Film #47 - ParaNorman

What is there to say about ParaNorman, the new animated kids horror-comedy heavily touting itself as being from the makers of Coraline. Well, firstly that it’s no Coraline, though at least you can see that it’s trying to wear get up from the same costume chest.

Right from the opening moments, it’s clear that ParaNorman doesn’t quite have what it takes. It just doesn’t seem to understand the world at all. The jokes aren’t funny, the drama is overwrought, the characters run into clichés very quickly if they didn’t begin that way. If it weren’t a movie specifically intended for kids, a reviewer could get very frustrated.

All of that said, ParaNorman isn’t exactly bad so much as it isn’t much of anything.

The plot runs thus: Norman Babcock (voiced by the now ubiquitous Kodi Smit-McPhee) is a tween much maligned in in his home town of Blithe Hollow for his ability to speak to the dearly departed. When his uncle (John Goodman, having more fun than anyone else here), who shares his talent, passes away, it is revealed that Norman is the heir to the legacy of annually preventing the awakening of a centuries old witch, whose backstory is also the town’s primary tourist attraction, and a small army of zombie Puritans. Of course, inevitably the witch’s curse is activated and Norman must ally himself with a team of unlikely helpers to force the witch back into her grave before she destroys the entire town.

Yes, the fat nerd has a heart of gold. Try and look surprised.

It sounds like a solid enough plot and with a few elements in play to make it different from every other film with a similar story, it may have worked. Sadly,  the elements of ParaNorman that do stand apart are largely minor and often not targeted at the child audience.

What is perhaps an eyebrow raiser is how cynical the film is for a children’s movie. It is absolutely assumed that people will always act at their worst; the adults are wan, drawn and thwarted and very little hope for anything better break through, even in the denouement.

That’s potentially interesting, given the subtext of the film is about the relationships between bullies and victims, including some fairly cloying but not inaccurate commentary about how those roles can sometimes be reversed.

Also, somewhat surprising is the frank take the film has on child sexuality where Norman’s putative friend Neil (Tucker Albrizzi) is very clearly shown as having an overt sexual interest in adult women and whose older brother  Mitch (Casey Affleck) is openly goggled as a sexual object, including gratuitous underwear and towel-clad sequences.

It's important to teach kids poor body image from an early age.
Presumably the terrible hair is to distract you from his underwear?

Considering Neil’s aerobics models asses and jock brother Mitch’s shirtlessness are both animated, it’s less likely they’ve been thrown in to titillate the young audience so much as that filmmakers Chris Butler and Sam Fell simply assume that these are already quotidian aspects of their lives. I’m not sure I entirely disagree.

It is worth mentioning briefly the visual of the film which is actually fairly impressive as it blends CGI, modelwork and, if I'm not mistaken, even some live shooting. the supernatural touches as the witch's curse really takes over the town are particularly well-flourished and Norman's final confrontation with her is as visually satisfying as the cryptic finale of an anime piece. Presuming you like that stuff.

Indeed, to be fair to ParaNorman, it handles visuals and action sequences fairly well, which is perhaps its real hand-me-down from Coraline, given that the theme and setting didn't gel. The third act, where events go truly paranormal, is certainly the saving grace of the film. There’s just not enough here to recommend this for anything above DVD viewing.

Film #46 - For A Good Time, Call

It would be tempting to give Bridesmaids the credit for a film like For A Good Time, Call but it was apparent from the Q&A after this sneak preview in Toronto last night that the script had been kicking around for a lot longer than that.

Instead it’s probably more a case of Bridesmaids’ success finally proving to the marketing geniuses that there really is an audience out there for films about the sexier, sillier side of the female experience and the barriers that stopped films like FAGTC emerging earlier have finally started to emerge.

Sorry, I have a personal cross to bear with the idea that the marketing department should be the final say in whether a film gets green lit or not.

While we’re on personal disclosure, I was at this screening as the guest of one of the stars/co-writer’s relatives. So, if you think that will bias my opinion, you should probably know that in advance.

