Doing my Index for the site, I've stumbled across all sorts of reviews for films I have fondly remembered, but never pulled over here. This is is one of them—a film in a very similar vein to Don't Look Up, but with less of the focus on obstinate deniability.
I Got Stoned and I Missed It or "As Well as All Your Favorite Classic Hits..."
Right off the bat,Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, starts with a great joke. Dodge (Steve Carell) and his wife Linda (Nancy Carell-heh—how "inside") are sitting in the car, listening to the news on the radio. It's not good. The space shuttle Deliverance has not been able to destroy or even divert the asteroid "Matilda" that is headed for Earth and will bring all life to an end. "Stay tuned for all the latest developments on this ongoing story, as well as all your favorite classic hits." There's silence in the car. Then, husband and wife look at each other. Wife opens the car door. And runs as fast as she can...away, into the night, leaving hubby gaping. "What just happened?"
That's the tenor of the humor of SAFFEOW—a kind of horrific slapstick that feels frightening, as well as inevitable, like a Blake Edwards comedy. You know a radio station would end a horrific story...even of Armaggeddon...with a reassuring tag-line. And the wife's reaction? Without a word of explanation, escaping her settled life? Eh, that one feels real, too.
Dodge is the calm of the storm for all this chaos. Where his friends are freaking out along with the rest of society, he is quietly considering his fate and deciding what he can do with his time, rather than quickly self-destructing. The first part of the film is full of dark humor as Dodge goes to work as an insurance broker ("No, sir, it isn't covered in your policy"), botches a suicide attempt that only garners more responsibility, and everything and everybody systematically shuts down. The skein of traffic comes unraveled, TV reporters freak out ("We're f@&%ed, Bob...") and the lack of consequence—or a future—bring out the worst in people.
Dodge reflects, and as circumstances happen, he decides to seek out "the girl who got away," along with "the girl along for the ride" (Keira Knightley) who has a similar quest—finding a plane to get her back to her parents in England. She's got a car. He says he knows somebody with a plane, so the two contract to maneuver through the chaos to achieve their very short-term goals.
It turns into a road-trip movie, without "the light at the end of the tunnel" and the two may be the last two sane people on Earth. Just when you think someone along the way is normal...or at last coping...there's a surprise. It all plays out in the way that you think it might—circumstances soften the resolve and their zeal for their goals and their attitudes towards each other. Even if the world has an expiration date, there's still enough room to change your mind (in much the same way that Dodge's wife does at the beginning).
Knightley's fine in this, still determined to not let her looks get in the way of an idiosyncratic performance. She is one odd goose, as long as she's not standing still on a runway. Carell's just the opposite here—an internalized performance that maintains a simmering calm. The face changes expression constantly, but the brow is always furrowed, like it's reflecting the first shock-wave that hits Earth. He wouldn't betray any unnecessary emotion, even if the world IS coming to an end, and there are nice turns by William Petersen and Martin Sheen, and bombastic ones by Rob Corddry and Patton Oswalt (and though it might not be fair) acting the way I think they'd act if they knew the world was coming to an end.
It's a neat trick Lorene Scafaria (she made Nick and Nora's infinite Playlist) pulls off here: the idea couldn't be more "high-concept" and in the hands of, say, Mike Bay, or Mimi Leder, or Roland Emmerich it would be more parts spectacle and surviving than anything having to do with as universal a thing as "coping." The only "high ground" to be found in those films is the one everybody's running to, while the pixel-people to the rear are never seen or heard from again (and never really mattered enough to be portrayed by actors, anyway). Scafaria provides no high ground of safety, but only the artistic high ground of keeping the scale human, the emotions raw, and running the risk of turning sentimental or, worse, encouraging the audience's wrath (being hit with an asteroid would be more humane). She doesn't cheat, keeps it edgy, and allows things to play out...tidily. And her musical taste? Spending the last night of your life before the power goes out listening to The Walker Brothers? Brilliant.
"I've Never Understood Why Music Has To Be So Stinkin' SERIOUS"
Edgar Wright has been re-writing rules for film-making for a while now, combining fantasy with reality, comedy with action, gangster pics with musical-dance, turning genre on its cliche, combining, mingling, crunching, like splicing the DNA of film to create new life in the medium.
But, what would an Edgar Wright documentary look like?
