THE WILD ROBOT***** - BFI London Film Festival 2024 - Day 5

THE WILD ROBOT is an utterly delightful film - visually stunning, occasionally funny, and deeply moving.  I haven't felt this invested in an animated film - or this awed by the visuals - in quite some time. Kudos to director Chris Sanders (LILO & STITCH): may this film earn him his well-deserved Oscar. 

The movie is based on a series of books by Peter Brown and tells the story of a robot called Roz (Lupita Nyongo) who learns to escape her programming and feel love.  In her crash landing and frenetic first day on the island Roz killed a gosling's family and becomes his adoptive mother. She assigns herself the task of raising him to eat, swim, and fly the winter migration.  But the cute little gosling, Brightbill (Kit Connor), imprints himself on her and soon she is just another harassed, confused and loving mother to her adoptive son.  

Roz is helped in raising Brightbill by a wily but ultimately warm-hearted Fox called Fink (Pedro Pascal). But the other animals on the island look on in bewilderment and mockery. They are scared of the "monster" robot and of her predatory fox friend. And let's be clear: there's no LION KING style gentle allusion to death in this film - it is faced head on and suffuses every scene. These are animals whose fear is necessary to survival. But Roz teaches them that kindness is also an option, and that together they can survive a harsh winter.

The resulting film is one of carefully calibrated peril but also deep warmth and heart.  This is nowhere better exemplified in the character of Longbill (Bill Nighy), a wise, kind old goose who will lead the winter migration. We have never heard Nighy so warm and encouraging.  But all the voice cast are superb. Nyongo moves from a Siri-esque relentless optimism to something more real and modulated. Connor is just adorable as Brightbill. And Pascal is both funny and deeply vulnerable as Fink.

And last but assuredly not least, this movie looks stunning.  The rendering of the animals, the wilderness, and the night scenes in particular, was a feast for the imagination.  I felt utterly immersed in, and delighted by, the world. This movie is truly something special and I highly recommend it.

THE WILD ROBOT is rated PG and has a running time of 101 minutes. It played Toronto and London 2024 and was released in the USA last month. It will be released in the UK on October 18th.

BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE**

Director Tim Burton has set himself a high bar in making a sequel to his beloved black comedy BEETLEJUICE. It was a film that blended live action and animation - a heartbreakingly wholesome couple and a ghoulishly dysfunctional family - macabre jokes about suicide and an iconic possession sequence set to Harry Belafonte. How do you top the inventiveness, the zaniness and the hilarity of Michael Keaton's titular performance? How do you make us love characters in the way that we loved Lydia Deetz and wanted to protect her just as the Maitlands did?

Sadly, except for a couple of flashes of brilliance, the sequel fails to live up to the original. We waste a good half hour simply catching up with characters and it must be 45 minutes before The Juice Is Loose.  Over thirty years have passed.  Lydia (Winona Ryder) is now a schlocky TV presenter with an oleaginous TV producer love interest (Justin Theroux). Her stepmother Delia (Catherine O'Hara) is now fantastically successful as an artist, but in mourning for her beloved Charles. Delia and Lydia have made a kind of peace since the original film, but Lydia now has problems with her own teenage daughter (Jenna Ortega).  The family gathers at the original house for Charles' funeral. Shenanigans ensue.

What's to love?  Michael Keaton, underused, but fantastic. Monica Belucci and Danny DeVito criminally underused.  Catherine O'Hara's occasional killer line, especially playing off Justin Theroux.  A fantastic flashback played as a foreign-language black-and-white melodrama. A brilliantly funny use of Richard Marx' Right Here Waiting. But too much of it was plodding through character catch-ups. Not enough of it was funny. Are we really surprised by the silly sandworms as deus ex machina? No. There are no stakes. There are no feelings. What's it for?

BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 104 minutes. It played Venice and is on global release today.

SUNDANCE LONDON 2013 - Day 3 - A.C.O.D.