Ignore the pink phone and the landline, this film is
actually not set in the 90s. I had thought phone sex itself was
set in the 90s but my lady friends tell me I'm wrong

For A Good Time, Call concerns itself with the affairs of Lauren (Lauren Miller) and Katie (Ari Graynor) who, despite hating each other, are forced to live together as a result of socio-economic circumstances. The initially frigid relationship between the two begins to thaw when the uptight Lauren discovers that the free-wheeling Katie is making bank on the side by working for a phone sex line. Applying her business acumen to the idea, Lauren soon figures out how to set Katie up her own sex line and gets drawn into a world of sexual exploration she had never dreamed of entering.

The hook for the story, and most of the best jokes, revolves around the sex, the perverted things men ask of the women and their reactions to them. But, just like Bridesmaids is not about weddings, the phone sex line is not the real subject of the film.

2012 has been a good year for mainstream films giving greater dimension to traditionally clichéd female relationship with Snow White and the Huntsman tackling female rivalry and Brave handling mother-daughter relationship. For A Good Time Call continues the trend with its treatment of arguably one of the most portrayed and most unexplored questions: what makes women friends?  Focusing on the start of the real relationship between these women makes this less of an indie version of Bridesmaids though and more of a female version of I Love You Man.

Lauren is secretly glad her housemate
has never heard of Cam4

Sadly, For A Good Time Call is far from a definitive voice on the subject. Although the pacing of the relationship of the women is well managed there’s a slight sense that we’re on rails here and their friendship blossoms because it is a story requirement rather than because the writers have anything greater to say about the subject. This is particularly noticeable around the second act turning point where all of the story elements we expect to play out did indeed play out in exactly the sequence we expected.

That again I suspect is less of an issue with the writers themselves than with the notes they’ve received as most of the script is very polished and feels as natural as one of this genre probably can. In a year where mainstream scripts have struggled with pacing and pathos, For A Good Time Call is never boring and its never a mystery as to why you might care about what happens to the two leads.

This is of course helped by the sympathetic performances coming out of Miller and Graynor, particularly in the latter’s case as she balances a tough girl exterior reminiscent of Bette Midler’s CC Bloom with a vulnerability reminiscent of Bette Midler’s CC Bloom. Girl reminded me of CC Bloom is what I’m saying here.

Although the men in the film are, without exception, inconsequential there are a number of amusing cameos from good sports like Seth Rogen, Kevin Smith and Ken Marino as some of the callers in.

It's OK, Jesse, you've set Act 1 in motion, you can leave now.

Justin Long also hangs around as Jesse, the mutual gay friend of both women who engineers their living situation in the first place but doesn’t provide much after setting events in motion. And frankly, for an actor who I seen great stuff from before, he does not acquit himself at all well here. I was wondering if Long had ever even met a gay person in his life until the Q&A afterwards revealed he based his character on the gay director, Jamie Travis. Considering we got to meet Travis in the Q&A itself I would now like to formally protest any plans Long had to play me in the biopic of my life. 

I’m sure he’s hurting.

All in all, For A Good Time Call is very sweet, often quite quite funny and an excellent debut for both Jamie Travis and a director and Lauren Miller/Katie Anne Naylon as writers. It’s not going to set the world on fire by any means but is a thoroughly enjoyable 90 minutes.

Film #45 - Boy

Kiwi director Taika Waititi’s Boy is actually two years old by this point but has only just managed to jump the Pacific for a Toronto-based release and, having been starved of Australian content for most of my time here, I was eager to see what the fuss was all about.

The fuss, of course, referring to the near-universal acclaim showered on Boy in New Zealand following its release and where it still holds the record for the highest grossing New Zealand film of all time (for obvious reasons we’re not counting Lord of The Rings under this category). Even in Australia it was regarded as one of the best films of 2010.

On the surface it may seem a bit out of proportion. Boy, after all, is a fairly standard coming-of-age yarn. The eponymous character, the 11 year old Boy (real name Alamein, and played by James Rolleston) is growing up in 1984’s Waihau Bayon New Zealand’s east coast, as the de facto primary caregiver for a large family of cousins and filling the holes in his life with fantasies about his long-absent father (also Alamein, and played by Waititi himself) and pop-star Michael Jackson. 

