Sunshine Cleaning

Written at the time of the film's release. I still have fond memories of this film ever since its release in 2008.

Oh! And give Amy Adams an Oscar, for crying out loud!

"Blood in the Seams/Heaven on TV/God on the CB/and the Spirit in the Sky"

Where do they come up with these things, these independent movie-makers?

First off, the poster with the chirpy "From the producers of Little Miss Sunshine" didn't help matters any; I'm not a fan of Little Miss Sunshine thinking it hit all the right "indie" crowd-pleasing ingredients (Alan Arkin + Gay depressive + quirky family + so-ugly-she's-cute-kid + passive-aggressive marriage + "bizarre" normals + a beater-van = "WARMTH") in the same "by-the-numbers" way James Bond fires off all his gadgets in the same order "Q" introduces them.

Sunshine Cleaning hits the same formulaic construction, but the finesse with which it's performed and the sheer weight of its "downer" concepts manages to make it bob cheerily higher in the dank waters it's been pushed into in a life-affirming defiance.

What are we talking about here? Single mom Rose Lorkowski (Amy Adams, all dewy eyes and iron jaw) is a former Cheerleading Queen in her Albuquerque, New Mexico High School who made all the wrong choices. Knocked up, no prospects, she now cleans the homes of the less popular, stabler girls from her class. She's carrying on a going-nowhere affair with a married cop who won't leave his wife, who just got pregnant again-(yay!) Her OCD son just got kicked out of school for obsessively licking things (including his teacher). Her worthless sister Nora (a brilliant Emily Blunt-not betraying a hint of her Britishness) just got fired from her worthless waitress job. And Dad (Alan Arkin)...is played by Alan Arkin.

To pay for her kid's private education (or anything), she decides to take her cleaning skills up a notch—there's good money to be made cleaning up the "blood and body fluids" from recent crime-scenes. Soon, Rose and Nora are a going concern as their "Sunshine Cleaners" does a fast turn-around of suicide clean-ups, "de-comp's" (as they say in the trade), and every other obnoxious, toxic, disease-ridden scouring job that comes down the pike. "It's a burgeoning field" says Rose, the whites in her eyes showing all-around as she explains it at a baby shower. "We come into people's lives when they're going through something ... profound."

Indeed. And the intertwining skeins of those lives weighs as heavily as the various crises in their own lives. It all is a bit messy. Amy Adams spends a lot of time looking into mirrors, sometimes chanting a mantra: "You are strong. You are powerful. You can do anything. You are a winner." One night, in a motel room that she's occupying alone, she'll have a new coda for that litany and burbling up will be a half-strangled cry/half-hysterical laugh.

It's brilliant. Adams rarely disappoints, and only does when she's got something she's trying to stifle (like her nun in Doubt that threatens to turn into her Princess Giselle from Enchanted if she cracks a smile.) Not here. Give this girl an Oscar, quick. In fact, director Christine Jeffs gets a great performance out of everybody, that elevates its basic plot (which reminded me a bit of Happy Gilmore) and stifles one's urge to apply the film's last line to casually toss it onto the indie "also-ran" pile. Films that click this well happen rarely.

War for the Planet of the Apes

Ape-ocalypse Now (The Beginning and The End)
or
"What Would Caesar Do?" ("Jesus Christ, You're Impressive...")

The more steps you take away from War for the Planet of the Apes, the more interesting a film it is. Maybe it's the way the FX now make you "buy" the apes as credible characters and not motion-capture constructs (They always looked good, aided immeasurably by the at-the-core ape-performances of Andy Serkis and crew). Maybe because Matt Reeves doesn't do anything "fancy," just directs with an eye toward verisimilitude and not for the cutesy-kitsch (ala the first movie from 1968). Maybe because the movie touches so many cultural reference points (and not just the first "Planet of the Apes" tetrology) that you get the feeling you've seen it all before—you have, just never like this, and never from this perspective. It is a film of so much incident (although quite compact), that the Big Picture the film is aiming at doesn't become apparent until you're out of it. Like the apes in their California forest, you can't see them for the trees. It's because evolution has been upended, and Man has made his successor in the form of his ancestor. The apes become humanity...and that's not a good thing. We have met the enemy and "he is us." The humans have played God with evolution...and God's really pissed.

Those expecting a big apocalyptic nuclear set-piece will be disappointed (although I was rather expecting it when I saw a reference to Beneath the Planet of the Apes in one of the sets). The world doesn't end with a bang, or a whimper, for that matter. As George Carlin once groused about Earth Day: "The earth will be just F-I-I-NE. But WE'RE fucked!" The world doesn't end at all. It just hits "reset" as it occasionally does ("Okay, everybody outta the gene-pool!") and begins again. Cosmically speaking, The Earth bases its fiscal year on dominant species. And the new King in town is the one Evolution left behind, and that Evolution's beneficiary unknowingly gave a kick-start to in its attempt to improve itself. The next species would do well if it never invents irony.

It's been two years since Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, which saw the sentient Ape-Tribe created by the green-eyed laboratory-experiment Caesar (Serkis) going through its own Civil War, ending with the death of Caesar's Iago and rival for power, Koba. But Civil Wars never really end, and those divisions haven't quite healed, and for the human survivors of a population-consuming flu (which grew out of the same experiments that created the intelligent apes—ya  know, irony), there hasn't been any sign of Caesar and his followers, as they have dug even farther into the Muir woods outside of San Francisco.

But, just because you don't see anything doesn't mean you can't hunt for it...just ask "Bigfoot." After a brief summation of what has gone before ("Reading" is what they'll say on CinemaSins), over a darkened forest shot, we see a well-armed Special Forces team stealthily track forward. On their helmets are slogans like "Monkey-Killer" and "Bedtime for Bonzo!" Humorous cultural references aside, they're on a mission: they've come from the north of the country under the command of one Colonel McCullough (it will turn out to be Woody Harrelson) to eradicate Caesar's ape-tribe for specific reasons that will be explained later, beyond merely fear and loathing. 

The attack initially goes well, decimating forward ape-guards standing at the ape-colony's outer defenses. But, a lone ape escapes on horse-back to bring reinforcements and the superior weapons of the unit are soon overcome by sheer force of numbers in an attack consisting mostly of a coordinated arrow attack. The Special Forces are overrun, save for four prisoners, including a gorilla, recognized as one of Koba's followers.

The prisoners are defiant. "How long do you think the woods will protect you? The Colonel has more power." They have every expectation to be killed, even inviting it, but after questioning them, Caesar sets them free. "Tell your Colonel you have seen me now. Tell him leave us the woods." And he sends them packing, tied back to back, astride horseback, and the tribe attends to their dead, putting their bodies in the river to send them to the sea.

Caesar's son, Blue-Eyes (Max Lloyd-Jones) comes back to the encampment after a long sortee to report that he's found a potential permanent home for the apes across a wide desert that might provide them safety. Caesar makes plans to evacuate the current refuge in the Muir woods and head for his promised land with the surviving apes and his family.

But, that night, other plans come to fruition. In his cave with his family asleep, Caesar sees green lights through the cover of their water-fall camouflage—an attack is coming and he runs after his commanders to seek out the soldiers and defend the encampment. He tells Blue-Eyes to stay behind and guard his family as he bounds into the interconnecting tunnels to coordinate the attack.

But, coming back to his quarters, he finds his family dead, riddled with bullets...and...just about to escape the scene of the assassination, the Colonel, who fires on Caesar as he prepares to be helicoptered away. Enraged, Caesar leaps after him, grabbing onto his rappelling line and starts to climb. But McCullough cuts through the chord and Caesar falls into the lake below, his family's murderer, escaped.

The next morning, it's a different Caesar making the plans. He instructs the tribe to head to the area found by Blue-Eyes and start again. But, he won't be going with them. Instead, he's going to go to the Army compound and kill McCullough, to later re-meet with the tribe should he survive. But, at this point, that's the least of his ambitions. His face is now an almost permanent scowl not—as one reviewer has said—dissimilar from the face of one of Clint Eastwood's revengers. 

It's apt. Because there's a lot of The Outlaw Josey Wales in War for the Planet of the Apes, as well as The Searchers, The Great Escape, shades of Apocalypse Now (but not much) and more than a salute to "Monkey Planet" author Pierre Boulle's "other" famous work "The Bridge on the River Kwai" and before the movie's through, you'll see hints (actually, more than hints) of Spartacus, Moses, and Jesus Christ, as well as Othello and MacBeth. That's a lot of iconography to be shouldered by one ape, but, at this point, short of martyrdom, there's not much more this risen ape can do to become a mythic figure to his followers. Myth is precisely what War for the Planet of the Apes is going for. And History repeating itself, as sure as the turning of the Earth, or its era.

But, Caesar has unwelcome company on his way to McCullough's compound; he's followed by orangutan Maurice (Karin Konoval), the gorilla Luca (Michael Adamthwaite), and chimpanzee Rocket (Terry Notary), who refuse to leave his side on his journey. Before long, they come across another chimp, Bad Ape (Steve Zahn), a zoo escapee who has also learned to talk, and a mute girl (Amiah Miller), who will soon be called Nova. They soon discover others, of McCullough's troop, who have been shot, abandoned and left for dead, who also exhibit signs of mutism, apparently a mutation of the original simian flu, carried by the survivors, that affects their speech centers.

So, let's see...

Apes Talk √

Humans Fewer in Number √

Humans Become Mute √

All we need is a doll that goes "Mama" and a couple ruined national monuments and we're back to the beginning.

But, we've got a ways to go still. At one of the bases of the Alpha-Omega troop (the name of McCullough's forces), the small primary band of primates learn something else. While on their exodus, the Muir apes have been outmaneuvered, captured by McCullough's forces and taken as prisoners back to his main base. Now, Caesar has another mission besides his personal revenge—free the apes so they can continue on their exodus. What he sees at the camp enrages him. The apes are back in cages and during the day, they are brought out to (without food and water) work a quarry and construct a large defensive wall for a coming attack—not from apes, but from other humans, who think, quite rightly, that McCullough has gone off his rocker and plan to (and here's the Apocalypse Now part) "terminate the colonel's command with extreme prejudice."

I guess Caesar and the humans have more in common than thought.

"Apes strong...together."

While Caesar goes after McCullough, Maurice, Nova and the others do some planning behind the scenes on trying to break the Muir apes out, and this is where the center-piece of the action starts. Now, I'm starting to read comments on IMDB* that fuss about War being being mis-titled, that it's not so much a war as a skirmish. Numbers aside, this is a whiny comment, born of a diet of super-hero movies pumped with more adrenaline than craft. There's a lot going on here, besides orange-flamed flowering explosions and gymnastics (although there's plenty of that to satisfy anyone not eating their Wheaties with RedBull). Revolutions are made with more than bullets. And, given the cultural references brought to bear in War..., the film is hardly revolutionary, even if it's depicting one. This is good, old-fashioned film-making with a lot of thought and a lot of care. I think the IMDBullshitters are reacting to the rather glowing interviews of the mainstream critics, who are probably just relieved about seeing a good story well-told. Maybe they're pissed about the military being depicted this way. But, one should be reminded that McCullough is an outlier, an extremist, opposed by even the traditional military who have been satisfied to leave the apes in peace and have no interest in what he calls his "Holy War." If you're going to defend something you have to be able to recognize extremism...even if it's in the mirror.

If there's a failing, it's one of scope. What's the rest of the world doing? (The credits of Rise... indicated that the "simian flu" became a pandemic). The experiments that created Caesar and his kin was all based in the United States, so one can forgive this; the "action" of The Planet of the Apes should be focused on where the mutated apes are and that will be where Caesar is. So, one can forgive the U.S. base (I would rather like to see what the French are doing—it's their story, after all).

