Trouble With the Curve

Written at the time of the film's release...

I Am, I Said/To No One There
or
Becoming Eastwood

Amy Adams is amazing, really. Clint Eastwood has had many female co-stars, from Shirley MacLaine to Meryl Streep, and directed a bevy of others, some of whom have given great performances—Laura Linney, Marcia Gay Harden, Hilary Swank, Angelina Jolie, two of them to Oscars—all have studied at the Eastwood school. The results have been a combination of actress' gifts and Eastwood guile. But, none of them have taken to heart that state of naturalness, the implacable restraint and mandarin ironic humor that the actor has demonstrated in the past like Adams does in Trouble with the Curve, Eastwood's latest project (produced but not directed—that job going to Eastwood's assistant director Robert Lorenz) about the relationship between an aged baseball scout and his estranged-but-not-fallen-far-from-the-tree daughter. Linney has played Eastwood's screen-daughter in the past, and she was terrific, but Adams imbues so much of Eastwood's game that one actually believes in the symbiosis, and their scenes together crackle with a lived-in familiarity, a mutual passive-aggressiveness, and a sense of shared past and unspoken tensions. 

Eastwood is the top-liner but it's the daughter's story. Mickey Lobell (Adams) is on track to partner at a law firm (nice line up of of Bob Gunton, George Wyner and Jack Gilpin—in fact, the film is top-loaded with good character actors, not only in the firm, but also in the Braves organization—Robert Patrick—and among the veteran scouts—Ed Lauter, Raymond Anthony Thomas, and Chelcie Ross) when she gets wind from family friend, Atlanta Braves scouting coach Pete Klein (John Goodman) that her scout father (Eastwood) is about to be brushed back in the organization—he's old, his eyes are going, and there's a new scout (Mathew Lillard) who's more into stats and remote-controlling his decisions than doing the leg-work of seeing and hearing what the talent can do (this one would make a fine double-bill with Moneyball if double-bills still existed). 

Lobell is given one last chance—check out a kid with a killer swing (Joe Massingill) who looks to be a high draft pick. Lobell's job is on the line, and Klein recruits Mickey to follow the old man on-deck and pinch-hit for him if necessary as a seeing-eye daughter. Against her better instincts, she heads to North Carolina to dog her father by day and work on her client-presentation at night (the film sends mixed messages on the thesis of remote-working, as it seems to be fine for her), the father and daughter trading mutual scowls and muted growls, trying to "get closer" while they couldn't seem more like each other.

That's a lot of scenario for a deceptively simple story about relationships and the importance of "being there" in them.  It is also complicated by the mutual interaction between a fellow scout (Justin Timberlake) that the older Lobell has a past with, and the younger might have a future with—Timberlake does fine, relaxed...even charming...work here, not so strong on the dramatics, but hitting solidly on the humor (best line: "Poor Bruce..."), finding a nice line between Eastwood and Adams and making the most of a convenience role to show growth between the two characters.

It works and works solidly if you, like Eastwood's character, don't look too well at it. And there's some late inning contrivances that come out of left field that tie everything up a little too conveniently and nicely, managing to retire the side and take care of every issue in only three pitches. I smelled a rigged game—we really didn't need a Grand Slam on the last pitch to put up a "W" for this one, and, to my mind, took away from the good things that had come before.

Maybe I was feeling that way, anyway. Personally, I'd've been happy if Clint Eastwood had stuck to his lack of guns and retired from acting (as he said he was doing) with Gran Torino. The grace-note of that particular character's last act served as a "period" to the syntax of Eastwood's career, full of so many unrealistic face-offs with clusters of opponents throughout the years.  It was the perfect bow and the perfect statement. But, he had to do a friend a favor—get his buddy a director card—and so he came back. I found it a little disappointing to find out that even Eastwood didn't know when the quitting was good. But, his work here is good, even if the eyes are squinting down to a lack of expressiveness (he does a wink here that is probably only visible in HD), and the voice has been reduced to a burned-out husk. The gravitas and irony are still there, though, enough for Adams to latch onto and take advantage of. And it makes for a pretty good show, while it lasts.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Written at the time of the film's release...

The Schell Game

or

An Irrational Fear of the Irrational

Not sure what the problem with young Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn) is: it could be borderline autism, or as is brought up, Asperger Syndrome ("the tests were inconclusive," he deadpans). It could be "mean world syndrome" or "fusion paranoia," or something as simple as shock or grief, maybe even survivor's guilt. But, coached by his father (Tom Hanks) who died in the Twin Towers on 9/11, he is on a mission to find answers by the same empirical methods Dad used to create scavengers' hunts throughout the city of New York.

To the young Schell, the events that took his father, literally before his eyes, yet in an abstract undefinable way (he literally vanishes, but there is no body to bury), it is all horrifyingly absurd, and the only way to wrap his mind around it is a quest, in the same way that his father distracted him from his fears, which are plentiful (closed spaces, crowded places, tubes and tunnels, things that fly, things that are loud, bridges that could collapse) all things that keep his logical, compartmentalized fact-file of a mind focused on the task at hand, to the rhythm of the tambourine that he shakes to keep his own mind from being rattled by anything else.

One day, after visiting the shrine he's constructed for his father, he confronts for the first time his father's room and closet kept undisturbed since the Al Qaida attacks, smelling his clothes, trying to recall the sense-memory of him, when by happenstance, he finds an envelope (marked "Black") containing a single key.  Thinking it to be the ultimate of one of his father's challenges, he embarks to find the one lock in all of New York mated to that key.

It's a tortured, torturing metaphor. What he's really looking for is something...anything...that might give him solace for his loss, an answer to why his beloved, obliquely protecting father might vanish so completely, without even the cold reality of a corpse to ground him to reality.  In the process, he neglects his mother (Sandra Bullock), his schooling, his life...for the ultimate answer of purpose, and thereby complete the education cut short by the death of his father.  It's a risky premise, one that, ultimately, can have no real resolution, but only absolve him of any complicity in the events of his father's death. 

What Oskar is actually looking for is his own penance.

Movies come in cycles, not only because of the economic consequences of box-office (nothing in Hollywood succeeds like excess), but also with the nation's zeitgeist.  Is it any coincidence that Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a modern day version of New York film-maker Martin Scorsese's Hugo...about another boy's father-quest involving a key and finding something else more than himself?  Hard to say...anymore than that Hugo and The Artist are both explorations and celebrations of the era of visual story-telling displayed by the dawn of moving pictures. 

But, EL&IC has the disadvantage of being a little too close to the theme without the benefit of artistic distance, while being a little too obvious about what it's trying to say...which, as it turns out, isn't much...other than "what are you worried about, kid, when you might be hit by a bus tomorrow." Or dharma works, when runaway karma runs over your dogma. Thanks, but I'd rather have Méliès be a cure for my malaise.

But, what a cast...Hanks, Bullock (basically in the background for most of the movie but allowed to shine at the film's resolution), John Goodman, Viola Davis, Jeffrey Wright and a steady stream of fine character actors as Oskar's many encounters and tough-stones on his journey.  But, the finest of the bunch is Max von Sydow as the Campbellian "helper by the side of the road" that he plays mutely without a word of dialog.  Again, the part is a little obvious and a little tortured, but von Sydow once again provides an actor's master class in taking a role of lightness and making it breathe with life and truth.

Flight

Written at the time of the film's touch-down...

 

Flying Inverted
or
Cracking the Whip

It's been years since Robert Zemeckis made a live-action film (the last being Cast Away, all the way back in 2000, the time being taken up with his three motion capture animated films) and this one, Flight, is an interesting choice, quite unlike anything the director has done, but falling in line with his other films about people being left up in the air about fundamental choices in their lives.  

Captain Whip Whittaker (Denzel Washington) is a pilot on cruise-control. Unfortunately, it's a path that will ultimately crash and burn. An alcoholic and coke-head, he'll do a layover with a stew (in this instance, Nadine Velazquez), get wasted, and then to get himself #1 on the runway will do a line, so he can do the "pilot walk" to the cabin—all confidence and casualness for the launching of "souls" into the wild-blue yonder.

Even before he takes off, Whip is flying. But his nonchalance and bon homie gets him through, even through a difficult take-off through low turbulence. He pushes the plane, but clears the clouds early and restores order to the flight, then settles back to cadge some booze samples, smuggle them into his orange juice and catch some sleep. He wakes up just in time for a crisis: the plane bangs, then goes into a steep dive that terrifies the passengers and crew (and me) and merely gives Whip a much needed shot of adrenaline. The only way he can take the plane from pile-driving into the ground is to bank it until he's flying upside down, then skimming the Earth until he can find a clear place to land, then cork-screw right side up and ditching for a landing.

Six people die, two on the crew.  Whittaker wakes up in the hospital with torn ligaments in his knees, lacerations around his eye and no idea how he got there.  First visitor is the pilot's union rep (Bruce Greenwood), then the NTSB who are all "just the facts" and deferential. Next is Whip's "connection" (John Goodman), a Dr. Feelgood who waltzes in (to the tune of the Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil;" Whip's is "Feelin' Alright"), tells Whip he's a hero, that reporters are hunting him, and criticizes the doctors' choice in pain-killers: "Amateur night!" All Whip can think about is getting out, but it's not as simple as that. He's under investigation for the crash (his simple response is "it was a broken plane"), has been lawyered up with an attorney (Don Cheadle) who doesn't like him, thinks he's a creep, but is going to do his job, and on top of it all, Whittaker must deal with a pissed-off ex-wife and a son who doesn't know him, and has no intentions to.

In the hospital, he meets Nicole (Kelly Reilly, you'll remember her as Dr. Watson's wife in the Robert Downey, Jr. Sherlock Holmes movies), who's recovering from an overdose and not in a good way.  Whip is attracted—she's female and weak, which seem to be all that's required—and he whisks her away to his family's small farm and failed crop-dusting business in rural Georgia.  He's already ditched all the alcohol, but after a couple days, he's back in the bag, drinking himself into oblivion while Nicole goes to AA meetings.  Whip visits, too, but when things get personal, he takes off.

Washington is brilliant in all of this, showing both the pilot's strengths and pitiful weaknesses. His scenes of bleary drunkenness feel real and incomprehensible, and one watches his constant crashing after attempts to bring himself up are painful to watch. The balance of the film is Whip's cart-wheeling from sober to sloshed, his best instincts superseded by his addictions—a man in constant denial, addicted to lying (and pulling himself out of a crisis) and risk-taking as much as to the hooch. It's a rough ride to be a part of and even observe, Whittaker constantly pulling himself out of his dives, then going into another tailspin, and you just know the only time he'll level off is when he crashes.  The parallels between flight and addiction are obvious (how far can you push yourself before everything breaks and if you survive, how much further can you push?) and audiences who gripe about all the action being in the first 20 minutes, may not realize that they're watching a parallel course throughout the rest of the movie, only far more personal, and maybe (hopefully) not as relatable.  

It is a tough, emotional roller-coaster to be a part of, but everything is of a piece. At one point, Cheadle's lawyer puts it succinctly: "Death demands responsibility," and responsibility is one thing Whittaker has never known. The old Irwin Allen disaster movie posters used to scream "Who Will Survive?" The same applies here, even if the audience-grabbing disaster only occurs at the beginning, and we white-knuckle it to see who'll surface from the rubble. This is a smart, troubling, painful movie to watch. But, you can't turn away, either in horror or fascination.

Whip Whittaker's sobering flight is just the first leg on the itinerary.

Speed Racer

Speed Racer (Andy Wachowski/Larry Wachowski, 2008) "This will change everything," said an editor friend of mine. He was referring to the cutting style, I think—the fast blink-of-an-eye editing that has become the norm for action movies, to the point where it seems like a competition to see just how little footage can be used to create an impression that the eye-ball will retain so that an idea can be processed. The cutting style for Speed Racer stills allows a thought to sink in your head, even if that thought is: "That's a complicated move—not that it matters." Crowds stayed away in droves from "Speed Racer" and it's just as well. It's another of those all-flash-no-substance muddled-message Wachowski Brothers films. 

But it looks pretty—an all-CGI-spit-shined, "there's no there-there" green-screened hybrid of live-action and cartoon and a fair imitation of the limited animation style of the Japanese cartoon that inspired it, in all ways a cotton candy movie.

But it's also a kid's movie—race-winners get a bottle of milk to drink at the Winner's Circle—with curse words and crudities (Bad guy Snake-Oiler says at one point in a race "Let's pinch theses turds off!"), kids giving the finger, and an adult's curdled cynicism.

