself in slow-motion fear is (marginally) better than that film. Is it on par with MI:3? I honestly couldn’t say, because for the most part J.J. Abrahams’ stab at the Missionary position self-destructed about five seconds after I exited the cinema… which is quite the achievement, admittedly, for a film featuring Phillip Seymour Hoffman.

Speaking of achievements, though, CGI has finally managed to conceal the fact that Thomas Cruise, Esq. does not age. The wrinkles that have begun to show on the Cruisester’s face look positively life-like. Will the Academy Award go to Make-Up or to Visual Effects? And is there any truth to the rumour that Cruise’s performance was motion-captured off Andy Serkis?

P.S.: For the record, I quite like Tom Cruise as an actor, when he’s got good material and is directed well – or when he shows that he’s got a sense of humour. (A bit of respecting this! and taming that! also seems to work quite well for him…)

Birds, rats and iron giants

I like Pixar movies, by and large, but I’m not as over the moon with them as many others. For one thing, I got extremely annoyed with John Lasseter when I got the Studio Ghibli films on DVD and had to sit through his patronising “My dear friend, Miyazaki-san…” and “You are very lucky…” intros; but also, I felt around Monsters Inc. and especially Finding Nemo that they were getting way too sentimental for their own good.

However, I loved The Incredibles. Yes, it also had that “family is the best” vibe that Nemo had, but it was done a lot less sappily. It was sweet but stayed quirky at the same time – and it was a lot darker in parts than Nemo – which basically did the Bambi thing by killing off Nemo’s mother, but apart from that there was little to no edge to the film. The Incredibles, on the other hand? Remember the scene when Mr. Incredible finds out what’s been happening to all the supers? Or the one where he almost kills Mirage? Also, there’s something very real about Mrs. Incredible’s fears that her husband is cheating on her – which is a fear you won’t find in many movies produced by Disney, I’d wager.

I also liked Ratatouille a lot – and there’s a subtle, quiet scene late in the film that brought a lump to my throat. I remembered that lump from another film by the same director: The Iron Giant. More than most directors of animated movies, Brad Bird is a deft hand at mixing the sentimental and the funny, real pathos and sheer goofiness. While Ratatouille is a very different film from The Iron Giant and indeed The Incredibles (the latter two go much more for the iconic, namely ’50s cold war paranoia and superheroes), all three of these films show a subtlety that is rare in American animation, so that a short, simple scene can break your heart.

The Iron Giant

I also liked Lifted, the Pixar short that was shown before Ratatouille. I hadn’t been that mad about For the Birds (shown before Monsters Inc., I think) or the jackalope one (Boundin’), since both of these got on my nerves after roughly one minute (they weren’t quite as clever or loveable as they thought they were, as far as I’m concerned), Lifted had a simplicity of story and design that worked very well for me. So, courtesy of YouTube, here’s Lifted: