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

..The Images & Trailer ..MCN Weekend ..Wilmington on DVD

Disney's A Christmas Carol
The Men Who Stare at Goats, The Fourth Kind, Paranormal Activity and 35 Shots of Rum

A Christmas Carol (Three Stars)
U.S.; Robert Zemeckis, 2009
    
Disney’s A Christmas Carol is definitely the most visually spectacular, thrill packed movie adaptation of Charles Dickens’ immortal Yuletide classic made to date. I‘ve seen Carol after Carol, as well as  many variations, from It’s a Wonderful Life to the recent fiasco Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, and this is the only one that somewhat faithfully recalls much of Dickens’ story and also manages to rival movies like The Dark Knight as an all out sensory action-nightmare assault.
     
As we watch, frequently stunned, writer-director Robert Zemeckis and his 3D/motion capture/CGI wizards keep performing prodigies of action-movie, super-fantasy technique, whizzing us over the London rooftops, dropping us into graveyards and rat-ridden streets, staging wild horse-and-buggy chases and flying to the moon and back. All the while, they reset the table and retell that grand old Christmas feast of a tale: showing us the relentlessly mean old London miser Scrooge (Jim Carrey), as he abuses his one employee, castigates charity petitioners, refuses his generous nephew Fred’s invitation to a Yule party and keeps damning Christmas as a waste of a good businessman’s time and money. (It’s a good thing those charity people weren’t campaigning for universal health care).
     
Say what you will about Zemeckis’ approach, he obviously has great affection for this story. Once again, Marley’s ghost appears, warning Scrooge of the three visitors about to pay him a nocturnal Christmas Eve call, transporting Ebenezer and us into his nightmare journey through the domains of the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future, there to discover the errors of his selfish ways and to become happily saturated with the spirit of Christmas.  So what if the movie might have been called “Die Harder, Scrooge!” Dickens‘ special band of literary Christmas goose and plum pudding makes a table full of lip-smackers no matter how many rooftops you have to fly over.         
         
The movie is certainly a visual stunner. And, despite the bizarre excesses of the action sequences, it’s also a fairly faithful and even loving adaptation, mostly well written and very well acted. Does that endorsement include Carrey as Scrooge (and also all three Christmas Ghosts)? Yes it does. And it also embraces Gary Oldman as Scrooge‘s beleaguered employee Bob Cratchit, as well as the spirit of his old partner Jacob Marley, and Bob’s sick cherub of a son, Tiny Tim, Robin Wright Penn as beauties Fan and Belle, and Bob Hoskins (best in the cast) as the young Scrooge’s merry old boss Fezziwig and Old Joe. 
     
You might have thought that Scrooge’s genial nephew Fred was Carrey’s ideal part. (Here, Fred is played well by Pride and Prejudice‘s perfect Darcy, Colin Firth.) And that the Christmas plum part of Scrooge would better have gone to a classy British knight like Ben Kingsley or Anthony Hopkins. And you’d be nearly right. But Carrey dives into the role and keeps things on track. He gives Scrooge a reedy, snappish voice and nasty-geezer manner that fits the motion-capture image of a bent, wizened, attenuated, mean old top-hatted British miser.  
    
So far, so good. But is a visually spectacular, thrill-packed Christmas Carol really what we want to see? How about a slam-bang, blast-you-out-of-your-seat Nicholas Nickleby? (I’m remembering Oliver! of course.)  
      
Dickens’ classic is so oft-filmed precisely because it gives us a message we want to believe, and tells a story we want to hear: one that enthralls and amuses us and creates characters that stay indelibly in our minds and hearts. The best-regarded movie adaptation -- the 1951 British version directed by Brian Desmond-Hurst, written by Noel (The Wizard of Oz) Langley and starring Alistair Sim as Scrooge -- is a gem of juicy Dickensian character play and snowy, wintry deep focus atmospherics. (It’s almost a Christmas noir). The Sim/Desmond-Hurst/Langley Carol still looks fine and scary and marvelous, and it well merits its perennial classic status.
     
Zemeckis is after something more here, as well as a different kind of audience. But he probably gives us too much  -- however much he loves and tries to honor the story. To have Scrooge blasted all over London tends to damage our sense of the old man’s vulnerability,  and the dreamlike “Once Upon a Time” feel that the story needs to work on our imaginations, hearts and souls. I enjoyed myself at Zemeckis‘ Carol, but it didn’t give me the pleasure it could have or stay with me very long afterwards. It‘s a prodigy of action technique and visual imagination, but not of emotion or character.
      