All the heroes are naively game, but the movie regards them as something to be pitied. It's a paean to the independent spirit that conspires in the shadows, and it teaches kids the Golden Rule: "Screw them before they screw you." 

Welcome to Dick Cheney's "Speed Racer."

But that's the way it is with the Wachowski Brothers. Fanboys like to see them as deep-thinkers, but you don't get far beyond the shallows before drowning in ambiguity. Folks crowed over the FX of The Matrix, and the veneer of the thing implied that it was a "Spartacus-frees-the-slaves" liberal message movie, but it was basically a fascist power fantasy where a superman saves the day as a Master of the Universe. And the crowd goes wide-eyed grateful for the benevolence of their new dictator. Leni Riefenstahl has brethren in the Wachowski Brothers.

But, it's just a movie, Ingrid; How is it? Technically brilliant in recreating a simplified reality with as much respect for photo-realism as anime, and no respect for the laws of physics, as demonstrated by a series of race-tracks that seem more like clamped-together Hot-Wheels patterns on which the cars cantilever and skid more often than they seem to be under any power other than centrifugal force. One begins to suspect that subliminal messages are flashed in front of our eyes in the form of "racing ads" and the whole film is dunked in Day-glo colors that haven't seen the silver screen since Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy. Too much use is made of travelling wipes in transitions—things float by taking the old scene with them (one of the devices is a race car driver on fire! Funny, huh, kids?).

The story is the basic "evil man" story of the cartoons transported to multi-corporation conglomerates trying to control everything, and an awful lot of time is spent showing just how eee-vil and corrupt (and surrounded by cool stuff) the bad guys are. The movie is over-crowded with incident and made busy with jokey things on the soundtrack with such regularity that one can start to predict when a "goose" will happen, such is the clockwork dependability of the movie.

Not that it matters, but how's the acting? Well, the best are old pros John Goodman and Susan Sarandon who know how to best exploit weak material. Christina Ricci puts in a spunky try, but Emile Hirsch, who is terrific playing real human beings is at a loss realistically playing a type with conviction. Matthew Fox plays "Racer X" anonymously, as if thinking it not worth fighting against the costume. And the kid playing Sprightle (Paulie Litt)is annoying as hell, but at least he's a professional kid, as all the others in the cast speak with mush-mouths. The monkey obeys orders well. Richard Roundtree makes a welcome appearance; he may be the coolest guy on Earth.

It's a movie that just ruins your day. The snarky cynicism and bad feelings can be summed up in this exchange that was probably going through the Wachowski's minds throughout making this car-crash of a movie—"The fans love it, don't they?" "They do, God help them."

"Go Speed Racer, Go!" ("...far away from us")

(Wilhelm Alert at 00:46:43)

Red State

Oh, look, it's October. "Guess I should be paying attention to horror films."

Written at the time of the film's release. Saturday is "Take Out the Trash" Day.

Red State (Kevin Smith, 2011) You could actually call this an indie cult film, independently financed with an auction to distribute at Sundance (which Smith harpooned to distribute himself), only running in major markets to qualify for unlikely Oscar nominations (Michael Parks, maybe; John Goodman, possibly but not likely), then quietly announced "special showings" throughout the country, presumably because the subject matter—about a homicidal religious cult, making the "cult film" literal—is so "hot" that moving, circus-like, from town to town for a limited time will discourage the "crazies" (of whatever stripe) from making the scene, making A Scene and picketing theaters.*

Needn't have bothered, really. Any media coverage would have actually helped this film, even if it doesn't really deserve it. It's Smith stepping out of his comfort zone (and just about everybody's) making a horror film about a religious cult that attracts lustful men on a web-site, doping them, and killing them for their homosexual tendencies that are targeting America (and the world—cited examples being African AIDS, Thailand tsunamis, and Sin City hurricanes) for rapturous Armageddon.

Forget the fact that these guys are hetero's looking to score, but, now you're getting all logical on us.

The Five Points Trinity Church, led by Abin Cooper (Michael Parks, doing the Smith-riffing like it was exploding out of his head and having fine, venal fun with it) is so bent on destruction and self-destruction there's no reasoning with them or the cache of automatic weapons kept in a vast catacomb-like basement, required for your "gotta-have-'em" horror film chases. They're all wild-eyed zealots, none more creepy than daughter Sarah (last year's Oscar winner Melissa Leo, going a bit over-the-top), who's the boy-bait for the serial-sacrifices.