Writer-producer Stu Zicherman's directorial début is a heartfelt, sporadically funny but overwhelmingly tepid relationship comedy about a guy called Carter who is still so traumatised by his parents divorce that he derails his kid brother's wedding. Zicherman's contention is that his peer group of thirty something Americans is the first generation to have to deal with errant parents, step siblings and general emotional chaos, leaving hem with, at best, a bunch of practical coping mechanisms that hide deep set neuroses. They are the ACODs of the title - Adult Children Of Divorce. The protagonist in this film is a case in point. On the surface he seems in control, a classic manager of chaos. He's spent his life resenting his parents, protecting his younger siblings and seeking the stable in his girlfriend. But when forced to broker both of his parents turning up to his brother's wedding, he discovers that he was actually the subject of a book on kids dealing with divorce. And his evident continued difficulties sparks a sequel.

There's a lot to like in Ben Karlin and Zicherman's script. There are moments that feel authentic and clearly come from personal experience. Some of the verbal humour is also fantastically on point, and there are a fair few laugh out loud moments, mostly related to Carter's dad who is played by Richard Jenkins, and totally steals the movie. I also admire their courage in not having to tie up all the ends neatly. But set against this we have characters and sub plots that seem to go nowhere (Jessica Alba I'm looking at you), a highly contrived moment of catharsis in the final act, and, well, the casting of the lead actor.

Adam Scott is often the supporting actor in mainstream pictures: the classic decent boyfriend who has a side seat for the action. Maybe it's because he's not a conventionally Hollywood chiselled leading man? I think he's a decent actor but there's just something off about him in this role, and I've come to the conclusion that he's just not likeable or charismatic enough to carry a film. I know that sounds mean, and that many character actors are wonderful when given the stage - not least Richard Jenkins. I also realise that Scott is playing an uptight worriwort, and that isn't a role you'd think of as being fun to spend time with. But Carter is at the centre of this film and one must be happy spending time with him, otherwise the film doesn't hang together. Just imagine what the movie might have been like had it starred Andrew Lincoln or maybe Josh Radnor?

A.C.O.D. played Sundance and Sundance London 2013. It does not yet have a commercial release date.

A.C.O.D. has a running time of 90 minutes.

London Film Fest 2012 Day 1 - FRANKENWEENIE

Tim Burton's FRANKENWEENIE is, despite its black and white mock horror gothic style, a warm-hearted and cuddly family feature, quite at home in the Disney stable.  It transports the story of Frankenstein to that typically Burtonesque 50s style contemporary American suburbia, where little kids can be see the weird and cruel in the everyday.  There are even characters that look and feel and sound like previous Burton characters - notably Winona Ryder voicing a little girl who could've become Lydia in BEETLEJUICE.  Her male counterpart is Little Victor Frankenstein, a good-hearted loner so upset when his beloved pet dog Sparky dies, that he uses the town's preternatural lightning to re-animate him.  Problem is, his creepy school-friends (all junior versions of well known horror tropes) find out about his scientific breakthrough and perform their own reanimations with gruesome and chaotic results.

It took me a while to warm up to the characters - I spent the first twenty minutes more wrily smiling at the horror movie in-jokes and admiring the beautiful hand-made stop-motion animation.  But soon Sparky and Victor stole my heart, and anyone's who's ever had a dog will appreciate the wonderful observation that went into capturing just how a pet dog acts.  As the movie built to its dramatic Godzilla inspired climax, I became genuinely nervous about Sparky's fate!  I can confidently say that if you go and see this movie with an open heart, whether or not with kids, you'll have a good time.

But this film is far more interesting than "just" a superior kids film - not that there's anything wrong with that.  Because FRANKENWEENIE is an absolutely darling film full of affection for the power and history of cinema, and simple delight of making things.  It opens with a film within a film - little Victor showing his parents his home made super eight starring Sparky as the Sparkosaurus.  The celluloid burns, but Victor's unpeturbed -"I can fix it!" he declares.  So much of the mood and spirit of the movie is set by that phrase.  It's a film about the wonder of film - the crazy illusions that we build with props and costumes and trick-shots - the almost juvenile glee that lurks behind even the most accomplished film.  

Tim Burton at the European
Première of Frankenweenie

Of course, director Tim Burton is making a more profound statement about the nature of good film-making.  He's saying that it's better to make a film with love and sticky-tape, then with crass showmanship in mind.  Science and celluloid can be used for good or ill - it needs to come from the heart.  Burton also makes a subversive political comment about the contemporary American anti-intellectual strain within the religious right.  The poor scientist is evidently a European emmigre, who knows what horror he has seen.  He finds himself attacked by a mob of suburban parents angry at "science". This leads to the funniest and most profound scene where he angrily calls them ignorant and stupid: "they like the things science gives them but fear the questions that it asks".  

