..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..RJ Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

Kung Fu Panda
plus You Don't Mess With The Zohan, Mongol, 'Tis Autumn,
and At The Death House Door
Plus Quick Hits On This Week's DVDs, including The Dirty Harry Box & 7 Blu-rays
from Paramount


KUNG FU PANDA (Three stars)
U.S.; Directors: John Stevenson, Mark Osborne.
Script: Jonathan Aibel, Glenn Berger. (DreamWorks/Paramount)

Kung Fu Panda, which I enjoyed, initially sounds like a one-joke comedy -- all about a plump and dumpy kung fu-loving panda who sounds like Jack Black and eventually turns the tables and kicks cartoon animal butt. The Karate Kid meets The Forbidden Kingdom? But there‘s more to the package than that. This DreamWorks movie looks great and, though it’s not especially witty or imaginative, the production people and voice actors put it across.

This new-style feature cartoon, with its gorgeous computer effects and drawing (the character art was by Nicolas Marlet and the production design and art direction by Raymond Zibach and Tang Heng) , and its all-star cast (including Angelina Jolie, Dustin Hoffman and Jackie Chan) is a far cry from the heyday of the old classic Disney period.

But it shares with the Disney of 1937-42 (the glory years from Snow White to Bambi) a real sense of art and beauty that cartoon features don’t always strive for. It’s not smart-alecky or too au courant. And even if that may hurt a bit with audiences who love The Bee Movie on one hand, or Persepolis on the other, scene after scene keeps knocking your eyes out: bejeweled temples, vast mountain staircases, halcyon landscapes rolling by like old Chinese scroll paintings.

The movie is cuter and prettier -- and even more exciting -- than it is funny. But that’s not necessarily bad. Along with their company/crew, directors John Stevenson and Mark Osborne (the latter made the much-awarded short, More) elaborate well. They plop us down in a DreamWorks version of ancient China, and they give us this fuzzy-wuzzy cartoon panda named Po voiced by Black: a big cuddly bear with a yen to be a kung fu star, stuck in a boring job at the noodle shop of his fussbudget dad, Ping, the goose (James Hong).

(Ed Note: Does an animated film need SPOILER WARNINGS? If so, beware until the next to last paragraph.)

Thanks to a series of coincidences, Po, while trying to kibitz on a Dragon Warrior ceremony, held by the wise old kung fu turtle Oogway (played by renowned Shakespearean stage actor Randall Duk Kim) , suddenly finds himself actually designated the new Dragon Warrior despite his unprepossessing black and white big fuzzy belly, and pretty complete lack of co-ordination, knowledge and skill. Naturally, his unaccountable victory tics off Po‘s rivals (and idols), who didn’t even know who the hell he is: the Furious Five. (What, no Grandmaster Flash?)

This perturbed quintet consists of Angelina Jolie as the lithe Tigress, Jackie Chan as the mischievous Monkey, Lucy Liu as the venomous Viper, David Cross as the soaring Crane and, in the role he was born to play, Seth Rogen as the nimble Mantis. (Who would have thought that the screen’s perfect mantis resided within the more panda-ish exterior of Knocked Up‘s sloppy Romeo? Bring on more mantis roles for this guy immediately, starting off with a remake of 1957‘s Universal shocker The Deadly Mantis. I can’t wait to see what Rogen does with D.M.‘s death scene in the Holland Tunnel.

Anyway, while the Furious Five furiously seethe, we watch Po learn martial arts from the Five’s teacher, the wise but impatient old red panda sage Shifu (Dustin Hoffman), as Po suddenly digs how to manipulate his panda bulk and bash the bad guys -- the main bad guy being Tai Lung the nasty Snow Leopard (Deadwood’s Ian McShane), who’s been sneering and taunting viciously and kicking the stuffing out of everyone, including Shifu. Rope bridges crumble. Cliffs hang. Will Po the Kung Fu Panda finally triumph? Will real life snow leopards, an endangered species, survive this insult to their species? Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?

 So much for the story. I wish Kung Fu Panda had cleverer dialogue and snappier patter. The Furious Five, despite my kidding of Rogen, are so colorlessly written, it’s hard to remember them. The best vocal characterization in the film, besides Hoffman and Black -- who was born to play a panda -- is by the venerable James Hong (a veteran of Blood Alley and Love is a Many Splendored Thing), who really puts a charge into the line when he, Father Goose, stares at his panda son and says that there’s something he’s been meaning to tell him.