The answer comes with his new film, The Sparks Brothers, which details the career ofRonaldandRussell Mael, two brothers who have been blazing a trail in music (while never catching popular fire) for over 50 years as the band Sparks.Starting under the name Halfnelson (and changing the name after an A & R suggestion with the first album), the two have put out 25 albums since 1967, changing their band through various adjustments in style and technique that always seemed to be slightly ahead of trends from glam rock to disco to techno to art pop to house to orchestral to stripped down rock, on through the ages of videos—they were doing them before MTV was established—thanks to their early interest in film, only to see other bands emulate their sound and style and hit the pop charts.*
But, they never had that "break-through" hit. The Mael's were born in San Francisco and started their career in the U.S., but traveled to England in 1973, where they charted with the song "This Town Ain't Big Enough for Both of Us," and achieved notoriety for their TV appearances—Russell was the "cute one" while Ronald dressed like a 50 year old, sported a Hitler/Chaplin mustache, and gave off the vibe of a 30's creep/gigolo. The contrast has a bizarre ying-yang effect, not unlike Cheap Trick. As the poster for the doc says it's the story of "Your Favorite Band's Favorite Band." Part of their "never-quite-achieved-the-success-their-reputation-inspired" result may be that Sparks never took themselves too seriously, abandoning the narcissistic singer/songwriter mode of "This is my story/It's sad but true" strategy for third person narratives with a sardonic, satirical—and funny/ironic—sensibility. That trick never works—as the career of Randy Newman attests. When an A & R rep whined "Why don't you write music you can dance to?" they titled their next project "Music You Can Dance To." And when a chance-meeting led to a joint project with the Scottish group Franz Ferdinand, Ron Mael's first song submission to them was titled "Collaborations Never Work." Music listeners/fans prefer the illusion that songs are "The Truth," and that they relate to them, as they relate to the performer. Sparks was rarely about that. They were more about experimentation and putting on a show. They attracted attention in Europe and England, not so much in America, despite appearing on Dick Clark's "American Bandstand" a few times—probably because they were articulate...and funny! They appeared as the band in the 1977 disaster film Rollercoaster, which played in theaters in "Sensurround". I wonder if the Sparks segment used it? Wright's film has 50 years of clips to use for the film and uses them liberally, as well as a lot of talking head segments with the Brothers and fans/producers/rockers/collaborators and they're all filmed in black and white. There's abundant use of animation in various guises and Wright book-ends the film with "YouTube"-friendly segments "Frequently Asked Questions about Sparks" and—during the credits—a whimsical "Don't Trust This" "Ten Things You Don't Know About Sparks." I loved it. I remember seeing Sparks albums coming through the radio stations I worked at and the cover art was always weird and gave you no sense of what the album was like inside. I never played them, never listened to them, and I find myself wishing I had. I was missing something and it would have thrown a different light on the music that was to become omnipresent in the years to come. The film evokes an odd sense of nostalgia for something you never experienced—although the trends in music all spring to mind when the next Sparks song is brought up with the resulting thought of "Oooh, THAT's where THAT came from...."
It is smart, ironic, and celebratory. So much so that one is disappointed to see it end. One hopes that, like the group it lionizes, it can go on forever, running just ahead of fame and idolatry, but never losing the energy (in whatever forms it takes) that keeps it running through the decades, as per the Mael Brothers, now in their 70's.
They've just collaborated with Leo Carax (which is perfect) on his first feature film (starring Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard) since Holy Motors that's coming out this Summer.** What will THAT look/sound like? Can't wait to find out.
* Oh gosh, there are so many comparisons—Queen (they opened for Sparks in one marquee photo), Human League, Pet Shop Boys, Devo, B-52's, Depeche Mode and on and on. Paul McCartney dressed up as Ronald in his "Paul portrays everybody" video of "Coming Up" in 1980.
** Their interest in film-making and their bizarre outlook led to almost collaborations with Jacques Tati and Tim Burton (on a musical version of "Mai, the Psychic Girl") but neither one came to fruition.
Writer's Cell-Block or "He Talked to Me Like I'm Not Pretty!"
The writing-directing team of Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman reunite to present what could be the dark sequel to their sunny, funny Juno. But, instead of examining the student body sub-strata of geeks, we're looking at the sosh's side down there at the very shallow end of the gene pool and the eventual disintegration of High School Dreams.
