Walk Hard, Juno, Sweeney Todd....

Walk Hard



For people like myself who have a soft spot for the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker parodies of the '80's (Airplane, Top Secret, The Naked Gun), there is good news. Jake Kasdan's Walk Hard is the first good parody film in nearly 20 years (after the genre had been hijacked by the makers of Epic Movie, Date Movie, et. al). Walk Hard parodies the musical bio-pic (films like Ray, Walk the Line, Beyond the Sea). John C. Reilly plays Dewey Cox, who endures a comically tragic childhood to become a rock star.



Reilly, like Val Kilmer in Top Secret, handles all of his own singing duties and he's terrific in the lead. For almost 20 years now, Reilly's been a reliable character actor in a number of notable films. In Talladega Nights, he even proved that he can be very funny (he's good in the film itself, but some of his improvisations over the end credits - ones that didn't make the actual film, are genuinely hilarious).



In many ways, comedies are the hardest kinds of films to review. All criticism is subjective, but comedies are perhaps the most subjective of all. You either laugh or you don't. And I would fell guilty about spoiling some of the film's funniest gags for you. So, the best I can do here is to say that if you enjoy the Airplane style of comedy, this is a good movie for you. If not, stay away.



Juno



For the first ten minutes or so of Juno, the film seems like it's not just going to be bad, but excruciating, end-of-the-year-worst-list bad. During this stretch, the film tries so hard to be quirky and clever in a way that would irritate even Wes Anderson. The direction is overbearing, the script is full of lines that think they're witty and clever when they're not, and the soundtrack features one of the most grating songs I've heard in years.



Despite this horrific start, however, Juno recovers and ends up being a pretty good film. Ellen Page plays Juno, a 16-year-old girl who gets pregnant from her best friend/not quite boyfriend (Michael Cera). After briefly contemplating an abortion, she decides to have the baby and give it up for adoption to a local couple (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner), who cannot conceive a child of their own because Garner is infertile. However, things aren't as happy as they initially seem with the couple.

Garner and Bateman both do terrific work. In the wrong hands, both characters could have come across as one-dimensional. Bateman could have been merely irresponsible and Garner could have been just an overbearing shrew. Bateman is indeed irresponsible, just as Garner is overbearing, but the script (by Diablo Cody) and the actors make us understand why Bateman would feel trapped into a life that he didn't really want. And we feel the pain and sadness behind Garner's character, a woman who wants one thing more than anything else in the world (a child) and that's the one thing she can't have because of biological bad luck.

J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney also do nice work as Page's father and stepmother. These characters are neither pushovers nor ogres. They love Juno, but are clearly taken aback by the news that they'll be grandparents a lot sooner than they anticipated.

In the end, the richness of the supporting characters is what makes Juno work as a film. Without them, the main character would seem like nothing more than a collection of quirks (as she does in an early confrontation with a convenience store clerk played by Rainn Wilson in which it doesn't seem like an interaction between two people so much as a contest to see who can out-quirk the other). With the solid supporting work, Juno's forced cleverness comes across as a defensive mechanism, something a scared teenager would employ because she feels overwhelmed by the world.

If you can survive the first 10 minutes, Juno is worth seeing.

Sweeney Todd

Full disclosure: I am generally not a huge fan of musicals in any form. In addition to this, I think they work better on the stage than on the screen. Sure, there are exceptions. I love Singin' in the Rain and enjoy the early '90's Disney musicals. But, I think film's a more literal medium than the stage and it seems more patently ridiculous when characters burst into song on film than when they do on the stage, where the stage itself makes things seem inherently more artificial, so it's not as jarring when the characters sing. On top of this, seeing a musical on stage is a more energetic experience. Watching the performers belt out the music live in front of you gives off a palpable energy that rarely translates to the screen (witness the failures of the film versions of Rent, Phantom of the Opera, Evita). I mention this just so you know my general feelings about musicals, so you can take the following review with a grain of salt.

Tim Burton's adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's stage musical Sweeney Todd tells the story of a barber (Johnny Depp) who's imprisoned on false charges by a corrupt judge (Alan Rickman) who's hot for Depp's wife. After tragedy strikes Depp's wife, Rickman adopts Depp's young daughter as his own, with hopes of making her his wife when she reaches legal age.

15 years later, Depp is out on the streets again and looking for revenge against the judge and against humanity in general. In a way, the film is like The Count of Monte Cristo, except if Edmond Dantes wanted to kill random people as well as those who wronged him. To this end, Depp teams up with the creepy Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter) who takes the corpses of Depp's victims and turns them into meat pies that become a big hit in London.

When the film is focused on Depp's revenge against Rickman, it's pretty compelling. Depp does a good job and the set design is terrific. Unfortunately, much of the middle third of the film is devoted to Depp's random killing spree and his conflict with a rival barber (Sacha Baron Cohen, a.k.a Borat) and this is much less involving. And now, less than 24 hours after I've seen the film, none of the songs have stuck in my head.

Musical fans might enjoy this more, but this was middle-of-the-road for me.

I Am Legend...

I had very little interest in seeing this. I've never read the Richard Matheson novella on which the film is based - many regard the novella as a classic of science fiction. I knew attempts to make the film stopped and started again many times over the years. The previews did absolutely nothing to interest me in the film. I thought the director's (Francis Lawrence) previous work, Constantine, sucked. My indifference was so great that even though I had a pass for a free screening of the film, I almost decided to stay home and read.