An evening's services (with communal execution) goes a bit south, and when a deputy is killed (oops), the ATF is called out in the reduced form of Joe Keenan (Goodman, who's lost a lot of weight) and ASAC Brooks (Kevin Pollak, a natural to be in a Smith movie, I think), who roll their eyes with memories of Waco backlash in mind. They don't want to be there. They know there will be no negotiation, the best they can do is keep the carnage down, which is not what the Church is interested in (nor, frankly, is the audience). And as interesting as a dialogue-crazy Smith directed hostage-negotiation might be, this is designed for horror audiences, so things go to hell quickly.

So, there's enough real-world identification with David Koresh and Fred Phelps** for Smith to get on his soap-box (and he does with a particularly annoying teacher character at the beginning of the film, who would no doubt lose her job for saying what she does in the film), but he's a little restrained in the wise-ass department here (other than coming up with the idea in the first place and he doesn't mention Star Wars once). He takes his template from Night of the Living Dead with the church members as both zombies AND barricaded potential victims, with a cascading story-line that starts with predators turning into victims, and their persecutors in turn turning into victims.***

Shooting on the pure-video Red camera system (maybe that's where title comes from?), the film can go just about anywhere and attach itself to anything on the run, which Smith, who also edited, hacks and slashes to cut out the transitional fat and keep the film moving unpretentiously fast. Should have cut a little faster and a bit more, as Smith uses the low-dig' horror format to make up for his short-comings as a shot-planner, but still keeps "the precious words" of his script intact. Too bad. There's a few things that could have easily gone in the out-takes bin that were redundant or not helpful. And then, just when things start turning really interesting, Smith pulls the rug out on the film, never venturing past its "potential." But it seems to me if you're going to be a barn-burner, you might as well burn it to the ground, rather than having the bucket-brigade near by to douse it half-way through.

Which is sad to me. Smith's career as the slacker's "geek-fantasy-movie-maker" still suffers from the poor execution of good ideas. A not terribly good film-maker, he still has potential as a superb script-writer. Problem is, he fancies himself a troubadour, a singer-songwriter, even though he can't carry a tune. Another director might be able to take a Smith script and hone it, polish it, and adjust it, so there are no slow spots, has a good sense of pace, and some actual composition to the frame, all things that Smith seems incapable of doing. He has a filmmaker's brio, but no taste and no judgement (especially where his own work is concerned).

His best film is the early-in-the-going Chasing Amy, but sadly, like Silent Bob and the protagonist in that film he's been incapable of doing anything better, in effect, ever since he's been chasing Chasing Amy. Still, if Billy Wilder's counter-maxim of "You're only as good as your BEST film, not your last" is to be embraced, so, too, is the career of Kevin Smith, just so we can have that one film added to the library of great films.

* Actually, Smith, whose humor has never kept him out of a fight (he joined a Catholic protest picket of his own film, Dogma) showed it to the daughter of Fred Phelps' daughter when he took it to Kansas City. Phelps brought her under-age kids, and Smith warned her that the film was "R"-rated and pretty raw. Didn't matter. But, predictably, she walked out 20 minutes in, saying the film was "filth." Um, yeah, wasn't that what Smith was saying?

** The Waco references are for the Koresh family, which was merely Messiah-based and collected weapons like lost souls with triggers, but Phelps (which is composed—if one can use that term—largely by members of his family, and is mentioned in the film, so no one can say that they're being directly targeted), the guy who protests at funerals for slain American soldiers, is so extreme—and media-whorish—that Jerry Falwell called him outright "a first class nut," and the Ku Klux Klan has participated in counter-pickets, declaring Phelps' church "hatemongers." And you know how much the KKK hates that!

*** Smith's original idea would have taken the idea even further to a Higher Plain, that actually would have been pretty neat to see.  But, it would have required expensive special effects for a film done on a shoe-string (the entire effects budget was $5k). And it gives Smith a chance to have that all important tag that wraps up his film in one good line: "People just do the strangest things when they believe they're entitled. But they do even stranger things when they just plain believe."

Monsters University

Dan Scanlon did a great job directing Onward. This was his his previous Pixar release. 