Poverty and chronic unemployment abound but through the prism of Boy’s imagination, it’s a fairly idyllic existence. Until the night when Alamein arrives unexpectedly back in Boy’s life and Boy begins a long coming of age where he will be forced to question everything he’s ever believe about his father and the world as he knows it.

You can see the script redrafting process at work
as this question moves out of the centre to make way for
"What kind of man will i be?"

What may make Boy such a cause celebre is just how well the individual  elements of its story are handled. 

The entire film performs a very delicate tightrope act of dramatic irony where the audience understands full well how dire Boy’s situation really is but the main character’s levels of delusion and optimism manages to keep the real world horrors of poverty, drug use, neglect, and violence at arm’s length from a story that is steeped in them.

Boy is a remarkable feat in that it’s a film that doesn’t pull any punches by pulling all of its punches.

Waititi’s previous feature, the “rom-com” Eagle vs Shark, was a master class in sheer awkwardness as the basis for comedy and Waititi builds on the tricks he deployed there to achieve even greater effect in Boy. 

Whereas EvS laid on stilted dialogue and delusion to make for jokes, the unavoidable humour they create in Boy helps to underline how serious all this stuff really is even as it makes it possible to stomach.

At its heart, Boy is a film about the way people use their delusions to stop themselves confronting their problems – and I suspect we’re specifically looking at male delusion here.

The men of 'Boy' in order of how seriously they
take this game from left to right

Alamein has fantasies of himself as a big time gangster exerting influence over his contemporaries even though he refuses to work to achieve any of his goals. 

Boy will not look past his image of a perfect father figure to see that his abusive pa has severe feet of clay. 

Even Boy’s six year old brother Rocky wraps himself up in the conviction that he has superpowers as a way of exploring his guilt over the fact their mother died during his birth.

By the film’s climax, all three will have to make a choice about whether to continue deceiving themselves and sabotaging themselves or whether to start living in the grim world the way that it actually is and the nuanced way in which each arrives at that point and what they do once there is captivating.

Seriously, sit through the credits for this sequence.

Matters are helped by the effusive performances of the main three stars which again helps to temper some of the more depressing material with a sense of zest and optimism. 

Boy and his clan may not have a lot of options on the horizon but they’re so likeable as they fail that you can’t help wanting to go along for the ride. 

Waititi, as Alamein, has the hardest job here as his character has such a damaging effect on his sons that it’s near impossible to sympathise with him as her terrorises and disappoints them but Waititi is so adept at playing up just how deeply Alamein doesn’t get it that you can at least understand his devastation at the realisation that his life has been a joke even if you can’t forgive him for it.

But as always seems to be the case with these films, it’s the kids that steal the show. And though James Rolleston’s mixture of bravura and innocence hit the target bang on, it’s Te Aho Aho Eketone-Whitu as Rocky that stayed with me after the show. For a six year old actor, Rocky comes across with more gravitas and understanding than anyone else in the film and figures out what needs to be figured out long before either Boy or Alamein.

There are women in Boy. The fact their stories are not covered
at all is, for once, not an oversight so much as a point
about the inner lives of the central characters

I suspect Boy is at least semi-autobiographical, Waititi is certainly the right age to have been Boy in 1984 and Waititi certainly captures the era in loving detail and with a verisimilitude that had me recalling moments of my own childhood on the other side of the Tasman.

Some slight caveats here. Boy is a slow burner and big on its subtlety so it’s more suited for an arthouse mindset than a cineplex one and North Americans are likely to struggle with the Kiwi accents. 

If you’re willing to adapt though, Boy is a thoroughly enjoyable, scarily accessible window onto a time and culture that feels sufficiently different to be a new experience yet familiar enough to feel like home.

Film #44 - The Dark Knight Rises

And so we get to arguably the summer’s biggest flick – the culmination to Christopher Nolan’s sprawling Gotham trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises.

By this stage both Nolan and his trilogy have had so much adulation lapping at their feet that it’s nearly impossible to say anything against The Dark Knight Rises and not come across as being a bit contrary. Yet, for all of Nolan intricate cerebral mechanics and call backs to Batman Begins and the Dark Knight, the lustre seems to be off a bit this time round and TDKR impresses more for its intellectual audacity than any visceral joy.

