Category: Arts & Entertainment

This week Mac got me into a preview screening of Ratatouille. It’s really an outstanding movie.

It’s gotten to where you just expect the highest level of quality from Pixar movies, and Ratatouille exceeds that. At the technical level, of course, it’s perfect — Pixar movies always have much, much more going on behind the scenes than is immediately apparent, and the effects always serve the story. There are hairy characters that don’t really need to have every hair individually simulated, and segments that don’t really have to be set underwater with accurate water caustics and bubbles and realistic movement, but they do it just because they can.

That’s the case here, but still the effects work stands out: in Ratatouille, I was most impressed with the 2D animation. There are several scenes where book illustrations and billboards come to life and begin speaking, and the movement and lighting and coloration are perfect; they really do look like paintings brought to life, and make the surrounding three-dimensional characters seem even more realistic.

The animation is perfect throughout, which is remarkable considering I don’t really like the character design for any of the non-rat characters. They’re all fairly off-putting, with grotesquely exaggerated features and a skin texture that makes them look like PVC figures. (But still nowhere near as unappealing as Dreamworks characters). But that’s just a personal preference, and even I quickly forgot it because the characters all move completely convincingly.

It’s full of laugh-out-loud moments, and like all the best animation, many of those come from small details. Just the shape of the food critic Anton Ego’s writing room, and the image of his typewriter, were enough to get a laugh.

And it’s got my single favorite scene in any Pixar movie to date. It would’ve been a great movie without it, but that one scene in particular — when Ego first tastes the ratatouille — was just so brilliantly done, it knocked it completely out of the park.

So Ratatouille gets my unqualified recommendation: go see it as soon as you’re able.

But…

I’ve got to mention the problem that kept distracting me throughout the movie. It was the same unsettling undertone that caused me to feel ultimately ambivalent about The Incredibles. (And for the record, I liked Ratatouille much more than The Incredibles, which is doubly surprising because the latter has superheroes and retro-future homes and a Bondian supervillians lair and fight scenes and explosions, while the former is about cartoon rats and French cooking).

What bugged me about The Incredibles was the sense of Objectivist preachiness that kept slipping in. The “Be true to yourself” message has been a staple of Disney movies for decades, but it’s usually of the innocuous (and vapid) “Follow your dream!” variety. I thought The Incredibles pounded home the darker variety, saying “I am an exceptional person and I deserve to be treated as such!”

The subtle aspects didn’t bother me — naming the characters “Parr,” setting Mr. Incredible up with a desk job — but when they veered into speeches — Mr. Incredible’s browbeating by his tiny middle-manager boss, and Dash’s browbeating by his nerdy teacher and the lecture about “just fitting in”, and especially the villain’s final speech — it just seemed like the screenwriter had some baggage he wanted to get rid of.

Ratatouille isn’t anywhere near as glaring — if you weren’t bothered by the parts I mentioned in The Incredibles, you probably won’t notice it at all in Ratatouille. But there are still a couple of moments of speechifying. Remy makes a speech to his dad about “moving forward” that seems more petulant than affirming. A book mentioned throughout the movie is called “Anyone Can Cook;” but ultimately, we’re reminded that anyone can try, but very few are going to be good at it. And even more blatant, the food critic begins his final review with a completely out-of-left-field dissertation about how critics are worthless and produce nothing of value, doing nothing but bringing down the ones truly capable of greatness.

Now, I’m willing to admit I’m sensitive when the topic of Objectivism comes up; it’s a completely alien and repugnant philosophy to me, and somehow I ended up with roommates all throughout college who were hard-line devotees of Ayn Rand. (Edited because that sounded overly harsh: they were perfectly fine people on every level; I just completely disagree with their philosophy.) So I could be reading more into it than what’s there.

But then I see stuff like this featurette about how Brad Bird is the Messiah, and I just feel kind of nauseated afterwards. One of the cardinal rules of filmmaking is supposed to be “show, don’t tell.” Bird has shown us three times over, with The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, and now Ratatouille, that he’s an exceptionally talented filmmaker, capable of making astounding movies that genuinely raise the bar for everything that follows. So I’d just ask that he stop reminding us of that.

