FILM – Page 11

Do All Animators Go to the Same Bar?

January 4, 2017 by Adam Membrey

Spoiler alert: these guys chased dogs more than they drove.

This is an old post from July. Let’s pretend it’s still July 2016:

I saw The Secret Life of Pets a couple weeks ago, and as the film hurtled towards it’s big action climax, the details felt more and more familiar. Where had I seen this before? The animals are trapped in a van. They need to get out. The only option is to commandeer the vehicle. This involves lots of wayward driving – if I can accept a talking animal than I guess I should accept a driving animal, too – and leads to the van going off a major bridge and nearly plunging into the water. I say nearly because of course the van has to be suspended in its fall for just enough time before it plunges into the deeper, darker waters of New York City below. Spoiler alert: the animals make it out alive despite not having the opposable thumbs necessary to unlock things.

Another spoiler alert: this is almost the exact same ending as Finding Dory.

Boy, the really make toys for *anything* these days, uh?

In Finding Dory, our lovable protagonists are also stuck in a van. They’re going the wrong way – away from their new home – and need to self-correct, so they commandeer the vehicle. Dogs driving a van is not that that far a bridge to cross (almost literally) – so obviously an octopus driving a van is just as believable. Again, there is wayward driving that sends plenty of cars flying in the wrong direction (they could softly crash-land the van from 30 feet up on the pile of insurance money that needed to be paid out for those numerous accidents) and eventually leads to the van flying back into the ocean. All the characters, despite not having opposable thumbs, hands, or even paws, make it out alive.

So my question is this: how is it possible for two major animation releases from two different studios – released less than a month apart – to have almost the exact same climax? It’s oddly specific. One happens in New York City and the other in Monterey, CA. One van falls of the bridge while the other flies off the highway before hitting the ocean. Those are about the only two differences. Additionally, everyone knows that these animated movies take a long time to make. Even if Illumination Entertainment has found a way to make their movies in a more abbreviated, cost-effective manner, you’re still looking at a 3 to 4 year project.

Illumination’s headquarters are in Santa Monica, California. Pixar’s are in Emeryville, California. That’s a separation of approximately 372 miles and at least 6-7 hours of intermittently angry driving in traffic.

A similar thing happened not long ago when Despicable Me 2 came out in July 2013 and The Penguins of Madagascar a year and a half later in November 2014. With Despicable Me 2, a key plot point involved the Minions being transformed into these purple, totally-not-cuddly rage monsters. The success of the mission depended on not only avoiding these purple nasties, but in transforming them back to their yellow, pleasantly banana-crazy selves. Not quite a year and a half later, Penguins of Madagascar had a key plot point about the cute penguins becoming hilariously ugly, somewhat violent penguins and needing to be transformed back. How did two major releases have such similar ending plots? Again, the mechanics of a slow-paced animation process make it unlikely the latter tried to copy a former’s major plot point, but is 15 months possibly juuust enough time to do so?

But this Dory and Pets situation? Freaky. I can only imagine that at some point both Pixar and Illumination found themselves stuck and unsure of just how to get their characters from one point to another in a relatively quick manner. Especially since, you know, they didn’t have the necessary opposable thumbs to pull off some badass stuff. I especially believe Pixar found themselves incredibly stuck because the amount of rampage the van causes on the highway is so mind-boggling as to not only be un-Pixar-like but to completely take me out of the film. I had no room to cry about Dory’s happy ending when my brain was crammed with hundreds of hypothetical insurance bills (and possible if not definite injuries or deaths to innocent bystanders. Can you tell I cared a lot about the insurance money? I must be a grownup now).

So what if a key story person from Pixar, frustrated and unable to poop out a great connecting plot point, took a drive to Yosemite National Park to free the mind? And what if another key story person, from Illumination, took the same trip? What if they ran into each other on the same boulder as they tried to take the best sun-soaked photo to post to their various social media apps? Seems crazy, right?

What if there is an absolutely breathtaking bar halfway between the two cities? Where people can get away and drink themselves into realizing the meaning of life?

A solid halfway point just off of I-5 is Kettleman City, CA. The best place there – according to my own rash, highly uninformed Google search – is Bravo Farms, which not only offers great beer, but ice cream. There is also farm life around which is perfect because, really, how often do Pixar and Illumination not have animals in their movies? Maybe seeing some odd interaction between the animals will lead to a kernel of inspiration that leads to a delicious bite of storytelling popcorn. And then you can grab a solid, delicious ice cream to reward yourself for pooping out that great, much-needed story point.

I don’t know. It’s not clear how it happened. Even weirder – at least to me – is how at some point in Secret Life of Pets two dogs have a literal sausage party of a dream, and there is an entire animated Sausage Party movie that came out just yesterday. Of course, the context of their sausage party (dogs love sausages, as the movies teach us, and they can’t stop thinking about them) is entirely, irrevocably different from the context of Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill’s Sausage Party.

But what if. What if an animator/story person from Pixar, an animator/story person from Illumination, and an animator/story person from Sausage Party‘s Nitrogen Studios (headquartered in Vancouver, B.C., Canada) went to the same animation program? They’re old classmates and they all chat over Skype whenever they’re stuck. Pixar and Illumination tend to do all the talking, stressing over the key story points without being too specific, talking about the pressures of holding up entire studios because live-action blockbusters are just so much more miss than hit these days. All of this is happening while Nitrogen, in his smug, Gilfoyle-like way sits and listens with his arms-crossed, proud of the fact that he doesn’t have the same problems they do. Nitrogen knows his shit. He knows what he’s doing. His movie is solid and subversive. It will make everyone see food in truly new and disgusting ways. And because Nitrogen tends to sit there and listen, barely getting in a word or even an idea, Illumination will wake up one morning with vague thoughts of a sausage party, laugh to himself for thinking how subversive it is to have cute dogs dream of actual sausage parties, and the rest will be history.

My point is this: animation is literally a limitless field. It can do and be anything. But it is still at its heart a tool for a great story. How these intricate moviemaking machines can have thousands of individual machinations a day and still come up with something eerily similar is not only odd, but a bit disheartening. At least they, with their ever-evolving animation, make it look good.

The Lasting Power of Tiny Honest Moments: ‘Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates’

January 4, 2017 by Adam Membrey

Let me get this out of the way: Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates is absolutely, gleefully R-rated. There is no joke too tasteless or visual gag too gross. Everything is out on the table, with it being very much a throw-everything-in-the-kitchen-at-the-wall-and-oh-hell-who-cares-if-anything-sticks effort. Everyone in the movie goes absolutely balls-out, including the MVP foursome of Adam Devine, Zac Efron, Aubrey Plaza, and the scrappy little nobody herself Anna Kendrick. Efron, as we should know by now, is some kind of national treasure. I almost think his muscles are distracting everyone from his incredible comic ability. Devine delivers a go-for-broke comedic performance that reminds me of Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura 2 in that there is no crazy face or idea he won’t explore at least once.

Beyond how hilarious this movie is, it does serve as a reminder that sometimes a little emotional through-line, regardless of how small or reaching, can make a huge difference.

The gist of the movie is that Mike (Adam Devine) and Dave (Zac Efron) are not only brothers but absolute pros at ruining every party they go to. They arrive stag, probably sleep with half the women, and inevitable cause some kind of destruction or injury. But this time: it’s their little sister’s wedding. They can’t screw up this time, their father demands. They must find nice girls to take to a beautiful destination wedding.

While the movie finds Mike and Dave struggling to make their alcohol-selling business work, Alice (Anna Kendrick) and Tatiana (Aubrey Plaza) are also struggling to make their reality something closer to their dreams. They see this opportunity to join Mike and Dave as a way to take a break from their disappointing-thus-far lives and have a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

The real emotional crux of the movie doesn’t reveal itself until deep into the story when Dave and Alice are walking through the Hawaiian woods, spitting out random ideas for Dave’s drawing projects, until Dave says:

Dave: “Do you ever get that feeling… that you’re not good enough to get what you really want… so you’re too scared to try?

Alice: “All the time.”

Dave: “Really?”

Alice: “Like, all the time. It’s terrifying. –

Dave: “It is, it’s terrifying.”

Alice: “Yeah. You’re, like, stuck.

Dave: “Totally.”

Alice: “Yeah.”

In the next 5-10 years, I imagine this movie will become something of a cult classic among millennials. It’s full of great to good to godawfully tastless jokes from start to finish, but that extra emotional string – something that everything can relate to – will make it stick to the wall just a little longer than most of the jokes.

Give It A Chance: ‘Maggie’s Plan’

January 3, 2017 by Adam Membrey

MAGGIE’S PLAN, from left: Travis Fimmel, Greta Gerwig, 2015. ph: Jon Pack/© Sony Pictures Classics

Maggie’s Plan opens quickly with its central conflict: Maggie (Greta Gerwig) is a young college professor looking to have a child, but with no real successful relationship to bolster it. So she has a solution: she’s got an old college friend willing to donate his sperm, and she’ll raise the child as a single mom.

The plan begins falling in place, like dominoes gently bumping into each other, until Maggie meets another professor, John (Ethan Hawke), who’s struggling to write his Next Great American Novel. She reads the first chapter, gives him the feedback he’s been longing for, and off they go. There’s just one problem: he’s married. With kids. She doesn’t realize that she’s not only inspiring him, but also giving him the attention his rising academic star Georgette (Julianne Moore) can’t seem to afford him.

I’m not going to give away what happens, but I will say there is a point where Maggie realizes the romantic ideals she had may no longer hold weight. What began as a torrid love affair in which she inspired him to write the book he always felt he had in him – so romantic! – has been brushed with the banality and reality of family life a few too many times. At a certain point, Maggie wonders if she’s made a mistake. We don’t often see regret and the genuine inner crisis it births in movies. Often it’s glossed over. And even when Maggie’s Plan threatens to lean into a romantic triangle with way too tidy of an ending, it always, always remains true to the characters. Even the most ridiculous notions have their own internal logic to them, which makes them much easier to swallow. We may not agree with it, but we understand where they’re coming from.

The most jaw-dropping moment to me – the one I’m still thinking about months later – takes place only 20 minutes into the movie. The sperm donor friend Maggie has arranged for – a rather intense, quiet man with a burgeoning pickle business (no joke) – is about to take the donor container into the bathroom and take care of business. Just before he shuts the door, Maggie asks him – a former college math major – why he never became a mathematician.

Guy: I liked math because it was beautiful, that’s all. I never wanted to be a mathematician.

Maggie: Really? You think math is beautiful?

Guy: Anyone who’s touched even a hem of that garment knows it’s beautiful. For me, the hem was enough. Couldn’t have taken the frustration.

Maggie: What do you mean?

Guy: Never seeing the whole thing. You’re always just getting these glimpses of the whole picture. Spending my whole life for scraps of truth.

It sounds like a well-written throwaway mini-monologue, and I’m honestly shocked it’s not something that’s been picked up on or written about elsewhere (the fact the film only grossed $3,070 at the box office probably has something to do with it). But it says everything about the movie. It encapsulates the message in a few short lines from the mouth of a character that nobody – not Maggie, not even the audience – takes seriously.

You can see Maggie struggle throughout the film with never seeing the whole thing. She thinks she knows what a happy family and relationship knows and feels like. She thinks she knows what it takes to get there. But it’s not worked out at all the way she imagined. She’s just getting glimpses of the whole picture; she’s scrapping for truth in real and painful ways. Georgette and John, in their own ways, are also scrapping for these bits of truth. They thought their marriage was terrible, and it, oddly enough, took an affair to realize that maybe they weren’t as far off the mark as they thought.

And so it’s fitting, with her final shots, that director Rebecca Miller reintroduces this odd, rather deep man into the story, right at the last moment when happiness seems to be just around the corner and coming up the hill.

Still available for rent at Redbox and on iTunes.

From Page to Screen: The Light Between Oceans and Me Before You

April 9, 2016 by Adam Membrey

By either serendipity or dumb luck, I found myself reading two upcoming film adaptations back-to-back. Both of them are fantastic in their own way. Both of them have trailers that show they are as perfectly-cast as you could hope for. And both of them will come out in 2016.

I began with M.L. Stedman’s 2012 novel The Light Between Oceans, which follows a young couple, Tom and Isabel, as they are living on a tiny lighthouse island off the coast of Western Australia. One day a small rowboat arrives, with a crying baby and a dead man aboard. Isabel, having just suffered with a series of miscarriages, and seeing that there is no proof of who the dead man is, suggests they keep the child. Tom, uncomfortable with them keeping a child that is clearly not their own, resists at first before accepting it may be for the best. All seems to be well until word carries out that the child’s real mother is still alive and has spent the past few years looking for her daughter.