Written at the time of the film's matriculation.

Crossing the Line
or
Big Monsters on Campus

They're ba-ack. The monsters who regularly hide in your childhood closets to go bump in the night have returned. And the whole premise of Monsters University is to show how Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal) and James Sullivan (John Goodman) first bumped into each other in the first place. It was a given in the first film (and one of its unstated charms) that a one-eyed puke-green bi-ped and a shaggy polka-dotted blue-green beast became friends in the first place. M.U. feels the need to explain this monstrously odd couple in the first place. You just know that at some story-meeting, the Pixar geeks leaned back and said "they probably met in college."

Which leads to the question, what sort of college would that be? Knowing that we, as an audience, had already suffered through the entire course-load at Hogwarts, M.U. was a good bet for movie-goers. There are all sorts of easy ironies for a place of learning that specializes in scaring the tar out of you (just as there was in the "Potter" series), and the ways that faculty and staff can exert their own forms of terror can make for a fairly seamless story-line (Helen Mirren is brought in—seemingly the only Britisher not to appear in the "Potter" movies—as the dragony dean of studies). 

The writers have a good time expanding on the differences between Mike and Sully. Mike has all the scary potential of a rubber ball, and his struggles through the "scare" curriculum makes him more of an over-achiever than he already is (one can easily see him pulling one-nighter's until his one eye is blood-shot, but they don't go there). Sully has it easy—he's a legacy student and doesn't put much effort into it, until his own back is against the wall.  Both are campus mis-fits of a sort; they can't get into the fraternity lorded over by Johnny Worthington (Nathan Fillion) and can only get into the scary "animal house" of losers that are the nerds on campus. Once all this is established, the story writes itself, as if by rote...or by script-mill.

Ever taught at a University? It looks kinda like this.

And that's the problem with Monsters University. The basic concept does some stretching, but then it's "pixilate by the numbers." Everything looks great-nobody makes a movie look as good as Pixar, whether it's a natural setting as in their Brave, or the unnatural one here, and the nuances of character draw from classic animation as well as a few wrinkles that Pixar tosses in. But the studio's sequels (excepting the "Toy Story" series) have a sameness that feels like coasting, as opposed to the daring ideas like Ratatouille and Up. The best of the Pixar films expand the horizons and stretch the form. One like this one are more insular and shrink the potential and the possibilities. At least it's better than Cars 2, which, basically, ran around in circles, as race-cars are wont to do.

The preview for the next Disney factory movie shows it's about airplanes. *Sigh* It does not bode well.

One of the little details that makes me love Pixar:
A "traditional" styled map of Monsters U.

ParaNorman

Written at the time of film's release...

Re-Animators
or
"I See Dead Puppets"

The town of Blithe Hollow depends on the supernatural for its tourist trade. But, what the city fathers probably don't understand is that if you live by the sword...well, let's just say you'd better have a good cleaning crew.

One of the town's citizens is young Norman Babcock (voiced by Kodi Smith-McPhee) and he has a problem—he sees dead people, all of them. He's ostracized from friends, family and reality...from life, really...as most of his acquaintances are non-corporeal and that leads to bullying, loneliness and a general lack of enthusiasm. He'd be better off dead—as the only people he can relate to already are.

Then, there's his creepy Uncle (a wonderfully comic vocal performance by John Goodman) who tasks him with a special duty—saving Blithe Hollow from destruction by the wrath of the very witch of the town's fame, killed by the city elders centuries before.  To do so, he must go on a hero's journey with unlikely allies, many roadblocks both physical and emotional, while evading zombies, the undead, jocks, bullies and narcissistic big sisters to confront the evil witch.

ParaNorman is hilarious, quirky certainly, but also has a lot of depth and breadth to it.  It would be an easy—too easy—temptation to call it a Tim Burton knock-off (stop-motion animation, horrorific subject matter...it must be a Tim Burton knock-off), but it's actually far more concerned with story over effect than Burton, whose work can become tangentially derailed for a sequence or bit that the director finds funny, even if its a mismatch for the rest of the film and its non-sensibilities. ParaNorman stays on track, managing to brings its humor out of character, rather than despite it, and with a sense of comic timing that's by turns subtle, surprising and goofy. Yes, there are scary bits—it's rated PG, so maybe the littlest of kids shouldn't go—but its horrors are not there to shock, but to thrill. 