Kung Fu Panda can be excused any sins because the cast is so likable, and the visuals so marvelous. Sometimes we forget how beautiful animated movies can be -- the recent Kino releases of Kihachiro Kawamoto’s animated short films and his Book of the Dead are reminders -- but the best of Kung Fu Panda brings it back.



YOU DON’T MESS WITH THE ZOHAN (Two stars)
U.S.; Director: Dennis Dugan.
Script: Adam Sandler, Robert Smigel, Judd Apatow. (Columbia)

In You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, a movie I didn’t find very funny, Adam Sandler plays a character whose aspirations and dramatic arc are the opposite of Po the Kung Fu Panda‘s. Zohan is an ace Israeli anti-terrorist commando who yearns to escape his world of endless martial arts and James Bond action, his long-running feud with super-terrorist The Phantom (John Turturro) and his constant effortless affairs with bodacious beach babes to be a hairstylist for old ladies in America. What a mensch!

So Zohan (or The Zohan as he’s better known) fakes his own death after another battle royal with the Phantom, and sneaks into New York, where, under the nom de shampoo Scrappy Coco (borrowed from two airborne dogs) Zohan gets a job teasing hair and old ladies at a Palestinian-American salon in a mixed Israeli-Palestinian neighborhood, woos the owner Dalia (Emmanuelle Chriqui), rolls in the hay with his shy roomie Michael’s ample mother (Lainie Kazan), becomes the rage of the salon‘s older female clients (the ones who haven’t been scooped up by Max Bialystock) and is recognized by so many people - including Salim, the vengeful cab driver (Rob Schneider) and Oori, the disco guy - that soon the Phantom is on his trail again.

This is the kind of movie that casts Mariah Carey, and then wastes her. The all-time pop music single champ, for some reason, is not even given as good a showcase as the movie parts Col. Parker used to dredge up for previous singles champ, Elvis, in his sad later Hollywood career. And there is a special cameo for The Zohan’s cod-piece, an immense supporting player/appendage that seems calculated to make Borat weep with envy.

Now, “The Zohan actually seems to have a comic pedigree. Director Dennis Dugan has guided Sandler to other profitable misadventures (like Happy Gilmore). And one of Sandler’s co writers here is Judd Apatow, Seth “Mantis Rogen’s mentor, and a man now engaged in a one-person campaign to out-Farrelly the Farrelly Brothers. If anyone can tame Sandler, it should have been his ex-roommate Apatow -- who has recently issued an interview describing Sandler’s gift for instant masturbation, something the Zohan spares us here. (We aren’t spared much else.)

I didn’t laugh much at this movie. But don’t listen to me. Millions will. And I do approve of the movie‘s message. Israelis and Palestinians should end the bloodshed and unite in peace and understanding -- even if it’s only to make bad movies together. Eat your heart out, Borat.


 
MONGOL (Four stars)
Russia; Director: Sergei Bodrov.
Script: Arif Aliyev, Bodrov. (Picturehouse)

Sergei Bodrov’s Mongol, which is based on the early life of Genghis Khan, is a really fascinating historical saga: a movie that combines epic sweep and adventure with psychological depth and dramatic intensity. It’s a movie that can hypnotize you. Shot on location on the Mongolian plains --a stark, intimidating wilderness where vast stretches of empty-looking land are traversed occasionally by riders and horses, and where forests and rivers lie under a seemingly limitless sky -- Bodrov’s movie, which was one of the five Oscar nominees for foreign language films, has the huge appeal of one of the great, visually majestic “adult Westerns, like Red River, The Searchers, The Big Country or Little Big Man (or of the great Japanese historical samurai epics like Seven Samurai or Chushingura).

A large part of what grips you as you watch is the way the movie upsets our expectations, taking a real-life figure almost universally regarded in the West as a villain -- the Mongolian general-conqueror Genghis Khan -- and presenting him instead as a genuine hero, a seemingly good man who never forfeits our sympathies and whose motives rarely seem dark or sinister.

Of course, history is largely written by the winners, and it’s a fact that, among Mongolian and Asian people (including the Japanese and Korean, who claim him for their own,) Genghis Khan is often seen as a hero, in much the way Alexander the Great or Napoleon are at least semi heroes in the west. That’s the legendry on which Bodrov draws even though in his native country, Russia, Khan is seen as a brutal, murderous conqueror who subjugated the peoples he invaded.

But Bodrov is after something different that the usual historical movie score-settling. He wants to show us a mystery: a man of nearly unfathomable density and extraordinary achievements, and he also wants us to speculate with him on why and how Khan did what he did. In doing this, Bodrov goes to the historical record. Some, though not all, of what he shows, comes from that record (such as it is) and from the legends it inspired. So what we get here is a mixture of a Beowulf-like saga with something like the Life of Napoleon -- told from Beowulf’s or Napoleon’s point of view.