So, there's action aplenty and food for thought, as well. That's in keeping with the entire series, which has always been satirical, often heavy-handedly so. This prequel series of Rise..., Dawn..., and War... has been more cunning, and far more subtle, often defiantly so. One of my favorite shots of the three films is in War... where a captured Caesar stands up for his troop in their captivity and resists, taking the whipping that one of his followers started to endure. The weakened ape is dragged to McCullough who stares at him, mutters "Jesus Christ, you are impressive" and orders him to order the apes back to work. When Caesar refuses, he takes his gun and points it Caesar's forehead...and he defiantly leans into it, staring his oppressor down. That is powerful stuff, more than explosions, more than fire-power, more than mega-tonnage.

So...how does it all end? Aptly, actually. With an ending and a beginning. 

But the POTA prequels leave one thread dangling...suspended, as it were. Back in Rise... there was the hint of a mystery that was buried in background television newscasts and newspaper headlines...of the Mars Mission Icarus that was poised to enter the Martian atmosphere but became (as the headline read) "Lost in Space." Nothing of that seemingly doomed mission is mentioned in either Dawn... or War..., but it's still out there, somewhere. War for the Planet of the Apes ends (not with a bang, not with a whimper) with a shot of the former Muir-Ape-troop in their Promised Land, as the camera tilts up to the sky and lingers there for more than a moment before the final fade-out. This may not be to connotate the freeing of a spirit, but more probably to await the promise of...something...falling to the Earth. The circle in this trilogy is now complete, but with that completion of the turning, another one has begun, in the grooves of what has come before. Is it the end of The Planet of the Apes...or just the beginning?

* I've also seen comments that it's "communist propaganda" (I'm mystified as to how, but any thought I put into it would be more than was put into the original comment) and objecting because "humans are the bad guys." Well...duh. In the POTA series, they always were. The humans were the ones in charge of the nuclear weapons that decimated the human population and created the power vacuum that the apes filled. One only has to remember the last lines of the original: "So, we finally, really did it. YOU MANIACS! YOU BLEW IT UP! AH, DAMN YOU! GOD DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!!!" (I'm surprised I didn't see THAT reply in IMDB).

The Great Buck Howard

The Great Buck Howard (Sean McGinley, 2008) Writer-director McGinley spent some time as the road-manager to The Amazing Kreskin and that formed the basis for his script for this, a production of Tom Hanks' Playtone Pictures.

Looking at the promotional videos associated with the DVD, it would appear that Kreskin is fine with this, even though, in details, McGinley strikes rather close to the psychic bone here—yes, Kreskin in his hey-day appeared 61 times on "The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson." Yes, he would close his shows by guessing where an audience member had hidden his pay-check (and he always got paid). That's all duly served up as quirks of The Great Buck Howard, played somewhat petulantly by John Malkovich. But are the other things in the movie like this—the grandiose ego, the out-sized self-importance, the schticky "I love this town" facile platitudes, the dismissive photo distribution, the intolerance for deviation from formula, and the truculence that borders on vengefulness. Oh, Buck can be a good guy...on occasion...but mostly he's in one big perpetual snit that you don't need a mentalist to see coming. Which makes one wonder why someone would take the job in the first place.

Troy Gable (Colin Hanks) drops out of law-school to be the personal assistant for "The Great Buck Howard," who is doing a cross-country tour of small town America, hoping to re-kindle some of the old magic of his mentalist show, when he was more famous...or famous at all. A publicity agent (Emily Blunt) is hired as point-person for interviews and "events" that tend to fizzle out, but she's only as effective as her sorcerous subject and he works best in a controlled environment, one under his control and can anticipate, and any deviation might throw him off.