Tonight’s entry in the Movies Everybody Has Already Seen Except Me Marathon was the Brian DePalma classic Scarface. Now, I realize the movie is 24 years old, but I’ve got to throw myself on the mercy of the internets here, because I just don’t get it.

I’ve been looking around for some kind of explanation, but people keep writing about it as if it were a real movie. Not just back then, but even now, after they’ve had time to reflect. I’m pretty sure I saw the same movie as everyone else, since they describe a lot of the same scenes. But the movie I saw is one that you walk away from with your head down, trying not to make eye contact with anyone involved. If it happens to come up in conversation, you acknowledge it and then quickly change the subject. You pretend it never happened. You sure as hell don’t celebrate it and make a videogame and a 20th Anniversary Edition.

Where do you start? The casting? I made fun of the critics of Memoirs of a Geisha, who complained that Chinese actresses were cast to play Japanese women. I want to publicly retract my mockery now, because I think I can understand how it would be offensive at worst, just plain odd at best.

I mean, in Scarface you’ve got DePalma casting Al Pacino, and sure, that kind of makes sense. His part has to carry the whole movie, so you need a heavy-hitter, and it’s unlikely anyone other than Pacino would’ve been able to carry it off. So yeah, Pacino as a Cuban, why not? F. Murray Abraham: still too early to call; so far he’s just vaguely “ethnic.” I’m watching scenes with Robert Loggia for about 15 minutes before I realize he’s trying to do an accent — sure enough, I pause to go look it up on the IMDB, and he’s playing a guy named “Lopez.” By the time they had Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (complete with Roseanne Roseannadanna hair) as Montana’s Cuban sister — introduced alongside their mother, who is inexplicably played by a Latina actress — I just gave up. Apparently they’re all from the Little Sicily part of Havana.

Apologists keep acknowledging that Pacino’s performance was “over the top,” which I don’t get. He was pretty much the stable center of this ridiculous movie. He’s so committed to the part, I started to believe he was more authentic than his second in command, who was actually born in Cuba. When you’ve got a montage sequence set to a Giorgio Moroder soundtrack, where immediately after the bride and groom kiss, the entire wedding party walks down to the stream to stand and look at the tiger they’ve got chained up to a tree on the other side — everything Pacino does seems understated in comparison.

It’s like everything I was ever told about the movie is wrong. Nobody mentioned it was almost three hours, for one thing. People said it was the story of the “rise and fall” of a drug dealer; it’s more like three hours of a drug dealer doing random things to piss people off. And people described it as ultra-violent; DePalma (and Oliver Stone) blew their entire wad with the chainsaw scene at the beginning, and everything from that point on was just a hair more graphic than what you’d see on “The A-Team.” (The scene where a guy gets thrown from a helicopter was my favorite; they watch it play out via binoculars, and you can not only hear the guy scream, but his neck snap. Those are good binoculars!)

It’s too long and boring to be a comedy. So I can only assume that while they were making it, they really thought it was a serious film. I don’t know; maybe I’m not giving them enough credit. The first scene shows Montana bluffing his way through a police interrogation — maybe they were bluffing everybody with this movie and have managed to get away with it for all these years.

When I was in high school, the rival school from across town put on a production of Godspell that rocked my world. I loved the music, I loved the concept behind the show, I bought the soundtrack and memorized it. When I went to college in New York, I spent my dining hall money to see the off-Broadway revival of it at least three times. I loved — and still do — how the show could be so unabashedly corny and goofy and still manage to be profound in its simplicity.

But that was a long time ago, and by the time it was actually practical to see the movie version (they didn’t have them new-fangled DVDs when I went to high school), I’d already lost interest. I finally watched the movie today, and I’m actually glad I waited for it.

