Filthy reviews

[The Pessimist]

http://www.bigempire.com/filthy/

(excerpt)

What sucks, though, is how fucking formulaic the rest of the story is. The monsters team up, they are in peril, they destroy the aliens and they become heroes who can walk amongst polite society once again. None of the aliens has much personality. Well, they each play a very broad archetype, but without any twists that would surprise you. Stephen Colbert plays the president and the writers tried to write jokes that are consistent with his TV character. Except the writers sort of suck, the jokes are awful, and Colbert's role comes off as stunt casting.

The movie's idea of monsters is nothing new. They are fifties sci-fi creatures in appearance only. They don't act like 50s sci-fi creatures; they act like Dreamworks characters. That is, generic plot devices with simple emotional problems that can be easily resolved. Outside of their looks, they don't reference those old movies and they don't touch on the old movie themes of cold war paranoia or fear of science. The alien is a lame ripoff of Marvin the Martian and every cartoon alien descendant of him. I don't know why Hollywood always depicts cartoon aliens as pompous buffoons, but I guess it's easier than trying to be clever.

The animation is blah. The landscapes have a lot more interesting detail and beauty than the characters. They offer nothing fresh or interesting to look at. And it all has a mechanical feel to it. Monsters vs. Aliens lacks the artistic grace of a movie like Wall-E or Cars, as though it were built on an assembly line rather than crafted by artists. The 3-D sure as hell ain't worth three dollars extra, especially when they ask you to "recycle" the glasses afterward. My ass. It has nothing to do with saving the planet and everything to do with propping up their bottom line. If everyone keeps the glasses, maybe Hollywood will be a little more judicious with their application of this stunt. There are a couple of 3-D tricks at the beginning of the story, but most of it would be exactly the same in 2-D. The characters and plot are only two-dimensional anyways.

Why is Dreamworks always trailing Pixar? And who are the principle owners of D'works?

[AndyDursin]

Creatively they may be "trailing Pixar" but at the box-office Dreamworks isn't trailing Pixar...in fact I'd say they're pretty much even now. KUNG FU PANDA and WALL-E basically made the same amount of money last summer. All three SHREK movies have made acres of cash. And this movie is going to outgross Disney's BOLT (not Pixar, but a solid kids animated film) probably in the final analysis too.

[The Pessimist]

-- One night, as Mrs. Filthy and I were boarding the Cyclone, one of the riders getting off told the crew they saw a big hole in the track. While we sat in the coast, a maintenance guy was summoned. He pulled out a flashlight, walked around a little bit, shrugged and said, "I didn't see anything." And away we went. The mystery added a little extra tension to the already scary ride.

-- The first hour or so of Adventureland, which is the slow unfolding of Stewart and Eisenberg's relationship, is pretty fucking great. To Stewart, Eisenberg is sweet and sincere, and a dork, while Reynolds is cool and grownup, but wrong. It's sort of like the choice between a big bowl of Captain Crunch and vermouth or Kashii for breakfast. You know which one's better for you, but you still can't resist the instant gratification. Eisenberg is in a role usually played by Michael Cera: the nerdy, unsure young man. Except, director/writer Greg Mottola doesn't leave him as annoyingly passive as these types of character usually are. In most of these "sweet" romantic comedies Cera/Colin Hanks sits around and gets shat upon until some script-formula-defined moment of revelation. Eisenberg isn't so passive, he actively expresses what he wants and pursues it, even if it is awkwardly.

This type of movie usually features a female lead who isn't like any real human. She is some lonely screenwriter's idealized version of the girl he never got. In Adventureland, Stewart is as fucked up as any of the men. She's mostly screwing Reynolds out of insecurity and low self-esteem. She has a self-loathing streak as wide as my shitstains after enchiladas at Santiago's. She likes Eisenberg, but would rather sabotage the relationship than disappoint him. And she's pretty sure she'll disappoint him.

The strongest part of Adventureland is Mottola's respect for his characters. Secondary characters look like they will fall into a formula, such as Margarita Levieva as the sexy, vacuous girl who bumps and grinds at the Music Express ride. When she asks out Eisenberg, I expected the usual: that he would lose his virginity to her, regret it and anger Stewart. That didn't happen, and Levieva proves to be more human than first impressions suggest. Similarly, Reynolds' Lothario mechanic isn't a typical smug *******. He's a guy who knows that the kids working at the park will go somewhere while he's stuck, telling his increasingly irrelevant bullshit Lou Reed story to kids who are less and less interested. Rather than try to undermine Eisenberg's relationship with his mistress, he likes the kid enough to help him out. Mostly.

