Isle of Dogs (2018): written by Wes Anderson, Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman, and Kunichi Nomura; directed by Wes Anderson; starring the voices of Bryan Cranston (Chief), Koyu Rankin (Atari), Edward Norton (Rex), Bob Balaban (King), Bill Murray (Boss), Jeff Goldblum (Duke), Kunichi Nomura (Mayor Kobayashi), Akira Takayama (Major-Domo), Greta Gerwig (Tracy Walker), Scarlett Johansson (Nutmeg), Liev Schreiber (Spots), Yoko Ono (Assistant Scientist Yoko-ono), and Tilda Swinton (Oracle):
Isle of Dogs (say the title fast) may be my favourite Wes Anderson Joint. I haven't seen The Royal Tenenbaums for about a decade, and I'd have to rewatch it to come to a final decision.
Anyway, 20 years into a sporadically retro future, the citizens of the Japanese city of Megasaki exile all their dogs to the island they dump their garbage on because the dogs are carriers of a mysterious plague.
A plucky boy travels to the island in search of his dog. Several plucky people in Megasaki search for a cure. Many plucky things happen. Have I mentioned it's all in stop-motion puppetry and models except for some traditionally animated visuals?
Anderson pursues the techniques he used on Fantastic Mr. Fox to even greater aesthetic nuance and occasional hilarity. The movie looks great. The musical score by Alexander Desplat is also great. The voice work works. Really, the whole thing is great.
Even the in-film explanations of narrative decisions are funny. The dogs all speak English (well, they speak different languages depending on the country of release; in the English-speaking world, the dogs speak English). Everyone else speaks either Japanese or English in the case of the American exchange student who helps lead the battle for dogs' rights.
When exposition is needed, a translator is around within the world of the film to translate Japanese. In Japan, do the dogs speak Japanese and the people English?
This isn't exactly a children's movie, though older children should enjoy it. There's some violence and a couple of operating room scenes. Anderson seems to have picked up a welcome level of acerbic tartness from adapting Roald Dahl for Fantastic Mr. Fox -- the movie never moves too far into the twee as some Anderson films do. Its antagonists are suitably nasty. The stakes are mortal.
Isle of Dogs almost makes me wish that the YouTube parody in which Wes Anderson directs an X-Men movie were at least partially true. But better he stay away from superheroes and mainstream treacle. Highly recommended.
Scrooge (aka A Christmas Carol): adapted by Noel Langley from the novella by Charles Dickens; directed by Brian Desmond Hurst; starring Alastair Sim (Ebenezer Scrooge), Mervyn Johns (Bob Cratchit), Michael Hordern (Jacob Marley), Francis De Wolff (Spirit of Christmas Present), and Michael Dolan (Spirit of Christmas Past) (1951): The 1951 version of Charles Dickens' venerable holiday novella remains the gold standard, though I wish CBC would stop showing the colourized version on Christmas Eve.
It has a real sense of horror about it, never moreso than in the scene in which the Spirit of Christmas Past shows Ebenezer Scrooge that all around people swarm the ghosts of those damned to impotently try to help people because in life they failed to help people. This is Hell. It's also great because Alastair Sim is great. He's convincingly angry and shriveled at the beginning, and he's convincingly nutty at the end after his reformation. His giddiness suggests a sort of ecstasy that initially terrifies his housekeeper, in one of the funniest scenes in any Scrooge movie. Highly recommended.
Dolores Claiborne: adapted by Tony Gilroy from the novel by Stephen King; directed by Taylor Hackford; starring Kathy Bates (Dolores Clairborne/St. George), Jennifer Jason Leigh (Selena St. George), Judy Parfitt (Vera Donovan), Christopher Plummer (Det. Mackey), David Strathairn (Joe St. George), and John C. Reilly (Constable Stamshaw) (1995): Little Tall Island off the coast of Maine supplies the setting for this terrific character study, acted terrifically and generally directed and adapted successfully from Stephen King's novel.
While the direction and screenwriting are solid if a bit programmatic, the performances by Kathy Bates, Christopher Plummer, David Strathairn, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Judy Parfitt should have netted the film a host of acting Oscar nominations. It's a Stephen King adaptation that merits the sort of robust second life that The Shawshank Redemption received after its theatrical release. It's also the most affectingly feminist of all King adaptations, the one most attuned to the casual humiliations of patriarchy. Nova Scotia plays Maine, btw. Highly recommended.
The Witches: adapted by Allan Scott from the book by Roald Dahl; directed by Nicolas Roeg; starring Anjelica Huston (Grand High Witch), Mai Zetterling (Helga Eveshim), Jasen Fisher (Luke Eveshim), and Rowan Atkinson (Mr. Stringer) (1990): Dark children's movie made from an even darker Roald Dahl novel. Orphaned Luke and his grandmother must battle the Grand High Witch and all the witches of Great Britain in order to save the children of Great Britain from a terrible fate. The Jim Henson studio puppetry and animatronics are terrific.
Anjelica Huston is comically terrifying as the Grand High Witch, while Jasen Fisher makes for an appealing and heroic boy hero. The movie is gratifyingly horrifying, though a tacked-on ending that isn't in the book really needed at least a couple of lines of set-up: it's perilously close to a concluding title card that reads 'Poochie Died on the Way Back to His Home Planet." And yes -- that Nicolas Roeg! Recommended.