To give a little perspective: the play originally premiered the month before I was born, and the movie came out when I was two years old. So by the time I saw it in high school, it was already on the south side of “quaint.” Jesus as a clown, the apostles as face-painted hippies, and the crucifixion taking place on an electric fence to show how it’s all “urban” — that must’ve seemed so daring fifteen years ago!

Now, fifteen years after that, the movie somehow manages to feel even older than a retelling actually set in Judea would seem. The cast all look like the random people from the Summer of Love footage you see in ads for Best of the 60s compilation albums. And it’s all filmed in the Sesame Street school of cinematography. At times you feel like you’re watching the Gospel of Saint Matthew as Performed by The Bloodhound Gang from “3-2-1 Contact”, with familiar faces bouncing up and jarring you out of your sense of proper time and place — Jesus is Sydney Bristow’s dad, and there’s the Chief from “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego!”

But ultimately, what dates the movie isn’t its music, or the fact that so many of the cast have now passed away, or even its visuals, but its very existence. It’s not just the case that this movie wasn’t made within the past 10 years; I’d say that this movie couldn’t have been made within the past 10 years.

Obviously, there’s all the skipping and dancing and rainbows and face paint, the hippie beards and white-guy afros, and the mugging the camera and lots of “funny” voices. But what most jarringly knocks the audience back into the present is when the cast performs the vaudevillian song “All for the Best” and delivers the climax with a wacky song-and-dance number at the top of the World Trade Center, still under construction.

There’s not a lot that can knock the wind out of a revival more effectively than that. A song about the promise of greater rewards in heaven, delivered from the top of a destroyed building by a cast of people almost half of whom are now dead.

Watching the rest of the movie in that frame of mind gives it more weight than any production of the play I’d ever seen. Although I love the play, I’ve never actually been moved by it — I’ve always seen it as a celebration of the gospels, not a passion play. It’s the musical theater version of The Living Bible: a simple, effective reiteration of Christ’s teachings, presented in an entertaining and contemporary (or at least more contemporary) format.

You watch it to get happy. To be reassured that somebody 2000 years ago really did have it all figured out, and it all really is as simple as He says: Love God with all your heart and soul, and love thy neighbor as thyself. Everything else is based on that.

The crucifixion scene during the finale has traditionally been the point in the show where I start looking at my watch. Yeah, yeah, it’s all very sad, but we all know there’s a happy ending — He comes back! Speed it up and sing “Day by Day” again. But now, for the first time, I finally get what that scene is supposed to make you feel: a profound sense of loss.

And loss on several levels. The most obvious and direct one, the loss of that connection to God or a more general loss of faith. I’ve frequently heard people describe religion (or at least the Judeo-Christian side of things) in terms of “abandonment”; there’s the line in the song “Get Together” that says, “When the one who left us here returns for us at last.” It’s always just seemed like a clever turn of phrase until now, when you look around and have to wonder, does anybody really get it anymore?

When we’re in the middle of a war where both sides are claiming to be fighting in God’s name, but the side that I’m helping to pay for is supposedly the God who made pretty clear His views on killing, loving your enemy, and turning the other cheek. And it’s gone on for so long, has been so perpetuated by fear and paranoia and a desperate desire for control, and is now so lacking in objective or purpose, that even if did at one point have some sliver of moral justification, that’s long gone.

And the world hasn’t stopped for it, there’s been no clear sign of a favorable outcome, no sense of “fighting the good fight.” Instead, the world has kept on cranking, adjusting itself back to the status quo. To the point that the phrase “I had to re-think a lot of things after 9/11” has become a cliche, saying nothing more than that the speaker is oblivious and hopelessly self-important.

I hate to sound even remotely like Pat Robertson, but I’ve got to ask: if we can fuck things up this badly and still just tool along and not be smited, is He even paying attention anymore? Is having to take my shoes off at the airport the only sign of divine retribution?

