essays

Toy Story 3 is as good as any movie Pixar Studios has made, and better than a few of them. But when you consistently achieve excellence, there’s this problem: people start expecting more. A merely excellent movie is not enough. Each one must be more suspenseful, surprising, original, hilarious, and emotionally satisfying than the last. Each success becomes a rack on which the next attempt is measured.

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This is the dilemma of movie reviewing: a critic who has honed professional discernment by studying the cinematic arts will not be as generous toward a film as a happy audience that is just looking for a good time. When I picked up my daughter for the screening, I said, “I don’t know why I wanted to review this; it looks awful.”

That opinion did not change—but while Meg and I were rolling our eyes and whispering witty critiques, hundreds of people around us, who had filled every seat in the theater, were having a ball. They laughed, they sighed, they cheered, they grew thoughtfully silent approximately 30 seconds after Meg whispered to me, “Now something devastating is going to happen.”

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This is not your grandmother’s Alice. Though the title is the same, director Tim Burton did not film a new version of the classic novels by British clergyman and logician Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass. Instead, Burton and screenwriter Linda Woolverton have moved the action forward 13 years. Now Alice, almost 20, is attending a garden party where the unappealing son of a local lord intends to propose marriage. Fleeing him, and pursuing a white rabbit, Alice kneels at the base of a tree and peers down an immense hole. Then she falls in.

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[National Review; December 20, 2009]

In Avatar’s opening moments, hero-to-be Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is waking up on the planet Pandora after a cryogenic journey, and reflecting on the twists of fate. Here he is, a paraplegic Marine, filling in for the twin brother who actually trained for this mission. But right before Tommy was due to ship out, “a guy with a gun put an end to his journey, for the paper in his wallet.”

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It’s the little things that count. Director Wes Anderson has always been good with the little things, filling movies like Rushmore (1998), The Royal Tennenbaums (2001), and The Darjeeling Limited (2007) with extraordinary, eye-catching detail. In Fantastic Mr. Fox the things are littler than ever, as the tallest actor is only 18” high. This film is an example of stop-motion animation, in which tiny figures are photographed, moved a fraction of an inch, and photographed again. It takes 24 photos to create one second of smoothly-moving screen time, so this kind of animation represents an enormous amount of labor.

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I brought a handkerchief. The occasion was a screening of the documentary As We Forgive, slated to kick off American University’s Human Rights Film Series this fall. It is the first film by Laura Waters Hinson, an AU alumna, and in addition to numerous festival awards it won a Student Academy Award. The film’s topic is the aftermath of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, in which Hutus killed up to a million Tutsis over the course of 100 days.

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What would it be like to live in a world without lying? I expected the universe depicted in this film to present a reverse image of the Jim Carrey comedy “Liar Liar,” in which the main character finds himself uncomfortably compelled to tell the truth. I expected, that is, one more brash, noisy, agitated film, replete with insults and gross-out jokes. I wasn’t expecting the sweetness in this film, its quietness and thoughtful core. It feels, in spirit, more like a fable, in the mold of mid-century films like “It’s a Wonderful Life” or “Miracle on 34^th Street”.

 I just wish it were better. I wish the early promise didn’t grow gradually thinner and less authentic—less true.

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You expect certain things from a Sandra Bullock comedy, and if that’s what you’re looking for, “All About Steve” will not disappoint. She’s perky and quirky, slim and lovely, and a very good sport about looking unglamorous (here she survives both a tornado and a fall into an abandoned mine). You’ll be unsurprised to learn that romantic complications arise, followed by a happy ending.  So if you enjoyed “The Proposal” or “Two Weeks Notice,” you’ll surely get a kick out of “All About Steve.”

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Does this sound like a good idea for a movie? I can’t decide. Take six women who have suffered the loss of a child. Send them together to South Africa, to work with impoverished children. In the security of each other’s company, with a genuine need set before them, their grief is mitigated and healing is begun.

As therapy, it’s a great idea.

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Summer Finn, we’re told, is an average woman in many ways—like height and weight, though slightly above average shoe size. (The narrator telling us this, in a wryly amused way, sounds like James Earl Jones, though I can’t find a credit for him.) Yet something about her arrests men’s attention. She gets an average of 18.4 double-takes per day. This is, we are told, “the Summer Effect.”

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