It might have been, should have been. I love Dickens and I consider him a stronger writer than his alleged British 19th century novelist betters: Henry James, George Eliot, and even Jane Austen (all great, but not as great or as much a natural, as he.) One of the shining moments of my Williams Bay, Wisconsin childhood, was when I was finally able to buy (with my mother’s help, of course) a beautiful complete illustrated deluxe 19th century edition of Dickens, from the Lake Geneva YMCA thrift store for the then princely sum of $25 (cut down, especially for me, from $50 because I‘d mooned over it so much. And no single pleasure since gave me so much joy over so many years.

How I loved those great, lusciously imagined and brilliantly embellished novels and stories! The laughing illustrations by Phiz, Cruikshank and the others. The very feel of the rich binding and paper. And the sumptuous wit, emotion and grandeur of Dickens‘ effortless prose style: those long, rolling, image-packed sentences. There‘s a lavishness, humor and poignancy  in the original story that Zemeckis’ whirligig action and all the CGI in the world can’t convey. 
    
Something else limits the movie. The very motion capture technology intended to more evocatively catch the physical look and movements of the actors, somehow also tends to rob them of some humanity, by leaving their eyes and expressions so strangely stiff and dead, like animated waxworks flown on wires. There must be some way to fill this lack; almost every other animated process can make eyes come alive -- whether old-fashioned drawings and cels, or computer imagery or the primitive Jiri Trnka-like puppetry of the upcoming The Fantastic Mr. Fox. But Carol’s motion-capture techniques tend to lose that crucial human element -- one of the very qualities you’d think they would be ideally suited to bring.
     
Still, Zemeckis’ Christmas Carol, like most of his other movies, is a good show, gloriously, as he says, “full of stuff.“  The film seems to me, whatever its flaws or overreaches, another more-than-decent pop Dickens movie -- adapted from the supreme writer who may not always please the snobs, but delights most everyone else. Dickens! Who else creates character so vibrantly  alive? Who else can touch even the most selfish and closed-off hearts? Who else creates and crafts such wondrous worlds of fantasy-tinged reality? And who else loves Dickens as much as the twelve-year-old Michael, clutching in his hand the $25 his mother gave him, long ago at the thrift store? As Gary Oldman would say, “God bless us, every one!”        
________________________________

The Men Who Stare at Goats (Three Stars)
U.S.;  Grant Heslov, 2009

George Clooney is beginning to become a genre to himself: the patent-holder and reliable purveyor, as star, director or producer of his own house brand of wry, liberal comic realism, served up with a healthy dollop of machismo and male bonding, a dash of  horny humor and a swig of jocular-jock irreverence.
     
Here’s another of the kind of movies we might call “clooneys,” straight from the star/co-producer himself  and Grant Heslov, his writing partner on the estimable black-and-white anti-McCarthy clooney Good Night, and Good Luck. They take a nonfiction book, Jon Ronson‘s Crazy Rulers of the World, and use it to whip up a satire about what might happen if the U.S. Army, from Vietnam to Iraq, tried to use New Age and hippie-ish psycho-babble techniques to fight our secret wars and checkmate our enemies.
    
It isn’t true, of course. But the credits insist that more of Goats comes from life than we might imagine. Clooney plays Lyn Cassady, the happy-go-lucky star pupil of a covert band of counter-culture commandos taught and led by Jeff  Bridge’s beamingly good-humored warrior Bill Django, a Vietnam hero who got side-tracked by the summers of love, and now is back in the army to mold his own band of warrior monks, to fuse alternative consciousness with martial mastery. (Talk about a perfect Jeff  Bridges part. You have to go back to The Big Lebowski to match it.)
    
These guys, especially Lyn, can simply stare at goats and make them drop dead, a strange talent, especially if you like goats and have a taste for goat cheese. And nobody could wire into the great telepathic switchboard with Cassady’s reliability and panache -- as war reporter Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) discovers when he runs into Lyn (now calling himself “Skip”) in Iraq. Soon the two instant buddies are wandering all around the desert, and into and out of Lyn‘s past --and finally into a current incarnation of Django’s New Earth Army, now run by a jealous and destructive usurper, Larry Hooper -- played in full smirk by Kevin Spacey.
       
Hard to get better star leads than this. But there are kinks in The Men Who Stare at Goats (not a very good title; even "Staring at Goats” might have been better). It somehow loses its edge while moving toward its unsatisfying would-be-epiphany end. Not everyone, not even Three Kings Clooney, can master the art of making an anti-war war comedy -- like M*A*S*H or Catch-22 -- and even getting halfway there earns these warrior monkeyshines some points. I wouldn’t worry though, any more than the Dude did. There are, and will be, better clooneys than this.            

