Dragons Forever

Man oh man, I love me some old-school Jackie Chan movies.

DRAGONS FOREVER puts Chan, Samo Hung, and Biao Yuen together in a workmanlike story about three bad guys who must find their souls through kicking people in the face. Chan plays a slick defense attorney, Hung and Yuen play his gangster buddies, and that's the last you're going to hear from me about the story.

Because really, when you see that Samo Hung and Corey Yuen co-directed the picture, is your very next thought, "I hope the story is a penetrating exploration of the human condition"? No. It's, "How are the stunts?"

Well, let me tell you: the stunts are awesome, and Hung and Yuen know how to film them. Instead of quick cuts, we get takes that are long enough to confirm that real people are actually doing the things we see onscreen. Jackie does some found stuntwork involving chairs and stairs that will have you rewinding and stepping through in slow motion just so you can dig on it. Hung and Yuen do some slapstick fighting that's actually a marvel of tightly choreographed performance. Innumerable anonymous stuntment pull off falls that'll make you go, "Oof!"

You know what? See DRAGONS FOREVER with one finger on the fast-forward button. The story is disposable and uninteresting, but the stunts make it worth speeding through it. If you enjoy watching top athletes at the top of their game, this movie's for you.

The Fountain

THE FOUNTAIN swept me up and away. I loved it.

I took two runs at this movie. First, I tried watching it on the Metro, but its imagery and structure simply is not compatible with viewing on a tiny screen while bumping along at rush hour. Second, I woke up before dawn and watched it on the enormovision, in glorious surround sound. In this environment, THE FOUNTAIN enfolded me in its dream-like worlds, washing over me like a languorous wave. When it ended, I knew I'd been on a journey. It took me a day or two to figure out where, but I viscerally loved the experience even before reason kicked in.

This movie does something different: it challenges the viewer to work with both intuition and analysis, offering few easy answers, and it does so while playing very loosely with the classic three-act structure. We meet Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz, lovers in different worlds and times, haunted by tragedies past and present and looking for ... something. In one construct, they're conquistador and queen; in another, scientist and patient; in a third, voyager and phantasm. In all three, we sense an overtone of sadness and defiance, acceptance and denial, enlightenment and desperation. The tales, one or more of which may be happening in the imagination or serving as an allegory of a state of mind, engage us in their own right and as part of a larger whole.

By the time THE FOUNTAIN climaxes in visions reminiscent of Dore's Paradiso illustrations, as well as Hindu and Mayan creation mythologies, we're carried away, outside of ourselves. Darren Aronofsky's doing something audaciously different here, and he succeeds wonderfully. This is a film worth seeing.

ADDENDUM

ecently, I've been subjected to repeated showings of the STAR WARS prequel trilogy. While watching it, I've been bothered by the utter lifelessness of Natalie Portman's Queen Amidala. While watching THE FOUNTAIN, I realized what was missing: gravitas. Portman's idea of Queenly bearing appears to be limited to having good posture and speaking in monotone. Rachel Weisz's Queen Isabella, on the other hand - now, there's a queen to inspire devotion and desire! Weisz's commanding, yet vulnerable, presence radiates monarchy: a personal state of being that lies beyond the powers of either Portman's talent or Lucas's direction.

For that matter, Weisz's entire performance in THE FOUNTAIN is simply brilliant. I've always respected the actress, who can bring class even to pulpy entertainments such as THE MUMMY RETURNS, but this picture takes her career to a whole different level.

Undertaking Betty

UNDERTAKING BETTY is a thoroughly inoffensive, moderately amusing, ultimately forgettable trifle of a romantic comedy. It rocks along pleasantly enough for an hour and a half, ends on an up note, succeeds in everything it tries to do.

The whole movie gets set up in the opening scene: a girl at a school dance attracts the notice of a shy young boy. Before the boy can work up the courage to ask her to dance, a more confident boy steps in and sweeps her away. Since Movie Law demands that whomever catches our eye in our preadolescence is destined to be our One True Love, she still pines for the boy, now all grown up and played by Alfred Molina. She (Brenda Blethyn) married the confident one, who grew up to be a jerk who's playing around with Naomi Watts. There's your romantic comedy framework, and here's your twist: Molina is the undertaker in their quiet Welsh town, and he's in dire competition with an evil American interloper who wants to "put the fun back in funeral." Christopher Walken plays the American, and he has great fun hamming it up.