And when the film does build up a full head of horror steam at the end, it provides some of the most awesome sights and effects that have been seen in animation in quite some time. A hybrid of the Burton and Aardmann animation studios—directors Chris Butler and Sam Fell worked for both groups, respectively, and you can see aspects of their animation styles meshing, hallmarking the best of both stop-motion worlds—Burton's "antic-ness" and Aardmann's appreciation (and mining the comedic possibilities) of stillness.  Combine that with the story of an outsider who manages to collect a posse of co-adventurers who handle the auxiliary parts of the hero's main mission, and you have a well-rounded story that manages to surpass the limitations of the parts (making it, amusingly, a bit of a zombie-movie itself).  

What's nice is there's enough time in the plot (involving more than just the cemetery variety) to appreciate the artistry behind it—the way the town is laid out with abandoned squalor in the detail, the people with perpetually bemused expressions, and are, like us, anything but symmetrical, the way an ear glows with the back-lighting of sunshine, and in the ending that manages to combine moments of dark beauty and true psychotic scariness. Lots to appreciate. Lots to like. It's a fine film that makes the most of its slim ambitions, and rises above them.

Almighty Then! or: "How Long Can You Tread Water?"

Bruce Almighty (Tom Shadyac, 2003)/Evan Almighty (Tom Shadyac, 2007)

Bruce Almighty was a gently humanistic take (more like the director's Liar, Liar and Patch Adams, than his anarchic Ace Ventura, Pet Detective) on God and Godliness, a bit like having your eucharistic wafer and abstaining from it, too. Jim Carrey, a frequent Shadyac collaborator, played Bruce Nolan, a rubberly-mobile human interest TV reporter who's became tired of reporting fluff and covets the anchorman's chair. Thinking his lot being...well, like Lot's (or Job's), he blames God for his sorrows, despite having Jennifer Aniston as his supportive live-in girlfriend, a brownstone in New York, a dog who loves him, and—dare we say it—a cushy goddamn reporter's job! 

Not only that, God actually answers his prayers. And not just any God, it's God in the form of Morgan Freeman (type-casting, admit it), the most denominationally-friendly choice for the role, other than Eric Clapton. Bruce Almighty delivered a lot of laughs. Carrey was not so much over-the-medication that he was funny, rather than alarming, and the feel-good message of "we're all just a little bit God" is just theologically mushy enough to satisfy everyone from the self-flagellators to the shakra zulu's....and keep the picketers at bay.

Parting of the tomato soup

But one does wonder: a look at the DVD's "Special Features" shows a definite softening of the material. Carrey with "God" powers goes a bit "Old Testament" in the out-takes, including a sequence that would have fit right in with The Mask featuring Divine Intervention with some car-jackers, some extreme "if-it-bleeds-it-leads" stories, and the further torturing of Steve Carell's rival anchor Evan Baxter, that includes setting his hair on fire during a newscast. Not quite so heart-warming. It would have tilted the film a little bit into the zany/cruel category, that might have upset the Faithful. Still, it's a fun-film that is genuinely funny, and does have its heart in the right place.

So, what in Hell happened to Evan Almighty? There were reports of problems, that the film went waaaaaaaay over-budget, threatening to turn it into the most expensive comedy ever made, and, of course, where Carell was featured only briefly (and brilliantly) in Bruce, it was his cross to bear to stand in for Jim Carrey for the sequel. 

Carell is an incredible talent who can—actually—cross the territories between comedy and drama and do so credibly—given the right material. But he's not good at everything. Bruce Almighty showed a gift for slapstick—his Tourette's news-anchor was one of the funniest things in it, but he's at his best as a low-energy Buster Keaton, standing stone-faced while the house falls around him. Evidently having everything that can possibly go wrong in the "Noah" scenario didn't result in a laugh riot. There are just so many poop jokes you can wring out of the "ark." 

As an experiment, I have had folks who have seen Evan Almighty—and not found it funny—sit through Bruce Almighty and howl. Comedy is, of course, subjective, and what will work in one movie doesn't necessarily work when done again. But,to have such disparate reactions?

So, Evan Almighty is just genuinely un-funny.

Isn't there a Bible story about going to the well one too many times?