________________________________

The Fourth Kind (Two Stars)
U.S.; Olatunde Osunsamni, 2009
     
The Fourth Kind (whose title refers to Close Encounters) is an attempt at a genre-busting horror sci-fi movie,  a mix of mockumentary and psycho-terror tale, that pretty much falls on its shrieking face.
         
They try hard to kid us along though. Director/co-writer Olatunde Osunsamni starts his little jape by having Milla Jovovich come on and explain that she‘s an actress playing a real-life woman psychiatrist in Nome, Alaska, named Abigail Tyler who actually went though the experiences we see dramatized here -- which include seeing her patients go crazy, scream, levitate and commit murders; as well as being harassed by mysterious white owls and a nervous sheriff (Will Patton), having her audiotapes sabotaged by what seems to be demon with throat problems speaking in Sumerian, and having her child apparently kidnapped by extra-terrestrials.
    
To further convince us that all this odd stuff really happened -- if we’re not inclined to believe poor Milla (a hard chore in any case) -- Osunsamni also give us very scrappy looking video tapes of alleged interviews conducted by the real Abigail Tyler with her unfortunate clients and a somewhat less degraded TV interview supposedly conducted by Osunsamni himself with the “real” Tyler. To further confuse us, no actress is listed in the credits as playing Abigail, and Abigail Tyler is instead listed as one of Milla’s and Will’s costars. (Perhaps that’s rather like the phony extra credit in Sleuth, though If  were Abigail, or someone playing Abigail, I might have refused credit .)
     
Osunsamni also tries to screw with us by splitting his frame, sometimes in two and sometimes in four images, three or one of which are dramatized sequences done in his over-flashy style, with Jovovich, Patton and fellow psychiatrist Elias Koteas battling owls and bad lines, and one of which is the supposedly real-life footage. To further disorient us, wavering thick black lines are sometimes placed between the “real” and “dramatized” scenes, some of which seem to have been written and directed by that angry Sumerian. 
    
Despite these strenuous efforts, I couldn’t buy any of Fourth Kind. Nor did I want any more close encounters of any kind with any of them. Everything in the movie seemed like a crock, especially the real-life footage. And the only things I found entertaining, besides watching Koteas trade psychological banter with Milla, were the end-title credits, run over brief snippets of “testimony“ by dozens of alleged UFO sighters.
   
At the end, in fact, I was so disconcerted, especially by those Sumerian tirades, that I was I was ready to swallow the theory -- suggested to me a real life theater patron sitting next to me and wearing an owl suit -- that The Fourth Kind was actually written and shot by extraterrestrials as part of an insidious plot to drive Earthlings crazy and soften them up for the inevitable invasion from Mars, with only Glenn Beck to stop them. Olatunde Osunsamni, my eye! I know Cedric the Entertainer when I see him.
    
By the way, if you want an effective mix of horror and mockumentary, there’s always…..      
_______________________________

Paranormal Activity (Three Stars)
U.S.; Oren Peli, 2007-9
      
I finally caught up with this surprise mega-hit, which had a budget good enough for a few Chinese dinners and a small car, and has grossed 84 million or so. Not a moment too soon!
    
The setup, of course, is ingenious. Actors Katie Featherson and Micah Sloat, playing bedmates Katie and Micah, are mostly alone together in Micah’s isolated house, where Katie is being pursued by the ghosts or demons that have  plagued her all her life, and while Micah tries to either find evidence or cure her, by filming everything he can on his video camera -- including eerie nocturnal views of the pair sleeping, with a very scary running time record blipping along on the bottom right corner of the screen.
     
Cloverfield actually holds its own amateur-camera conceit better. But Paranormal Activity is still pretty damned clever. The dialogue is extremely believable. The acting is very good throughout. And the shocks aren’t over-frequent or overplayed. Very cleverly marketed, it deserves to be a hit. And distribution companies  should take more chances on this kind of brainy low budget little gem, even if it isn’t a horror movie.
     
By the way, there’s no truth to the rumor, started by a jokester on Variety, that Paranormal Activity actually doesn’t exist, that Katie and Micah are real-life mythical beings, both of whom speak fluent Sumerian, that the owls are tied to a fanatical anti-conservation crusade started in Nome by Sarah Palin, and that Paranormal’s “grosses” and “box-office” are actually part of a shrewd marketing campaign blitz for The Fourth Kind. Nor have the alien occupants of a UFO sighted over Bakersfield and recorded on Micah’s camera, kidnapped “Michael Wilmington,” taken over this column and decided to….     