And there really isn't much to say beyond that setup. UNDERTAKING BETTY never elicited so much as a chuckle, but it was reasonably nice, reasonably fun, and entirely pleasant. Should you go out of your way to see it? No. But you may enjoy having it on in the background while you're folding laundry.

Ratatouille

Production company strips are boring. What do I care if Amalgamated Media, Inc. produced the movie I'm about to see? Why should I watch its, and its fellow companies', animations when we could all just be getting on with the movie? What are they trying to do, build customer loyalty? "Boy, I sure do like those MGM movies. They're way better than Paramount's."

On second thought, there is one production company that has managed to build customer loyalty, and I don't mind sitting through its logo. When the Pixar animation flickers on the screen, I settle in, secure in the knowledge that I'm about to be entertained by people who care about the product they're putting onscreen. I may not be dazzled, but I can count on being well entertained, and I respect that.

RATATOUILLE, Pixar's latest, dazzles. Perhaps more importantly, it does so with an original story, excellent performances, and the kind of first-class animation we've come to expect from the folks with the desktop lamps. Here's the setup: Remy just wants to cook. He has extraordinary senses of smell and taste, he intuitively understands food, and he studies the works of Gusteau, the famous Parisian chef who declares that "Anyone can cook!" There's a problem, of course: Remy is too far down the social ladder to land a job at a restaurant, much less a slot in culinary school. In fact, he's a rat: he can't even get in the kitchen.

I like the idea of using a rat instead of a mouse. In the popular imagination, rats are evil while mice are cute. We in the audience shudder when we see a (flock? herd?) bunch of rats skittering across a floor, and the movie accepts that and works with it, artfully reproducing the biomechanics of rat movement (ok, there's some anthropomorphization, but that's to be expected). By accepting Remy's rat-ness, it challenges us to do what those in the film must learn to do: get over it and get on with the realization that this rat has a lot to offer. "Those in the film" includes Remy's rat family, which includes the disapproving father who doesn't understand why his son can't just eat garbage like everyone else; Linguini, the hapless janitor who stumbles into an alliance with the little chef; and, perhaps most dauntingly, the Paris gastronomical world. Further, I like the idea of setting an animated film in the world of food. Perhaps its because I recently saw and loved MOSTLY MARTHA; perhaps it's because I recently had relatives in for a visit, relatives who dragged my wife all over town looking for just the right lemon grater for our kitchen; perhaps it's because I've had a few meals in my life that have brought tears to my eyes (Aside: those meals were at Cantina Vecchia il Baroni and La Botta). Whatever the reasons, this is new territory for family pictures, it isn't intuitively obvious that kids would dig it, and I applaud Pixar's courage in going there.

Patton Oswalt, who did not impress me in THE COMEDIANS OF COMEDY, does fine work here as Remy, as do the rest of the cast of people whose names I recognize, but whose voices I did not. Particularly surprising was Peter O'Toole as cadaverous food critic Anton Ego: during this film, I though, "Wow. Jeremy Irons is doing great work here." O'Toole nails that Ironsesque menace and takes it to an entirely different level and, when his character develops, that development feels both organic and earned.

As for the animation, well, it's Pixar. You get about what you'd expect, which is remarkable excellence and attention to detail.

I saw RATAOUILLE in a theater filled with young children and their families. The film captivated the entire audience, who applauded the gorgeous final shot. That's saying a lot about a movie about rats in the kitchen, and it's yet another feather in the cap of Pixar and director Brad Bird. RATATOUILLE is destined to find a place in the heart - and on the shelf - of many, many people, and I'm one of them.

What a delight.

March of the Penguins

MARCH OF THE PENGUINS spends an hour and twenty minutes anthropomorphizing birds. It's bad science and it's bad film.

Sure, it looks great. Emperor penguins are cute and the Antarctic is beautiful, so it's pretty hard to screw up that element of the film. Nevertheless, I just couldn't get past the film's conceit that penguins are basically people with beaks. They aren't, and all of Morgan Freeman's protestations to the contrary can't make it so. I spent my viewing time utterly mystified as to why this documentary was such a huge hit.