Maybe I'm being too earnest about the political metatext of FRANKENWEENIE? But I don't think you need to scratch too hard on the surface of the seemingly Spielbergian family adventure to get to its more scabrous heart. And it's that doubling, that wonderful enchantment coupled with deeper provocation, that makes this by far Tim Burton's best film in year - maybe since EDWARD SCISSORHANDS.

FRANKENWEENIE played Fantastic Fest and is currently on release in Canada, Colombia, Paraguay, Romania and the USA. It opens this week in Russia and Spain and next week in Belgium, Ireland, the UK, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Thailand, Ukraine and Iceland. It opens on October 25th in Australia, Chile, Malaysia and Switzerland and on October 31st in France. It opens on November 2nd in Brazil; on November 22nd in Argentina, Greece and Lithuania; on November 29th in Singapore; on December 15th in Japan; on December 28th in Turkey; on January 3rd 2013 in the Czech Republic and Hungary; on Jnauary 11th in Sweden; on January 17th in Denmark, Italy and Norway; and on January 24th in Germany.

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE - weather with you

Spike Jonze, the visionary director behind BEING JOHN MALKOVICH and ADAPTATION, returns to the big screen with an adaptation of Maurice Sendak's iconic children's book. The book is slight, dark but also joyful: a little boy called Max throws a tantrum, is sent to his room, and disappears into an imaginary world of wild things. The wild rumpus if fun, but he grows lonely and returns home in time for his supper, which is still hot! BBC Radio 4 produced a marvellous programme on the book and its iconic status, interviewing Sendak. He said he thought the book was radical because Max wasn't a WASP but a little Jewish kid, and because Max wasn't a classic innocent child but a realistic rage-filled, energy-filled little boy. And after all, he had it both ways - King in his imaginary world, but also welcomed back into his home.

Spike Jonze and writer David Eggers have taken the slender meat in the book and spun it out into a beautifully rendered, overwhelmingly dark and pyschologically truthful film about the fears and resentments of childhood. In truth, there isn't much joy left in it, and I'm not sure what kids will make of it. But for adults, the film is a deeply emotionally affecting depiction of what it's like to be a child, and indeed, the pressures on parents in a modern world of working parents and divorce.

The first hour of the film gives us the reality of little Max (Max Records), a nine year old kid growing up in the snowy American burbs. His elder sister is too busy being a teen to hang with him, his working mum (Catherine Keener) tries her best to give him attention but has her own stress to deal with. He loves mischief - instigating a snowball fight with his sister's friends - but gets scared when the fight gets out of control and they smash his igloo. The film is full of visual references to kids seeking small dark places to hide and feel safe in, but that safety being intruded upon. It's also full of play fights that have real emotional consequences. In these early scenes, I love the efficiency with which Jonze and Eggers essay Max's emotional life. The fight that triggers his running away comes out of nowhere. I also love the freedom of the camera, capturing with handheld the rumpus, but also shooting from Max's POV and height. There's a lovely scene where Max is sitting under his mum's desk tugging at her tights - a wonderfully intimate moment but also hinting at his need to express himself and incapability of doing so with words.

By the second half hour, Max has run away from his house having thrown a tantrum and bitten his mother on the shoulder - a highly charged scene. He takes a boat and through scary waves, lands in the land of the wild things. There he meets a loose collective of monsters and becomes their king, starting play-fights that soon sour. All of these monsters are expressions of Max's own insecurities and fears - the fear of not fitting in, of being abandoned for cooler friends, of not being understood, of not being loved, of sadness. The fear that doing a robot dance won't make his mum happy and won't make the monsters happy either.

I love this section for its wonderful visual style. When Carol (James Gandolfini) takes Max to see his model world, it really is magical. There's a kind of magic to the simple mastery of making and doing rather than CGI wizardry. That translates to the monsters themselves. They are giant muppets that have been ever so lightly CGI animated to show the facial expressions of the actors voicing them. It's a really wonderful result - they look real, they have weight, but they also look, well, muppety enough to have come from a kids imagination. I also love the wry humour. Classic example: Max and Carol are walking through a desert and an absolutely enormous monster appears on the horizon. Carol dismisses it as a harmless pup: "don't feed it or he'll follow you around." But there's no denying that this section is also pretty much a constant downer. The monsters talk like a bunch of depressed characters from a Woody Allen film, filled with neuroses about failed relationships and low self-esteem. They speak in phrases that kids must hear and not quite understand. They have an abiding sadness that poor Max can't shift because, after all, he's not a real king.