About 70 minutes in, I thought Adventureland might be damn near perfect. And then subtlety disappears as the plot machine takes over. What was patient and amusing about Adventureland becomes slightly forced and formulaic. Stewart and Eisenberg's romance falters on a corny misunderstanding, things are said that will be regretted, and everything gets patched up romantically and conventionally. Worse, the characters stop behaving like the unique individuals we're introduced to, and they start behaving more like pawns of the plot devices. It made me care a little less about the characters so beautifully developed, because they become more like pawns of the script devices.

The amusement park is a great setting for the movie. Like my beloved Lakeside, it's a semi-sad relic trying just to survive and keep its guests happy. It employs people who think a lot of themselves and who want to escape. While it may represent adventure for the guests, it means stagnant chore for the workers.

Setting the movie in 1987 doesn't make a whole lot of sense, other than maybe it helped Mottola place the events from his own life. But he seems to forget some details. Beers in the movie are pull-tabs, even though pull-tabs went out almost ten years earlier. When Reynolds wows girls with tales of jamming with Lou Reed it seems damn unlikely to me. By the late eighties, Reed was pretty irrelevant, and most teenage girls had never heard of him. The soundtrack is heavy on Velvet Underground and the Replacements. Both are fine bands, and both likely staples for the intellectual college crowd of the time. But they are also among the touchstones of Ira Kaplan from Yo La Tengo, the band who does Adventureland's music. While VU's Pale Blue Eyes is a pretty song, I wonder if the more contemporary and really fucking great and shambly REM cover that came out the year the movie is supposed to take place would have been better.

Overall, Adventureland is pretty fucking good. It's better written and deeper than I expected, and it feels pretty damn real and sincere up until it's last thirty minutes. I guess that's when Mottola was forced to wed his memory to Hollywood formula and deliver something the grassfuckers would understand. Four Fingers.

[The Pessimist]

I think this is one of Filthy's better reviews in some time.


http://www.bigempire.com/filthy/

I like Up, but I don't love it. That surprised me, because after the first fifteen minutes I was ready to love it, more than my wife, more than a car, even more than a few brands of beer and Robitussin. There's a lot of good **** in this movie, but then there's stuff that felt like it came out of a weaker Dreamworks production. Up is primarily the story of an old man's quest to fulfill a lifelong promise to his late wife before it's too late, about getting old and the sense that you've left someone disappointed. It's got a hell of a love story. Where it falls apart for me, though, is some of the less interesting secondary characters and some surprisingly formulaic gags and plotting. That love story, though. Holllly ****.

Ed Asner is the voice of Carl Fredricksen, a retired balloon salesman. I've read stuff where this character is referred to as a curmudgeon. He's not; he's the most complex character in the movie. He's mostly disappointed in himself and lonely. Those are a hell of a lot different than curmudgeonly. In fact, they're exactly where I expect to be at the end of my life if I sober up enough to look back.

The movie starts out with Fredricksen as a shy kid swept into the world of Ellie, a girl who shares his love for world explorer Walter Muntz. Fredricksen would probably be happy just watching Muntz, but Ellie wants to be an explorer herself and she brings Fredricksen out of his shell trough force of will. Up then gives us a montage of their young romance, marriage, heartbreaks and aging together, until she passes away. It's a fucking brilliant montage that made me understand the depth of their love for each other, love both of them, and love how they and their dreams helped them deal with life's disappointments, and why their dream of following in Muntz's footsteps got sidetracked. These five minutes are the best part of the movie, and maybe worth the price of admission alone. Well, maybe not the inflated price of the 3-D screenings, but definitely the 2-D.

After Ellie's death, Fredricksen becomes a recluse, which is different than a curmudgeon. He is alone and thinks that because he and Ellie never made it to the jungles of Venezuela as he had promised her that he let her down. I get that same feeling sometimes. If Mrs. Filthy died tomorrow, I will forever regret having not gotten around to cleaning up that bottle of maple syrup I spilled in the hallway six years ago. That overwhelming stench of stale syrup and the pile of lint, crap and scraps of paper stuck to the carpet will forever remind me that I never did the one thing she begged me to do, and that I may or may not have promised. It's been so long I can't remember and it's usually easier to assume I didn't.

