But the Hair is Fantastic

Brave: written by Brenda Chapman, Mark Andrews, Steve Purcell, and Irene Mecchi; directed by Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman, and Steve Purcell; starring the voices of Kelly Macdonald (Merida), Billy Connolly (Fergus), and Emma Thompson (Elinor) (2012): I wanted to like Pixar's first foray into the long uncharted realms of a female protagonist. And the first 40 minutes or so of Brave are decent enough, though there are points where I became convinced that they created a female protagonist (Scottish teenager Merida) just to show off their increasing proficiency at CGI hair.

Merida has a lot of hair. And it looks pretty realistic. If you want to see what top-shelf CGI could do with hair just 15 years ago, take a look at Malebolgia in the live-action Spawn movie. See how terrible it looks? So we've mastered computer-generated hair. It's not a Mars colony or an end to world hunger, but it's something.

But Holy Moley -- did Pixar's first female protagonist have to get saddled with Mother issues that ultimately swallow the entire plot? And was the last 40 minutes of the movie even plotted out? Because everything in the second half of the movie revolves around two female characters accomplishing...a repair job on a tapestry. Specifically, repairing about a two-foot-long tear in a tapestry.

So a movie in which three of the four major speaking roles are for women has as its McGuffin...the ability to sew. Well, and forgive. It's as if Aladdin came down to whether or not a tinsmith could fix the Genie's lamp. And the amount of Idiot Plot running-around in those last 40 minutes is something to behold. It makes the chase sequence at the end of Star Trek: Into Darkness look like a model of narrative economy and plain good sense.

So hopefully Pixar will give a female protagonist a movie as good as the Toy Story films or Up or Wall*E. This one, muddled and burdened with voiceover homilies that don't seem to have any relation to what the film showed us, isn't it. Not recommended unless you're a scholar of CGI hair.

Here Comes the Sun King

All-Star Superman, based on the graphic novel by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely and the characters created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, written by Dwayne McDuffie, directed by Sam Liu, starring the voices of James Denton (Superman/Clark Kent), Christina Hendricks (Lois Lane) and Anthony LaPaglia (Lex Luthor) (2011): In a perfect world, a new Superman movie would be based on the same graphic novel this animated movie is. And it's amazing -- and a testament to late screenwriter Dwayne McDuffie, who died one day before All-Star Superman was released -- how much of that graphic novel makes it into this 75-minute-long adaptation.

Something disastrous happens to Superman in the first few minutes, leaving him with a year to live. The movie then follows the course of that year as Superman tries to accomplish all the tasks he'd failed to accomplish previously. Meanwhile, Lex Luthor plots and preens in jail as he awaits execution. New menaces arise. And Solaris the Sun-Tyrant, a computerized sun-destroyer with a hate on for organic lifeforms, lurks somewhere out there, waiting.

Freed from the constraints of any one particular Superman continuity, Morrison threw in tons of things that either hadn't been seen for decades (Silver-Age time-travelling, pain-in-the-ass heroes Atlas and Samson; the original cloud-like Sun Eater) or hadn't been seen at all (the chronovore, alas, doesn't make it into the movie while the League of Supermen makes only a cameo appearance). This adaptation wisely keeps a lot of the dialogue from the comic while also mimicking to a surprising extent the style of artist Frank Quitely.

The ultimate enemy is Luthor, presented here closer to his super-scientist version of the 1960's and 1970's rather than the super-businessman of the 1980's and 1990's. By the time a frustrated and regretful Superman says, "Luthor, you could have saved the world a long time ago," you'll pretty much agree. And a dying, increasingly depowered Superman will need both brains and brawn to save the world that Luthor has spent decades trying to conquer. Highly recommended.