Trouble is knowing when to wake up. That's the thing about the privileged and the entitled, they never know when the party's done and it's time to go home (and don't even bother asking them to help clean up—that's maid-service). It's the problem of Mavis Gerry (Charlize Theron):her party's over but she's still rocking in the corner, hugging her Maker's Mark bottle, and she picks the perfectly wrong time to go home to Mercury, Minnesota. A writer of moony, self-absorbed children's books (No, no...that's "Y-A's," the contradictory term "Young Adult" novels) about High School life in a series called "Waverly 128", she draws mostly from real life—her own—but with additional snatches of overheard conversations cribbed from teen conversations in fast-food joints and malls.
She need not bother with the latter. Mavis' emotional development is so arrested it should be serving 10 to 20 in "juvie." Her thought processes are still confined to Middling School concerns, even if her behaviors have become more adult in nature, with one marriage behind her and several casual affairs left high and dry, to sleep it off in her bed, and the height of a social life being getting hammered in a bar, anticipating it like a kegger, and her one constant companion an "accessory pet," an animated white hair-ball named Dolce that is left, more or less abandoned, but still capable of the one love Mavis can accept or understand—reverse unconditional. Oh, in our self-absorbed and -absorbed youth culture, she can pass for a grown-up, she's pretty, put-together, and trendy, but on the inside she hasn't graduated, pushing off her writing assignments like she was having to write a term-paper.
Thing is, she's clueless. Mavis is so stuck in the past rattling around inside her head, you begin to wonder if she might be a little insane, besides insular. Fortunately, she runs into somebody she perpetually ignored in High School—the guy who had the hall-locker next to her that she never noticed existed, Matt Freehauf (Patton Oswalt, best thing he's ever done), who had his own development beaten out of him ("Oh, yeah, you're the "hate-crime" guy!" blurts Mavis, tactfully and sensitively) by High School toughs who, in a clear case of High School temperance, tolerance and judiciousness, mistakenly assumed he was gay. Matt, with his twisted body, develops a fascination with Mavis and her twisted logic, only half-heartedly trying to suggest that...you know...she might be a little out of sync with the normal, a notion that she scoffs at, before taking another slug and checking herself out in her mirror.
"You...are a piece of work," says Matt, admiringly. "And you are a piece of shit," comebacks writerly Mavis.
This can not go well, and one wonders where the movie could possibly go and if it can ever be resolved without something being destroyed. The damage being done, though, is to the expectations of the casual movie-goer. Mavis is not your charming debutante "sweet thing" that you'd find in your standard rom-com. She is, as one of her class-hates says, a "psychotic prom-queen bitch," and, though smart and clever, thoroughly unlikable, even when sometimes bordering on the sympathetic.
Theron is never afraid of tackling this type of character (she did, after all, win an Oscar for her terrifying Aileen Wournos in Monster) or challenging expectations of the audience, and Cody (with Reitman) has a fine time skewering the traditional "woman-pursues-her-soul-mate" brand of romantic fiction. For that, Young Adult, as cringe-inducing and unsettling as it is, deserves an acknowledgement for being a brave film, risking a lot, while also giving a bitch-slap to the Hollywood romance. It left me in an odd place. I didn't thoroughly enjoy Young Adult, but, at the same time, I recognized that the makers were making a thoroughly professional statement...or at least an obscene gesture...to the too-easy way that love is presented in the movies, something I've railed against myself. This isn't love. It's selfish obsession. And Mavis, like so many of the protagonists in Reitman's films, is an outlier of Society, playing by her own rules, but, as opposed to the others, she reaches no self-awareness, and is absolutely clueless as to where the goal-post is (knowing Mavis, she probably would pick a random spot, easy to reach, and declare it 'good"). One is hesitant to praise or applaud such accomplishments, when the impulse is to show it the door and kick it in the ass on the way out.
Written with an uncharacteristic gob-smacked brevity, at the time of the film's release.