In the final section, emotions come to a head. Some of the monsters realise that Max favours KW and Carol - that's he not an equal opps king. And then they realise that he's not really a king at all. And then, most crucially, as Max tries to convince KW about the need for family and why she should return "home" to Carol, he also realises that he too needs to go home. What is learned? Maybe not much. Max always loved his mum, and still has trouble expressing himself. The rage and the fear are still there.

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE is a brave, bold and beautifully imagined movie that takes us into the psyche of a kid who has trouble expressing himself. Is it a kids film? Not sure. But it is certainly a superb film about being a kid, and about being a parent. It is uncompromising, challenging, dark, scary and makes you cry. Spike Jonze remains one of the most fascinating directors working today.

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE was released in October in the USA, Canada and Italy. It was released in November in the Ukraine, Malaysia, the Czech Republic and Romania. It is currently on release in Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Denmark, Lithuania, Norway, Turkey, the UK, France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Spain. It opens on December 30th in Belgium. It opens in January in Brazil, Singapore, Finland, Taiwan, the Netherlands, Japan, Argentina, Greece, Portugal, Venezuela and Sweden. It opens on February 4th in Russia.

AWAY WE GO - twee

AWAY WE GO is a great step forward for Sam Mendes, whose previous directorial efforts (AMERICAN BEAUTY, REVOLUTION ROAD) have been story-boarded and designed to within an inch of their lives. In this film, he hangs loose, allowing his story and characters room to breathe. The movie looks and feels lo-rent, almost casually thrown together, rather than distracting us with a high-gloss finish. Great.

Problem is, Sam Mendes hasn't moved beyond his other fatal flaw as a director - being patronising. I have yet to see a Mendes movie that does carry with it an air of smug self-satisfaction. AWAY WE GO features John Krasinki and Maya Rudolph - two actors better known for comic roles on TV - in a semi-serious character driven drama. They are well-adjusted, right-thinking, warm-hearted, in-love and pregnant. When his parents decided to move to Antwerp on the eve of the birth of their child, this prompts a crisis. Well, no, they are too banal to ever have a crisis. Rather, the young couple are concerned that they haven't figured out how and, indeed, where, to live. So follows a road trip, visiting friends and family, hoping to learn.

The couple are basically good people (and indeed, are portrayed by good actors). As shown here, they don't really have anything to learn. This is a road-trip with no real emotional journey. The couple are confronted with a series of increasingly caricatured couples, and it's a no-brainer that these are not the guys to learn from. In particular, the hippie couple depicted by Maggie Gyllenhaal and Josh Hamilton were so absurd they completely took me out of the film. And then it all winds up with an ending that is as schmaltzy as it unbelievable.

AWAY WE GO was released earlier this year in the US, Canada, Greece, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Israel and the Netherlands. It is currently on release in the UK and opens next week in Belgium. It opens in October in Finland, Norway, Germany, Australia, and Romania. It opens in November in New Zealand, Portugal, Sweden, Argentina and Spain. It opens in Russia on December 10th.

PENELOPE - what a mess!

PENELOPE is a deeply derivative movie that snatches the look and feel of EDWARD SCISSORHANDS and AMELIE and splices them with the post-modern fairy-tale vibe of SHREK and ENCHANTED. There's so much going on with the plot I'm not entirely convinced the film-makers are in control of it. All I can say is that they make creative decisions that are flawed at every turn, thus frittering away a talented cast.

Penelope is a rich young woman cursed with a pig's snout rather than a noise. She'll regain her beauty when "one of her own kind accepts her for who she is". So her parents hire a match-maker to audition a bunch of blue-bloods to a blind-date with a difference. One such is a superificial preppie who runs screaming, and then teams up with a paparazzo to bring Penelope down. Another candidate is a down-at-heel but warm-hearted drifter. Penelope will venture into the world and find her true love (no prizes for guessing). And yes, this being Hollywood, there is a spunky side-kick with a quirky hair-cut and good intentions.