Gremlins: written by Chris Columbus; directed by Joe Dante; starring Zach Galligan (Billy), Phoebe Cates (Kate), Hoyt Axton (Randall Peltzer), Keye Luke (Mr. Wing), and Polly Holliday (Mrs. Deagle) (1984): Gremlins is a blissfully nasty critique of capitalism, the commercialization of the American Christmas, 'small-town values,' and the American family in general. That it was a huge box-office success in 1984 seem remarkable, though having Steven Spielberg's name attached to it didn't hurt. He did produce it, after all, through his newly formed Amblin Entertainment.
But boy, does the small town of Kingston Falls ever get dismantled literally and figuratively! When Zach Galligan's Billy gets the mysterious creature known as a Mogwai from his generally absent, incompetent inventor of a father (Hoyt Axton), he names it Gizmo and then pretty much ignores the three warnings about what one must never do with a Mogwai.
His casual attitude leads to a small-town apocalypse that is, admittedly, really his father's fault more than his: the Mogwai wasn't actually for sale from Keye Luke's mysterious shop owner. The shop owner's grandson's need to make some money off a Hoyt Axton desperate for a unique gift for his son to compensate for his lengthy absences from home -- whew! -- sets the whole disaster in motion.
And so it goes as all Hell breaks loose after an initially idyllic beginning with the lovable Gizmo, voiced by a cooing Howie Mandel. Once the army of Gremlins is unleashed, Christmas is ruined. Really, really ruined. Zach Galligan and Phoebe Cates make for an appealing pair of leads, but it's the real-world special effects of the Gremlins and the Mogwai that dominate the movie. They're marvels from creature creator Chris Walas and his studio.
The script from a young Chris Columbus is sharp and nasty (indeed, it was rewritten by Spielberg and company to tone it down). Joe Dante's direction has a real sense of anarchic menace throughout, though he's also very good at the quiet, slightly askew Norman Rockwell world of the movie's first act, a 'happy' small-town mask that's already slipping off as the movie begins to reveal the shiny happy skull beneath the skin. The mohawk on the chief evil Gremlin is one of a long string of signalling evil through a haircut generally favoured by harmless punk rockers and their fans at the time the film came out. Oh, culture! Recommended.
The Witches by Roald Dahl (1983): Roald Dahl's zippy, scary, funny, Whitbread-Award-winning children's novel about the efforts of a plucky boy and his grandmother to thwart the Witches of England in their quest to turn all children into mice is a humdinger. It's also got some disturbing psychological elements that the excellent 1990 Nicholas Roeg film version eliminated, understandably so. The changes prompted Dahl to publicly trash the movie, but it's a darned good movie and you should see it anyway.
The novel is also darned good. Dahl, a great writer of both horrifying short stories and weird children's novels, had a great imagination. And he didn't patronize his intended readers with fake scares. The witches in his story are terrible beings, which doesn't stop them from breaking out into song from time to time. And for whatever reason, childhood gluttony is once again a target of Dahl's writerly wrath.
There are also a number of nicely gross scenes calculated to make children giggle in between the scenes of fantasy and horror. For example, to witches, a human child smells like dog poo. Hee hee hee. The protagonists are a brave pair, and Dahl's witches are a fascinating bunch with some fascinating peculiarities (why don't they have toes?). Recommended.
The Unbidden by R. Chetwynd-Hayes, containing the following stories: No One Lived There; Why Don't You Wash? Said The Girl With œ100,000 And No Relatives; Don't Go Up Them Stairs; The Gatecrasher; A Family Welcome; Crowning Glory; The Devilet; Come To Me My Flower; The Playmate; Pussy Cat - Pussy Cat; A Penny For A Pound; The Head Of The Firm; The Treasure Hunt; The Death Of Me; Tomorrow Is Judgement Day; and The House (Collected 1971):
The prolific English horror and science-fiction writer R. Chetwynd-Hayes (possibly the most English writer's name of all time) came to professional writing fairly late, at about 40, but made up for lost time with fairly astounding productivity. His high point of fame probably came when a movie, The Monster Club, was adapted from several of his short stories.
I certainly wouldn't argue that he was a great writer, or sometimes even a very good one, but many of his ideas are fascinating. He also brought a black sense of humour to many of his stories. The horrors tend to the supernatural, though not exclusively, and many of his stories are so droll as to leave horror altogether for the sort of dark whimsy that Roald Dahl specialized in when he wasn't writing children's novels.
This collection, the first for Chetwynd-Hayes, is an enjoyable and quick read. Some of the stories deliver ironic supernatural vengeance upon evil-doers ("Why Don't You Wash? Said The Girl With œ100,000 And No Relatives", "A Penny For A Pound"), some visit horror upon the innocent and unlucky ("Come To Me My Flower", "Pussy Cat - Pussy Cat", "The Playmate"), some play as weird comedy ("Don't Go Up Them Stairs", "The Head Of The Firm"), and the final story, "The House", offers gentle fantasy rather than horror. Recommended.