To say any more would be criminal. This is a story that is beautifully told, but that also creates a situation in which sides will be chosen. I found myself sympathizing with Isabel’s point of view more than my co-worker, who strongly believed Isabel was in the wrong. It provides a great opportunity for discussion, and for a while, I felt the ending would be similarly conflicted. Whatever your opinion of the character’s actions may be, it does give way to one of the most beautiful endings I’ve ever read. It takes what could be a splintering reading experience and makes it something whole again.

Any movie that can boast having Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, and Rachel Weisz is going to be worth anyone’s attention. Even better is that all the roles seem to be perfectly cast. But what I find the secret ingreident to be is writer/director Derek Cianfrance. His 2010 film Blue Valentine led a lot of couples to seriously examine their relationships and his ambitious 2012 film The Place Beyond the Pines seems to be gathering more praise as time goes on. All of this is to say this is not someone who does things in half-measures. You can be sure Cianfrance will dig for all the emotional depth the story provides, direct his actors to fantastic performances, and hopefully leave us with a film worth talking (and, who knows, maybe even arguing) about. It will hit theaters September 2nd, 2016.

While Jojo Moyes’ Me Before You takes place in a completely different time period and location, it is similarly about choices and the consequences of them. Here we meet Louisa Clark, a small-town twenty-something who is suddenly out of a job. Her boyfriend has distractingly become more and more enamored with his own triathlon training. Her family needs some financial support and she has little sense of how to do it. That is, until she hears of a rather particular job offer: working as a personal assistant to Will Traynor, the son of a rather wealthy family that lives nearby.

As simple as the job sounds, the challenge becomes clear: Will is a quadriplegic who, due to a sudden accident, has been robbed of his adventurous, thrill-seeking life. He is now confined to his wheelchair, and with it, his future has been boxed away. The first day on the job leads to Louisa convinced she can’t do it. She can’t change the mind of a men set in his ways of darkened rooms and limited movement. Only through sheer persistence is she able to break some cracks in the armor and let things breathe a little.

Louisa is determined to save Will’s life and make him see all the possibilities ahead of him. Will, on the other hand, has already decided what he wants. It’s nearly halfway through the book before you understand this as a reader, and when you do, it changes everything. Like I said, this is also a book about choices and the consequences that come with them. There is still a rather hilarious, exciting, and heartwarming story to be found within this book. But it also all leads to an ending that I found rather heartbreakingly incredible, but that which may put off others. I give Moyes credit for staying true to her colorful cast of characters all the way to the end instead of using wish-fulfillment fantasies to leaven the truth. It provides an immensely satisfying story that I was not ready to let go of.

Like The Light Between Oceans, the filmic adaptation of Me Before You appears to be as perfectly cast as one could hope for. I actually heard about the adaptation taking place as I was reading the book, and once I knew Emilia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryen to many) would play Louisa, I couldn’t separate the two. She seems perfectly cast, and the rest of the movie follows suit. I, for one, can’t for wait for June 3rd to arrive.

The Spy Who Broke Me: 2015’s ‘Spectre’

March 19, 2016 by Adam Membrey

For most of my life, I had no way to connect with James Bond. I knew the name. I knew the ‘shaken, not stirred’ line. I knew he was spoofed in the Austin Powers films. Even the Pierce Brosnan era passed me by without leaving a mark. I enjoyed seeing some of the cool gadgets they came up with, but they were never enough to get me interested.

Then came Daniel Craig’s Bond. When Casino Royale hit 10 years ago (!), it rather deservedly changed everything. It told a compelling story with an even more compelling Bond girl in Eva Green’s Vesper Lynd. It had an interesting villain in Mads Mikkelsen and populated the screen with great British actors. The promise had been established; a new Bond had arrived, with sparkling new pedigree, and some badass, memorable action. I saw it at just the right time, when my interest in movies and their production had exponentially grown. I left the theater satisfied and excited for the new Craig adventures.

Two short years later, I spent my senior year of college mentoring some 45 freshmen, and it is such a strong memory of mine seeing how disappointed they were with 2008’s Quantum of Solace. Several students wrote “QOS Sux” on their whiteboards, after they had breathlessly waited for its release. That whole experience turned me off to the point where I never bothered to see it – even as it has earned back some goodwill over the years.