"Eet's so, how do you say...Meekey Mouse."*
Brad Bird may be the natural heir to the Warner Brothers group. His "Family Dog" segment was one of the few good projects created from Spielberg's "Amazing Stories," (and one of the few that broke the mold of the rather atrophied premise, as well). His The Iron Giant is one of the few cell-animation projects of the last twenty years that can genuinely be called a classic despite not having any songs, or being Disney. When he signed on with Pixar, one worried that his odd sensibility, but impeccable story sense would fit in or get homogenized. Thankfully, his The Incredibles proved to be a winner, and completely went against the S.O.P. of the studio, creating photo-realistic backgrounds for characters who are clearly designed to be cartoon characters. Some folks quibbled that Bird might be saying something about the privileged when his superheroes were forced to suppress their powers, but that's from the crowd that hasn't read a comic in the last thirty years (or an "X-men" comic in the last forty).
Now, along comes Ratatouille, and it benefits from the advancements in digital production and rendering since The Incredibles, for if anything the backgrounds are even more sophisticated and have the feel of being filmed, while the characters are complete flights of Bird's fancy and design sense. Plus, the movements are far more complicated and fluid, the expressions more minute, and the comic timing (a lot of which is owed to Jerry Lewis) is crack. If you want to see the future of animation and how it can be driven to its full application and imagination, Ratatouille is the place to look. And one can only hope that Pixar continues in its tradition of bringing in new story-tellers in animation to stretch their capabilities for years to come (and the short that comes with it,
Lifted written and directed by former sound designer Gary Rydstrom, is a perfect example of the possibilities**). If everything is run through the John Lasseter filter, the company could lose its potential and grow stale, but films like Ratatouille will keep it at the top of its game and the advancement of the medium for years to come.
2016 Addendum:I unearth this from the DVD pile every so often just to take a look at it to see if, after all the years and Pixar movies and technical advancements, this still holds up. It does. And not because of the animation, which hedged its bet with bipeds by going "full cartoon" with them and away from naturalism—a good choice that seems to have been adapted by every other animation studio working in three dimensions. Water depiction has improved and Nature looks natural now in Pixar movies, for which landscape artists must all applaud.
But it's not the rendering that makes a movie—rendering is important with meat. It is story and story-telling where Pixar has always excelled (with exceptions you could count on a Disneyfied one-digitless hand). Begun by directorJan Pinkava(who directed the Pixar shortGeri's Game), Ratatouile ran into story development trouble andBrad Bird, fresh off The Incredibles took over supervision of the film, re-writing parts of it, and doing extensive research in Paris and in cooking classes.
Remy combining tastes with a visual representation not unlike Disney's experimentations with jazz.
The result is a movie awash in good ideas emanating with a rat named Remy (voiced by Patton Oswalt) who wants something more in life than to eat garbage—a rat with good taste. He develops the dream that someday he might be able to become a great chef, which, given rats aversions to kitchens and health inspectors' aversions to rats, is an impossible dream.
But, with the spirited inspiration of the late populist Chef Gusteau (voiced by Brad Garrett) and the opportune presence and cooperation of Gusteau's bastard child Linguini (Lou Romano) in the Gusteau's Restaurant kitchen, the little rat is given the opportunity to shine, a move that brings new interest in the restaurant, as long as the identity of the "little chef" is not found out.
The various forms of staff at Gusteau's
There is plenty of opportunity for action of a "scurrying" variety, to keep the kids from fidgeting, but I found the characters and the dedication to concept of aspiring to be something more to be a warming theme—plus, I'll like any movie that tries to tickle one of the other senses besides sight or sound, in this case taste. Bird does some attempts at visualization to communicate the concept of taste, which I found charming, and more than a little reminiscent of the way Disney animators tried to be-bop their animation when it came to explaining jazz. That and an amazing visual representation of "comfort food" which immediately flashed the concept from screen to mind.
But, my favorite thing is its sublime ending, which, as a critic (or more appropriately, a person who appreciates such things) I found extraordinarily well-articulated and with its constantly seeking heart in the exact right place. I so impressed me that a truncated version of that monologue (beautifully played by Peter O'Toole) has a permanent place at the bottom of this blog page. It will always be there.
There have been so many great Pixar movies that continue to astonish and entertain (last year's Inside Out blew me away), but I still think Ratatouille is my personal favorite. * A French person's reply to being asked about Euro-Disney. Apt. ** The really nifty thing about "Lifted" is that it very obviously comes from a Sound-Mixer's personality. I could relate.