And then of course there’s the sorry state of religion in America. Where Christianity has been twisted and distorted to such a degree that something like Godspell, which should be like mainlining pure undiluted Christian concentrate, would be rejected as absurd or downright sinful. To start with, there’s all the rainbows and the skipping and prancing around Manhattan, plus it’s musical theater — you know what that means. All that talk about love is all well and good, as long as you’re loving the right people.

And it’s got to be said: the movie makes Jesus out to be kind of a pussy. Nowadays you’ve got to see Action Jesus, who gets nails graphically driven into his body and then says, “Is that all you got?” And dispense with those pansy-ass beatitudes; what we want to see is people getting their what for after the Rapture comes, when all the bad shit goes down. Godspell may have been acceptable in the 70s, but now in 2007 it’s got entirely too much hugging. Jesus weren’t no retard, and he weren’t no homo, and he sure as hell wasn’t some damn hippie.

Here’s an idea for a short film: start in the warehouse from the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. You hear a ringing sound from one of the crates. A workman enters from offscreen. He listens at each crate for several minutes before finally finding the right one. He blows a thick layer of dust off the top, then pulls out a crowbar and pries off the lid. Inside is the Ark of the Covenant. He lifts the lid of the Ark a little bit and the ringing stops. He listens for a moment, nods his head silently, then closes the Ark again. Once he has the crate lid back in place, he leaves the warehouse. He walks down the long corridor to his desk and picks up a phone. He dials a number, waits a moment, then says: “Jesus just called. He wants His religion back.”

As long as I’m pointing fingers, how about a little condemnation of the secular world? The real reason you’d never see a movie like Godspell today is because a bunch of hippies in rainbow-colored costumes skipping through Manhattan singing songs about Jesus is as much of an anathema to the secular crowd as it would be to self-described fundamentalist Christians. Probably even moreso: the fundamentalists would call it sacrilege to portray Jesus as a clown (even though come on: a heart and clown tears? That couldn’t be more obvious or appropriate); while everybody else would object to the concept of clowns in general. And both sides would object to a baptism scene that looks like the opening credits of “Friends.”

The movie commits the unforgiveable sin: it’s completely and unapologetically earnest. Jesus Christ Superstar has always been the more popular of the two “early 70s Jesus musicals,” and I’d bet a million bucks it’s because of the tone of that play. It’s more ironic. It makes plays at depth by putting the focus on Judas and by raising the question of whether Jesus was the Messiah or “just” a great teacher. It’s the hipster version of the Passion, that gets rock stars to play the leads, while Godspell is for the musical theater set.

We’re in an environment that’s so cynical and so polarized, that even the most simple and understated expressions of faith are grounds for dismissal. I’m guilty of it too. I’ve seen so many schmaltzy or oversimplified or dogmatic examples of glurge that I get antsy at even the first sign of a capitalized “He.” And I’ve been preached at by hypocrites and pedants so many times, that I immediately turn off when hearing anyone’s interpretation of religion that’s not my own. And it’s a shame, because when it’s expressed the right way, without judgement and spin, it’s amazingly reassuring. It’s supposed to be a message of inclusion, a reminder that all of us are just trying to figure out what the point of all this is, and this is what we’ve learned so far.

Sure, there’s a lot that’s painfully corny in Godspell. (And while I’m criticizing, I should mention that when watching it now, you quickly forget that Victor Garber was in Titanic and “Alias” and just concentrate on the fact that he’s overwhelmingly creepy in the movie). But it’s necessary to make the whole thing work. Without that sense of fearlessness, that sense that if we fail, we’re going to fail spectacularly, the movie would feel detached and hopelessly dated.

As it stands, the movie is hopefully dated. You’re never allowed to forget for a second that this is an artifact of the early 70s. But the message is so pure and unencumbered by irony and cynicism, that you start to ignore the aspects that are dated, and focus on all of the stuff that’s still relevant.

Now of course, cynicism isn’t a recent invention. Reading this curmudgeonly review of the movie from the time of its release actually made me feel a little bit better. Vincent Canby said he wasn’t buying the purported innocence and naivete of the movie for one second; it wasn’t about Jesus at all, but an ironic performance about show business itself. The playwright used the Gospel of St. Matthew simply because it was in the public domain and he could avoid copyright concerns.