When age finally does catch up with Fredricksen and he faces going to a retirement home, he decides to escape to the destination of he and Ellie's dreams. It's his way to physically avoid the confinement of old age, and a way to finally feel that his wife s still with him in some way.

Fredricksen ties his house to a few hundred thousand helium balloons, and lifts off for Paradise Falls in Venezuela. What he doesn't know is that a fat Cub Scout (called Wilderness Explorer here) named Russell (Jordan Nagai) is on his porch trying to earn his "Assisting the Elderly" badge.

After landing in Venezuela all Fredricksen wants to do is drag his house to the Falls so he can go where he always promised Ellie he would. To him, it's not an adventure, it's just a trip to a destination. For Russell, it's an adventure.

The "adventure" is where Up fails a little. Well, the first place is with the Russell character. I suppose he's supposed to be cute, or something, but the kid did nothing for me. Besides being Eurasian, there is little about him that's interesting or clever. He's given a backstory of coming from a broken home and looking for a father figure, but what kid in the movies isn't? I can't think of any gags or plot driven by Russell that feel fresh.

Once in Venzuela, Russell and Fredricksen are befriended by a pair of somewhat-generically cute animals. One is a huge bird that was believed non-existent, and the other is a dog with a collar that translates his thoughts into words. They are then terrorized by much tougher dogs, who also have translating collars and are in search of the giant bird. Dug, the dog who accompanies Russell and Fredricksen, is fat and has some funny lines. But, I also got the nagging feeling this was Pixar's attempt to have a talking animal without admitting they had stooped that low. And, mostly, Dug acts as an uninspired piece of trite dog humor. Hee hee, dogs have short attention spans and like to chase tennis balls.

The rest of the dogs are under the command of Walter Muntz (Christopher Plummer), the adventurer that Fredricksen idolized as a kid, and who must be nearly 100 now. He still lives in his zeppelin in the jungle. He was accused of making up the giant bird some 70 years earlier and has spent his entire life trying to find it to prove to the world he isn't a fraud. He is a bit of an *******; he will kill Russell and Fredricksen to get the bird. Fredricksen's mission has changed since he got to Venezuela. Maybe he realizes that there's more to a trip than just getting to the end, or maybe he's reminded of why he wanted to go in the first place. Whatever, he wants to protect the bird and its babies from Muntz.

Fredricksen's reason for wanting to protect the birds may be traced back to the montage, when he and Ellie learned they would never have the children they hoped for. Or maybe it's a nurturing sense he gets from dragging Russell around the forest. Regardless, this sends Up into its third act, a series of action pieces including chases, and a scramble aboard the airborne zeppelin. There are big bird heroics chases and dogs flying planes. It's exciting and fun, but also more formulaic than I expected.

Up is pure fantasy, and as such, a lot of weird **** can be granted and expected. Like that an old dude would survive in the jungle living in a blimp for seventy years, or the planes and its engines would still have good gas. That a talking dog would have such a huge vocabulary, or a house strapped to balloons would end up 7,000 miles away, almost exactly where it wants to be.

But, when characters act arbitrarily, it can't be excused as fantasy. At the beginning of Up, Fredricksen is a slow-moving, slow-rising old guy. For most of the movie he dodders with a cane. In the third act, though, he's a superman. He can climb the upside down ladder on the zeppelin, carry heavy objects, yank a fat boy out of the air. All of these actions are dictated by the action, not the character. And they detract from what made Fredricksen so likeable to begin with. I thought the movie would end with him being a hero in unconventional ways that were limited by his age. Instead, he's Cary fucking Grant in North by Northwest.

The Venezuelan jungle and the various creatures feel like a step back graphically for Pixar. Everything looks okay, but not particularly memorable or inspired. Particularly disappointing is the entire Paradise Falls area that Fredricksen and Ellie dreamed of. It's pretty, but that's about it.

Up features an unusual hero and a fucking fantastic love story. Like other Pixar movies, it has a sentimental side for the sense of loss from dreams unfulfilled or taken away. And that ****'s great. But it uses easy outs and some undeveloped characters to graft on the action, and that's a disappointment. Four Fingers for Up.