But you know what? I Am Legend is actually pretty good. Not a classic by any stretch of the imagination, but pretty good. (Side note: 2007 could be called the year of the "pretty good" film. I was looking over my list of films that I've seen this year and while 2007 is very thin at the top, with very few movies that have blown me away so far, there has still been a very sizable amount of films that would qualify as pretty good/entertaining/worth seeing.)

Will Smith plays a scientist who finds himself as the last man in Manhattan (he still has a canine companion), immune to a super-virus that killed almost everyone on Earth and turned the remainder of people into flesh-eating albino zombies (they die if exposed to sunlight). While there are a couple of skillfully staged suspense set pieces with Smith and the zombies, most of what I Am Legend does well and what distinguishes it from other zombie films is its exploration of loneliness. Other apocalyptic films touch on the emotional toll of the end of the world on its survivors, but since Smith is the only human being on screen for the majority of the film's running time, I Am Legend is in many ways an exploration of its character's loneliness.

It's also commendable for being a big-budget Hollywood suspense/action film that embraces stillness/silence. There are long stretches without dialogue or music. The film doesn't go to the extreme of The Birds or No Country for Old Men in terms of having no score, but the the film's music is very sparingly used (and when it is used, it's reasonably effective).

Again - I Am Legend is no classic, but it is a well-made, entertaining sci-fi film.

The Golden Compass and The Kite Runner....

Fritz here...I've seen a lot of movies recently for the holiday rush - I've also seen Walk Hard and Juno, which will open in the next week or two. And I'll have more stuff to come. For now, enjoy reviews of two literary adaptations.

The Golden Compass

The latest effort by studios to cash in on the Harry Potter/Lord of the Rings extravaganza of adapting a series of sci-fi/fantasy books and making boatloads of money, The Golden Compass works just well enough to have me interested in the future films.

Directed by Chris Weitz (American Pie, About a Boy) and adapted from the His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman, The Golden Compass is set in an alternate universe that combines elements of real-world life (stuffy universities, cowboys, etc.) with high fantasy (talking animals, witches, and the like).

An orphan girl (Dakota Blue Richards, who makes for a likable heroine) is in possession of the magical compass of the title, which attracts the attention of the Magisterium, a powerful group that wants to keep people from learning the truth about their own existence, and represented most prominently in the film by Nicole Kidman, who employs her natural iciness to good effect.

The Golden Compass has two big problems. The first is that, like many adaptations of novels, it feels a bit rushed, that the filmmakers were compressing a lot of stuff to make a film that runs under two hours. The second is that The Golden Compass is the first work of a trilogy, and like many such works, it has to spend a lot of time laying the groundwork for the universe and characters. I enjoy Harry Potter & the Sorcerer's Stone, but it's still my least favorite book and film of the Harry Potter series, mainly because a lot of it is exposition, albeit necessary exposition. I got the same vibe here.

But, the performances are good and the world itself is visually striking, with its juxtapositions of real world and fantasy. And the film is brave enough to have some genuinely scary moments in it for a children's film. The film's still suitable for children, but a fight scene near the end of the film and a sequence where the heroine finds herself trapped at a Magisterium base are genuinely scary.

These virtues are enough for me to forgive the clunkiness of some of the exposition and the rushed feel of some of the film. It's worth seeing and hopefully things will really take off in the next film.

Oh, and if for nothing else, go see this just to annoy the religious groups protesting the film because they think it promotes atheism.

The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner may actually be a first - a Hollywood movie populated almost exclusively by Muslim characters. Some of the film's characters are kindly, others are downright evil. But, the same could be said of humanity in general. Even if the film accomplished nothing else, The Kite Runner would be an important film strictly for the way it describes the experiences of Muslims who've immigrated to America.

The film opens in Kabul, Afghanistan in the 1970's, just before the Soviet invasion. Amir (Zekeria Ebrahimi) is a priviliged boy whose only real friend is Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmidaza), the son of the house servant and member of a persecuted minority in Afghanistan. Hassan, despite being undersized, is the braver of the two, constantly standing up for Amir, who's reluctant to stand up for himself. A terrible event occurs about thirty minutes in (and when I say terrible, I mean terrible) that leaves Amir with a deep sense of guilt that he takes out on the loyal Hassan. Shortly thereafter, the Russians invade and Amir and his father immigrate to America.

The film then jumps forward to Amir (Khalid Abdalla) graduating from community college and finding his way in America. He marries another Afghan immigrant (Atossa Leoni). The film jumps forward again, with an adult Amir enjoying a reasonably happy life. One day in 2000, he gets a phone call that sends him on a journey back home to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

The first hour of The Kite Runner is the strongest. When the film is focusing on the relationship between the two boys, it's a powerful film. But, just like The Golden Compass, The Kite Runner suffers in that it feels rushed, particularly in its second hour, like the filmmakers were trying to get everything in and keep the film at a reasonable running time.

Despite this flaw, it's a good film, and ultimately a touching one. Even when the film feels rushed, the strong relationship from the first hour permeates the film, always the audience a sense of who Amir is and why he's doing what he's doing. And Amir's journey back to Kabul is affecting. After going through Katrina, I knew the pain of what it felt like to lose your beloved hometown. But New Orleans has nothing on Kabul. New Orleans has mostly managed to resurrect itself after Katrina. But the Kabul that existed in the 1970's is long gone and likely never to return. For me, anyway, Kabul's demise is almost as sad as anything that happens to the characters.