The movie is conventional enough and had they stuck to their guns the film-makers might have produced a decent enough romantic-comedy. After all, Christina Ricci and James McAvoy are charming as the star-crossed lovers. But the film-makers fail at every hurdle. The production design is a rag-bag of London and New York exteriors and the actors accents vary wildly too. All of this is highly distracting for the viewer. I just wished they'd settled for one or the other or gone for a non-specific fairy-tale land somewhere in between. As it is, we have James McAvoy in a broad US accent bumming round Southwark and Lenny Henry turning up as a rozzer with a Brummie accent to question Yank Catherine O'Hara!

The film-makers also exhibit a lack of faith in their audience in how they choose to depict Penelope's curse. It's intrinsic to the story that Penelope look ugly. But then again, they need to make her sympathetic and the movie marketable! So they give Christina Ricci the smallest, cutest little snout and compensate with falsh eyelashes, tousled hair and cute clothes. Indeed, snout aside, this may be the prettiest Ricci has ever looked on film!

Maybe the biggest problem is the film's uneven tone. Director Mark Palansky directs half of it as a very broad comedy, with elements of slapstick. Catherine O'Hara falls over in shock and Simon Woods, last seen as Caesar Augustus in HBO's Rome, puts a lot of physical comedy into his role as the preppie suitor. (Actually he's rather good in a comic role!) On the other hand, Palansky wants us to take PENELOPE seriously as a coming-of-age film with real heart. So Peter Dinklage gives a remarkably nuanced reporter as the sleazy paparazzo having second thoughts. Ricci, McAvoy and Witherspoon also play it fairly straight.

What with the shifting geography and shifting tone, I felt all at sea watching this film. There were flashes of wonder - and a few laugh-out-loud moments but these did not compensate for the general mayhem and one of the most excrucitiatingly embarassing first-kisses on film. The result is a movie that is frustrating to watch: a total mess, and a waste of a talented cast.

PENELOPE played Toronto 2006 and has since sat on the shelf. It played Russia and Ukraine last August and is currently on release in the UK. It opens in the US on February 29th, France on April 9th, the Netherlands on April 24th and Belgium on April 30th.

OVER THE HEDGE - job done but no trimmings

OVER THE HEDGE is a new animated movie that will keep your kids occupied for 90 minutes. It's full of cute animals doing funny stuff. The idea is that there are a bunch of foragers who wake up from hibernating all winter. Instead of waking to the usual lovely field, they are faced with a giant hedge. For, over the winter, that field has been developed into a nice gated community filled with fat Americans who have super-stocked double-barrel fridges. The foragers are nervous of these new inhabitants and reluctant to look for food over the hedge, but they are egged on by a new arrival: super-smoove R.J. R.J. reckons he can outsmart the humans, the Verminator and the neighbourhood cat. What he doesn't tell the other cute animals is that he has an ulterior motive - if he doesn't replace all the food he stole from a mean bear by full moon, he's toast.

The movie is full of all those good moral lessons that you want your kids exposed to. Family is important, and it is better to be selfless than selfish. And like I said, the animals are really cute. But OVER THE HEDGE does nothing more than the basics. The voice cast is for the most part fine. Great comic actors such as Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara are wasted on limited material. Avril Lavigne has about three lines and was no doubt recruited solely to boost the teen box office. Bruce Willis does his usual smart-ass schtick on autopilot. The only really impressive performances are by William Shatner as a Luvvie Possum and Thomas Haden-Church as the hysterically deluded pest-controller - The Verminator. Oh yes. As usual, Omid Djalili steals every scene he is in as the persian house-cat.

But the biggest let down is that there isn't more humour for the grown-ups. Normally I wouldn't sweat that too much. After all, if the kids are happy then the genre-box is ticked. But somehow, with OVER THE HEDGE, I expected more. That's because the flick is based on a cartoon strip that has real bite. The concept is that a bunch of cute animals look over the hedge at us crazy-ass humans and make biting satirical comments at our expense. Apart from one montage taking the piss out of our chronic food dependency, in this movie, cute wins out over satire.

OVER THE HEDGE was released in the US in May is on release in Australia. It goes on wide release in the UK on June 30th. It hits continental Europe the following weekend.