By the time Sam Mendes took over for 2012’s Skyfall, it felt like a beautiful course-correction of sorts. It had a compelling, haunting villain played by Javier Bardem, and it was expertly lensed by cinematography god Roger Deakins. I become punch-drunk in love with this movie as I saw it, enraptured by the confluence of images, action, and story.

So when 2015’s Spectre was announced, with Sam Mendes back at the helm, I was excited. By the time the movie came out, however, the response felt so much like Quantum of Solace: sharply divided opinions that praised the filmmaking craft but cared not one iota for the storytelling. Just as I ultimately didn’t get around to Quantum of Solace, I put off Spectre for months.

I finally saw it last week, and I understand the anger: Spectre is effectively the end of four movies of Bond origin, which is three more than was ever needed, leaving Craig’s Bond in a weird place both from a contractual and storytelling standpoint. Drew McWeeny of Hitfix and Devin Faraci of Birth.Movies.Death both articulated this much better than I. Skyfall finally ended with Bond where we all expected him to be, and yet Spectre almost immediately reneges on that.

My problems with Spectre are myriad, so I will just list them:

I am normally a fan of Sam Smith’s music, but that theme song has to be one of the least-deserving Oscar winners in a long time. It certainly didn’t help that it was coming off the heals of Adele’s all-timer of a Skyfall theme. It also didn’t help to find out the song Radiohead made for Spectre is massively better.
The movie begins with a helicopter fight scene that takes place over a massive Dias de los Muertos crowd. While it’s not weird to see a helicopter fly over a crowd, it is definitely weird to see one in which the helicopter is violently turning in unnatural ways with two men punching it out on the landing skids. And yet, the crowd never moves. Only when it is increasingly obvious that it will crash do people finally seem to go anywhere. Even worse: this should be a rousing fight, and yet it just seems to happen. Not great.
The main villain, while Bond’s most popular and well-known, was already devastatingly spoofed as Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers movies. To have your villain wear nearly the same outfit and get the same scar – and even throw in a cat! – feels so wrong in ways I cannot fully articulate.
It can be compelling when one character knows more than the others. It can be compelling when the audience knows more than the characters themselves. But it is never compelling when both rival characters know more than the audience does, and for no good reason. Bond and Blofield seem to know exactly what is going on, and they never bother to let us (or anyone) in on it. It just makes everything drag.
A lot of effort is made to take Bond and his new Bond girl to Blofield’s lair aka The House of Spectre. It’s blown up completely only 20 minutes later (or so it seems). What a waste.
The explanation for why Blofield is effectively destroying small pockets of the world (and thousands of lives) to chase one Mr. Bond is so lame that it’s infuriating.

However, you can’t spend 250 million on misguided storytelling without having some highlights, so in the spirit of having a Bondian Compliment Sandwhich (that doesn’t leave a bad aftertaste like the movie) here are some highlights:

The cinematography is pretty great. Even if Hoyte van Hoytema (Her, Interstellar) is not quite Roger Deakins, I do think he managed to do his best with a problematic story.
Mr. Hinx, played by Dave Bautista (Drax the Drestroyer from Guardians of the Galaxy), is a fantastic character and the highlight of the film for me. The only bummer with his performance is that it’s so short; I wanted him to hang around just a bit longer. In the meantime, he gets a couple scenes to rough people up a bit before really roughing up Bond in a spectacular train fight. I’m not sure how they pulled it off, but it looks as brutal and fun as possible. It just might top Spy‘s kitchen fight scene for Best Close Quarters Fight of 2015.
I’ve always wanted to see Ralph Fiennes get a little spy action in, and he gets a few pretty killer moments here. But having a delightful Ben Winshaw and resourceful Naomie Harris show up as Q and Moneypenny as well only reinforces how much these Craig Bond films would benefit from taking a more team-centric approach to missions.
It’s highly possible that you will watch this film, and absolutely none of the problematic areas in this will register with you and it will be a rather enjoyable movie-watching experience.

Considering how the press around Spectre seemed to dictate how much Daniel Craig does not want to play Bond again, who knows where the series will go from here. It could definitely do with bringing in another actor, but please, for the love of film and all things wonderful, do not make it another origin story.