Which, if nothing else, proves that people have always been able to miss the point and assume that everybody’s trying to pull one over on them. And if things aren’t getting better in that regard, then at least they’re not getting worse.

I don’t know when it was decided that comic book movie blockbusters were required to have multiple villains in them; I’m guessing it was during pre-production of Batman Returns when someone realized that more people would pay to see Michelle Pfeiffer in a leather catsuit than would be willing to see Danny DeVito dressed like a penguin. Good call there, but it set a bad precedent, and they really need to cut that shit out.

The biggest problem with Spider-Man 3 — there are way more characters than the movie can handle — is so obvious I can’t believe that they just didn’t realize it during the production. It’s more likely that somebody at Sony-Columbia or Marvel (or maybe it was even Sam Raimi himself) decided that there was so much money riding on the movie, they’d better cram as much as they could into it. Of course, the end result is a muddled mess that’s getting pummeled in the reviews.

It’s actually kind of a shame the movie’s getting such bad word of mouth, because it’s really not that bad. Or at least, for every bad thing it does (emo Peter Parker, hyperactive pacing, and it’s about an hour too long); it does something else well (disco Peter Parker, Bruce Campbell and Stan Lee’s cameos, and insistence on keeping the goofy character-development stuff). The action scenes are really well thought out and choreographed and are suitably over the top. But the editing is confusing and the effects seem rushed, so it all cancels out. I actually liked the big team-up scenes during the finale, but it took such a long time to set them up, it robbed them of any emotional value. Everything seems like it was better in concept than it is in execution.

For all the big movie franchise bloat, it definitely still feels like a Sam Raimi movie, and a Marvel comic (for better or worse). I don’t want to contradict Kirsten Dunst or anything, but the person keeping these things from being total flops is Sam Raimi. I don’t buy into the whole auteur theory, but the scenes that really work in the Spider-Man franchise are the ones that have the mark of Raimi’s style. In Spider-Man 2, it was Doc Octopus’s awakening in the hospital, filmed in full-on Evil Dead-style.

And in this one, it’s the insistence that Peter Parker is, above everything else, a total nerd. I know enough about Marvel comics to know the story about the black suit and the alien symbiote, and I’d read reports that Spider-Man 3 has a subplot (one of 1000, as it turns out) where Parker starts acting like a total dick while under the influence of the suit. I was fearing the worst, but as it turns out, those are some of the best moments of the movie. Simply because Sam Raimi and Tobey Maguire are completely unafraid of looking stupid. So he takes advantage of women by insisting they make him milk and cookies, he sasses back to his professor, he struts down New York streets to a funk soundtrack only he can hear, and the worst offense of all — he steals the spotlight from Mary Jane by using his spider powers for an elaborate jazz dance routine. I’m sure if I were a 12-year-old who’d been looking forward to a big action movie, I would’ve thought it was “lame” or even “gay,” but I was loving it.

Clearly, there was a force fighting to keep the good, goofy fun in the movie. So why couldn’t they have fought to save Venom for part 4, and keep this movie down to a manageable cast? If you need to sell cool black-suit action figures, one of my friends had the perfect suggestion — introduce that stuff for the final showdown against Sandman, and then save the full story for the (inevitable) sequel.

Ah well, maybe the sequel will just focus on the Lizard, since they’ve had the guy sitting around for two movies now. If they’ve got to add somebody else, I vote for Kraven the Hunter, just because of the costume. Who wouldn’t want to see somebody having to wear that in a live action movie? I respectfully suggest Bruce Campbell to play him.

And my favorite line of Spider-Man 3: when the cops first spot Thomas Hayden Church as Sandman, and one of them says, “Hey, that’s that guy from the prison break.” Just because it sets up the obvious response: “No, that’s that guy from the ‘Wings.’ ‘Prison Break’ is a different show.”