Bodrov is immeasurably aided by his star: Tadanobu Asano, the Japanese actor whom he’s chosen to play Khan, or “Temudgin, the name by which he’s known as a child and young man. Asana -- who played in Takesho Kitano’s Zatoichi -- is an actor of remarkable gravity and quietude. He has the face and bearing of a hero; he carries himself with almost mythic-seeming resolve, but without narcissism. Again atypically, Bodrov shows us Temudgin, not in a string of glorious victories, but during a period when he knew mostly defeat and subjugation himself: from 1172, when he was nine, to his first great solo victory against the combined forces of Temudgin’s virulent enemy Targutai (Amadu Mamadakov) and his onetime blood brother, the man he loves and respects most, Jamukha (Honglei Sun).
    
For most of the film we see Genghis Khan -- who has been played in movies by actor-heroes as various as Omar Sharif and John Wayne -- not as the mature conqueror and world-strider, but as a boy and young man, often on the run. In the film’s first scene, the young Temudgin, son of his clan’s leader Esugei (Ba Sen), loses his father to poison (and good manners) and then becomes the victim of a usurper, Targutai, who soon afterwards, takes over Esugei’s clan, defies Esugei’s wife (and Temudgin’s mother) Oleun (Aliya), loots Esugei’s goods and livestock, and turns Temudgin into a fugitive.
    
It is the young Jamukha whom Temudgin meets on the road, who saves the boy wanderer, and who later, as a man and a powerful leader himself, throws his own clan into battle to help his friend -- to help rescue Temudgin’s promised wife Borte (Khulan Chuluun) from her old clan, the Merkits.
    
A powerful triangle emerges. Jamukha loves Temudgin, the blood-brother whom he wants to be his second-in-command. And Temudgin loves Borte, whom he first chose as his bride when he was nine and she ten, shortly before Esugei’s murder -- and who has remained faithful to him, as best she could, even when the two are separated by imprisonment or are hundreds of miles apart. It’s a savagely emotional but outwardly restrained triangle, and all three actors play it to the hilt --especially the Chinese star Sun (a magnetic, smiling Jean Reno type, who co-starred in Zhang Yimou’s The Road Home). Yet it is crucial that Temudgin, until the end, and the last heart-stirring battle scene, never has the upper hand. It as if we were watching our Napoleon-Beowulf as the Count of Monte Cristo, with much of the biography taking place in the awful prison, the Chateau d’If.
    
Bodrov sets and tells his epic wonderfully well. He didn’t convince me that the real-life Khan was the hero he celebrated, but he does make it a matter open to more debate. And the movie’s somewhat fictionalized young Khan, Temudgin the Mongol, is certainly a hero, just as the Ringo Kid, Ben-Hur and Marshall Will in “High Noon all are. “Mongol is powerfully written, splendidly acted and directed and beautifully photographed -- by the Dutch Rogier Stoffers (“Character) and, in the second half, by the Russian Sergey Trofimov, of the “Night and “Day Watch films.
    
I watched Mongol at times, entranced by the sheer force and grace of the narrative, spellbound, as if at a story one has heard a hundred times before, but never tires of. Yet the world that Bodrov shows us here, though ancient and eternal-looking, will be new to most of us (even if we‘ve seen films like Close to Eden or Tuya‘s Marriage), but also familiar as a canvas. It’s Mongolia as it was in the twelfth century, but it’s also the classic fantasy-world of the epic, the Western, the historical adventure. It‘s a strange land in which we are both witnesses and strangers here ourselves, and in which we watch another people, whose lives drench us with emotion, and a hero whose shadow looms large on the turbulent battlegrounds and the immense, dangerous plains.



‘TIS AUTUMN: THE SEARCH FOR JACKIE PARIS (Two and a half stars)
U.S.; Raymond De Felitta.

He had one of those voices you can’t forget: Jackie Paris, an Italian-American bebop crooner of Tony Bennett’s generation, much admired (and hired) by legendary fellow boppers like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, singers like Peggy Lee and colleagues and would-be patrons like Lenny Bruce. But Jackie’s precious few classic albums (and his all-time stellar recording of “Skylark ) were neglected, his jazz poll victories forgotten. In the 60s, his gigs dried up, his recording sessions vanished. His admirer (and this film‘s director) De Fellita thought he was dead when he suddenly found him trying a comeback at a New York club date.