The film has its charms for a one-sided coming-of-age story, mostly in the casting with Hanks the younger (Hanks the older plays his skeptical father in a nicely subdued and flinty cameo) as a fine, callow presence (most of his performance has to be done in the eyes in the course of observing the shenanigans, and, appropriately, Troy never takes his eyes off Howard, when the job might more appropriately call for his attention to be elsewhere. Blunt is great, as always, even if she isn't doing much more than 'love interest," and Malkovich does a tender walk between comedy and psychosis, cruel and entertaining in one flow. There's also some nice touches by Steve Zahn (a favorite of mine) and Ricky Jay, as bumps on the road-trip.

Still, the Kreskin connection bothers me, especially as the movie's mentalist is a bit of a jerk, never himself coming of age. I remember the film coming out and listening to Hanks (the younger) and McGinley do "press" and never once mentioning Kreskin. Nor did I hear anything else about the man through the film's admittedly short run. To see him come up so specifically and directly on the DVD was a bit of a surprise.

In fact, I don't remember him ever mentioning it, before I saw that supplemental feature.

Hmmm.  Perhaps he is a clairvoyant, after all.

The Good Dinosaur

Dinosaurs Should Be Pleistocene and Not Heard
or
Bronto's/Meet the Bronto's/They're an Altered Timeline Fantasy

Disney/Pixar's The Good Dinosaur has had a troubled history. Originally intended for theater release November 27, 2013, it was only sent out this Thanksgiving, after much tinkering, the dismissal of the original creator/director, and some extensive re-working. With Pixar, that's usually not a bad thing. In the past—specifically, the excellent Ratatouille and Brave—the results of the re-working have been spectacular. 

Here, not so much.

 

Oh, don't get me wrong. Technically and aesthetically, there is a sizable leap in the results. The movie LOOKS spectacular. It is as if the Pixar animators plunked goofy looking dinosaurs in the middle of a "Nature" documentary—evidently the big digital break-through here is multi-layered clouds and getting them "just-so"—so impressive is the mock photo-realism of the landscapes. And landscapes are a big part of the story as they have to be traversed and conquered throughout the film.

It's just that the story isn't that great. Maybe it wasn't that good to begin with. Maybe it was "improved" and "re-thought" into a a messy goo. Whatever the reason, it's just not that fine a concept, it's just not that good an idea. From any other studio (like Dreamworks, or, god forbid, Nickolodeon) The Good Dinosaur would be a prestigious effort (if only because it wasn't going for the "laff" factor). But from Pixar, which, just this year came out with one of their best films, if not exactly in the animation department, the wise, imaginative Inside Out, this one is a disappointment. Not in the Cars 2 type of balderdash, but in the Monsters University realm.

The idea is that we're in an alternate Universe where the asteroid that struck the Earth 65 million years ago did not do so, saving the indigenous dominant life on the planet—that supposedly being dinosaurs—from extinction. After millions of years of evolution, the dinosaurs have now developed societies and language. We first meet a family of brontosauri (they might be apatosaurs for all I know, because they've been cartooned into having the look of Albert the Alligator from the old "Pogo" newspaper strips). The bronto's, being vegetarian, are farmers, and we see Poppa (voiced by Jeffrey Wright) plowing his plattes with his nose to make a new corn crop for his growing family—his wife (voiced by Frances McDormand) and their new hatchlings Libby, Buck and Arlo, the runt of the litter.

I don't know what I am, but that's probably a stegosaurus

Arlo may be the runt, but he's the one with the most potential—he, after all, hatched from the biggest egg. But he's scrawny, the smallest of the kids, and is always being picked on...by his siblings, and even by the pre-historic chickens on the farm (would they be called Jurass-chicks?). His slight nature makes him capable of only the lightest of farm-work, while his bigger brother and sister are digging and irrigating and irritating each while other doing so. Arlo's good for moving sticks. And moping. And being afraid of...just about everything.