________________________________

35 Shots of Rum
France; Claire Denis, 2009
    
Claire Denis, the marvelous French writer-director of Chocolat and Le Beau Travail, is a poet of everyday life. She‘s a filmmaker who can make magic out of the simplest tasks or events -- whether preparing a meal, taking medication at evening, or dancing after hours in a little restaurant. In 35 Shots of Rum (or 35 Rhums) Denis returns to her favorite subject: the consequences of racial relations between blacks and whites in France and its one-time colonies. And once again, she fills the screen with life and poetry and humanity. Denis also universalizes her subject matter in another way. She turns her story into a classic statement, like those of the great Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, on parents and children, and the pain of parting.
    
It’s her best film, I think. In following the lives of her subjects -- quiet African émigré train engineer Lionel (Alex Secas) and his bright bi-racial college student daughter Josephine (Mati Diop) -- and also of their apartment building neighbors (and prospective lovers), the cheery taxi driver Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue) and the sullen egotist Noe (Gregoire Colin, a favorite actor of the director’s), Denis manages to create a little piece of cinema time and space that seems almost flawlessly real.
       
Like Ozu, Jean Renoir, or Vittorio De Sica, Denis is a true master of cinematic realism. She never pushes a scene too hard, never takes a characterization too far. Her rhythms don’t seem artificial or imposed. Instead, we seem to be eavesdropping on life: on real people and honest emotions. To some audiences (and critics), this may mean that 35 Shots of Rum -- whose title refers to a contest of Lionel’s, like the 50 eggs in Cool Hand Luke -- will seem too slow. But that’s a superficial judgment. Compared to the moving everyday world Denis creates here, most other films are too fast. 35 Shots of Rum, a subtle and true family tale, makes us a gift of life. (In French, with English subtitles.)

- Michael Wilmington
November 5, 2009

Recent Columns

10.29.09 - Michael Jackson's This is It, The House of the Devil, Labor Day
10.22.09- Amelia, Cirque duFreak: The Vampire's Assistant, Motherhood, (Untitled)
10.15.09 - Where the Wild Things Are, Law Abiding Citizen, Couples Retreat, A Serious Man
9.24.09 -Capitalism: A Love Story, Fame, Bright Star
9.17.09 -The Informant! and Love Happens and Disgrace
9.11.09 9, Whiteout and No Impact Man
9.03.09 Extract and All About Steve
8.27.09 - Play the Game, Still Walking
8.20.09 - Inglourious Basterds, The Marc Pease Experience, Post Grad
8.13.09 - The Time Traveler's Wife, Ponyo, and Bandslam
8.6.09 - Julie and Julia and A Perfect Getaway
7.30.09 - Funny People Plus, Thirst, Adam, and Yoo-Hoo Mrs. Goldberg
7.23.09- Orphan, The Ugly Truth, The Answer Man, Shrink, Katyn
7.16.09- Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, (500) Days of Summer, Three Monkeys
7.9.09 - Humpday, Soul Power and Il Divo
7.2.09- Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, The Hurt Locker, The Girl from Monaco
6.25.09 - Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, My Sister's Keeper, Cheri
6.18.09 - Whatever Works, The Proposal, The Taking of Pelham 123
6.11.09- Away We Go, Moon, Food, Inc.
6.04.09 - The Hangover, Land of the Lost, My Life in Ruins
5.28.09- Up, Drag Me to Hell, Departures, Outrage
5.21.09 - Terminator Salvation, Night at the Museum 2, Dance Flick, Easy Virtue
5.14.09 - Angels and Demons, Summer Hours, The Brothers Bloom
5.07.09 - Star Trek, Next Day Air, The Limits of Control, Rudo y Cursi, Battle for Terra
4.30.09 - X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past and Hunger
4.23.09 - The Soloist, The Informers, Tyson and Fighting
4.16.09 - State of Play, Anvil! The Story of Anvil, American Violet, Is Anybody There, The Song of Sparrows
4.09.09 - Observe and Report, Hannah Montana: The Movie, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Gigantic, and Sin Nombre
4.02.09 - Fast & Furious, Silent Light, Sugar, Adventureland, and Paris 36
3.26.09 - Monsters Vs. Aliens, The Haunting in Connecticut, Z, and Shall We Kiss?

.