This movie would have attempted to revive his career (as Alberta Hunter’s late career and others have been saved). But Jackie died before that could happen; the film becomes a memorial and a tribute. Some praise here seems too fulsome; Jackie’s singing is not a combo of Sinatra’s swing and Ella’s bop. But it’s good to hear these songs again. Note: Whoever puts out the DVD version of “’Tis Autumn has to box it with a CD of Jackie’s best album cuts.

 

AT THE DEATH HOUSE DOOR (Three stars)
U.S.; D: Steve James, Peter Gilbert. (Kartemquin)

A moving and effective film against capital punishment from Steve James and Peter Gilbert (co-directors on the great basketball documentary Hoop Dreams) and also from Kartemquin Films, the company of their primo left wing indie mentor Gordon Quinn (whom Bob Dylan once dubbed "The Mighty Quinn"). The two main subjects here are the laconic westerner Rev. Carroll Pickett, the death house chaplain for many years at Texas‘s execution center at Huntsville Penitentiary and a man whose views of the “virtues of capital punishment changed during that time -- and the late Carlos De Luna, who, according to reportage by the Chicago Tribune’s Maurice Possley and Steve Mills, seems pretty clearly to have been wrongly executed at Huntsville for a murder he didn’t commit (and which was confessed by another).

Done with calm, compassionate objectivity the film accomplishes its goals, artistic and social. (By the way, then Texas Governor George Bush pops up, cheerleading for lethal injection, and looking like a fool once again.)

 

MW on DVD
Picks of the Week

NEW RELEASE

There Will Be Blood (Blu-Ray) (Four stars)
U.S., Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007 (Miramax/Paramount)

One man’s history of American oil. I don’t like the ending, but it’s still a fantastic movie and an incredible acting job by Daniel Day-Lewis, channeling John Huston. By the way, you should also read Upton Sinclair‘s Oil!, the epic leftist novel that inspired this movie.

CLASSIC RELEASES

Reds (Blu-Ray) (Three and a half stars)
U.S.; Warren Beatty, 1981

Warren Beatty shakes it up with John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World. Ultimately, producer-director-co-writer-star Beatty might have been better off making his long-delayed Howard Hughes project instead, but at least it won him his Oscar. With Diane Keaton (as Reed‘s girlfriend Louise Bryant), Maureen Stapleton, Gene Hackman, Jerzy Kosinski, Jack Nicholson (as Eugene O’Neill) and “The Witnesses -- real-life interviewees from the period who really make the movie.

BOX SET

Dirty Harry Ultimate Collector’s Edition (Three and a half stars)
U.S.; Various directors. (Warner)

 I know what you’re thinking. Did he fire six shots or only five? Well, to tell the truth, in all this excitement, I kinda lost count. But, being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world….(“Dirty Harry Callahan, 1971)

 Included: Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971) (Four stars).
Magnum Force (Ted Post, 1973) (Three stars).
The Enforcer (James Fargo, 1976) Three stars)
Sudden Impact (Clint Eastwood, 1983) (Three and a half stars).
The Dead Pool (Buddy Van Horn, 1988) (Two and a half stars).

ALSO RECOMMENDED:

Flags of Our Fathers (Blu-Ray) Four stars
(U.S.; Clint Eastwood, 2006)

Babel (Blu-Ray) Three and a half stars
U.S.; Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu, 2006

The Untouchables (Blu-Ray) (Special Collector‘s Edition) Four stars
U.S.; Brian De Palma 1987.

Diva Three and a half stars
France; Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1982

Patton (Blu-Ray) (U.S.; Franklin Schaffner, 1970) Four stars.

The Sand Pebbles (Blu-ray) (U.S.; Robert Wise, 1966) Three and a half stars.

The Stan Laurel Collection 2 Three stars
U.S.; Various directors, 1918-1926 (Kino)
21 comedy shorts.

- Michael Wilmington
June 5, 2008

May 29: Sex & The City, The Strangers, Irina Palm, The Fall
May 22: Indiana Jones 4, Postal, Contempt
May 15: Prince Caspian, How The Garcia Girls Spent Their Vacation, DVD: Indiana Jones Collection
May 8: Speed Racer , Redbelt, What Happens In Vegas
May 1: Iron Man, Son Of Rambow, Flight of The Red Balloon
April 24: Tuya's Marriage, Chapter 27
April 17: My Blueberry Nights
April 10: Shine A Light, Plus Young @ Heart, Smart People, and The Forbidden Kingdom

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