This being "Little Dino on the Prairie," the only way for Arlo to grow as a character is to leave home and get stuck in his own adventure, but that's not going to happen unless disaster strikes. When it does, leaving Arlo alone in the wilderness, he must learn to deal with the greater world and its natural and unnatural dangers. It's a bit like "The Adventures of Huckleberry Fin-back" but with a lead character who doesn't exhibit much will, which is, frankly, not very interesting. "Huck" is capable, but directionless with no moral compass. Arlo has no compass, either, but he's never needed one because he's quite incapable of surviving on his own. If there's going to be a movie at all—besides 90 minutes of dino-bones bleaching in the sun—this "Huck" needs a mentor. He needs a "Jim."

 "Jim" comes in the form of a lost human child that Arlo dubs "Spot" and that immediately establishes the dynamic—"Spot" is the pet, but, at the same time, he is also more capable than Arlo and is someone that Arlo can learn from and, simultaneously, be responsible for.  

"Bam-Bam"

This makes The Good Dinosaur much more than a creationist's validation—altered timeline, people, remember—but it also makes it the flip-side of "The Flintstones" (that other creationists' validation) where the lizards are the dominant species and the humans are the co-habitant workers ("Eh, it's a living...")—"The Flintstones" once removed. Where the story is at its wisest is the infrastructure, the skeleton of the story. The dinosaurs carve out their little corners of the world as to their natures—as I mentioned before the brontos, being vegetarians, are low-impact farmers. But, it goes beyond that as dis[played by the limited number of other dino-types Arlo meets on his journey home: the Tyrannosauri Rex, being meat eaters, are ranchers (and when they're about the film takes a decidedly "western" turn—"Papa" T-Rex, Butch, is voiced inimitably by Sam Elliott); the pterodactyls (the head of whom is voiced by Steve Zahn, as a messianic cult leader) are scavengers, picking the bones of any carcass—alive or dead—they can find.

The VERY old West: T-Rex's 'round the camp-fire; 'dactyls acting like rustlers

That part is entertaining-and shows the potential of the story showing what might have happened if dinosaurs ruled the Earth. But the rest of it is less compelling. The pterodactyls are a constant threat and they wear out their welcome quickly. One finds oneself drifting off, admiring the scenery, which is not what you want to do in an animated movie, or a movie about dinosaurs. You want to say "grow up, already" to Arlo, but the best the filmmakers can come up with is a variation of "there's no place like home." But, the lesson is learned more in wanting to leave the theater and be home, rather than in the telling of the tale.

And, there's something else that bugs me: a lot is made of the concept of "family"—at one point, Arlo teaches Spot about it and how important it is and why he mopes because he's away from "the herd" (which makes me think that a really good animated film could be made of the dynamics of elephants rather than dinosaurs). One could make a good case for going the "Huck Finn" route of embracing of the opening of the closed circle Arlo uses to illustrate the "family" concept and accept a not-one-of-your-kind," such a non-lizard like Spot into the fold. There's a good lesson there, a universal one—Twain published his in 1884—and any parallels making the dinosaurs less prone to tribalism than the human inheritors of the Earth might have been a good contrast and object lesson to those familiar with how things are.

But, no, the movie doesn't go there, replacing that lesson with a "you go your way and I'll go mine" ending that only encourages segregation of the different. That left me scowling and thinking Pixar's dinosaurs were no better than us in our "you're okay as long as you're in your place" prejudices. "There goes the neighborhood" and NIMBY-ism are just as at home in the domiciles of this parallel Universe, and left me more than happy that the dinosaurs became extinct, if this is how they evolved. If only xenophobia and tribalism had gone extinct, too.

Arlo, like the story, is stretched a little thin.

Maybe I'm expecting too much deep-tissue philosophy from a cartoon (although I don't think so). But, I do expect more from Pixar, which for the last couple of decades have been expanding my mind, not only with movie-making and story-telling techniques, but also in the concepts that they employed those methods to tell. The Good Dinosaur is a little narrow-minded in that regard. Maybe they'll find their way back on track with Finding Dory.