I know. I’m a hard man to please.

Even Bane is a fanboy

Set eight years after the events of The Dark Knight, Gotham is enjoying a precarious golden age as the city’s devotion to the deceased Harvey Dent has allowed a series of draconian laws to be quietly ushered in, breaking the Mob’s grip on the city. Batman, who took the fall for crimes Dent committed, has vanished and his alter-ego Bruce Wayne has taken on a Howard Hughes-like existence scuttling in the abandoned corridors of Wayne Manor. Gotham’s prosperity hasn’t been universal though and, as the remains of Gotham’s underworld plots to rise again, they make the mistake of hiring criminal mastermind Bane who promptly raises an army from among Gotham’s diaspora and readies them for a war much more wide-reaching than his employers have in mind. As Batman begins to re-emerge from the shadows, Bane sets his sight on breaking the Bat – in every conceivable way.

It sounds like a standalone plot, but one of TDKR’s major strengths is how well the events of the film tie into events that happened elsewhere in the trilogy, including many more references to series-starter Batman Begins that I would have expected.

But even as TDKR impresses with its grandiose vision and complexity of the trilogy as a whole, I’d argue that the potential flaws in Nolan’s vision have never been so obvious either. I say ‘potential’ because whether you regard them as flaws or not really depends on how much you’ve bought into what Nolan has been doing quietly to date but which comes back resoundingly this time around.

It almost goes without saying that Nolan’s Batman trilogy is not really about Batman at all but rather Batman merely serves as a convenient symbol for the city of Gotham itself. In Begins, the city learns to rise above the fear that has held it stagnant for decades; in The Dark Knight, it exhibits a core of goodness and hope that refuses to give in even when it has every reason to. And in TDKR it pays the brutal price for not standing up for the values it once aspired to.

It’s beautiful, laudable stuff. Nolan isn’t really making superhero films here, even as he reinvents superhero films, so much as gripping crime dramas about nations of people. The problem is, for me at least, the closer the Bat moves into symbolism, the sillier the Batman looks in reel life.

Considering how much TDKR caps off the trilogy, it’s a little odd that Nolan essentially rescinds the Batman’s use of fear and secrecy as a crowd control technique here. Batman fights in broad daylight here, one of a throng of people, his fights in the midst of audiences and appears as clearly merely a man in front of groups of citizens even as he tries to inspire with some symbolic pyromania. It may be a metaphor I just don’t get, but I just don’t get it.

I'm only using this photo to prove that Bruce
does put on the suit at some points

And he is undercut in a myriad of ways throughout TDKR. He’s barely onscreen as Bruce Wayne does most of the heavy lifting, everybody in Gotham seems to know his secret identity by now and he’s oddly ineffectual. It doesn’t help that his early set-piece brawl with Bane is portrayed in near-silence, rendering events strangely boring.

It kind of overshadows proceedings. Without anyone to really get behind in the central role, it wasn’t as absorbing an experience as watching The Dark Knight and I often felt more like a wind-up toy compelled to watch until my spring ran down than an active participant in the film’s events.

Ironically, The Dark Knight could probably have gotten away with more of this, given the mesmeric presence of The Joker to spice things up. But Bane is no Joker, with all due respect to Tom Hardy who gives his all. Between the facial expression obscuring mask and the convoluted yet seemingly directionless plot (does he achieve his goals at the midpoint? Is there more to his ambition?), he’s not given enough to be a driving force either.

She might look like a t cat, but thankfully, she doesn't think she is one.

Much more successful and more humane is Anne Hathaway’s turn as the Catwoman, who (much like Michelle Pfeiffer in Batman Returns) add a jolt of pleasure nearly every time she’s onscreen. Selena Kyle’s (she’s never referred to as Catwoman) journey throughout the film is the easiest to understand and engage with and Hathaway treads just the right line between mischievous villainy and conflicted pathos to keep us on board. Yes, Kyle is the stereotypical femme fatale but it’s not the worst cliché to throw at us and Hathaway at least gets into it with gusto.