The Thin Man Goes Home (1945): written by Robert Riskin, Dwight Taylor, and Harry Kurnitz; directed by Richard Thorpe; starring William Powell (Nick Charles) and Myrna Loy (Nora Charles): So-so penultimate entry in the six-movie Thin Man series plays up comedy and Asta the dog in the first half before turning to an interesting mystery in the second half. William Powell and Myrna Loy are charming as always, but this is certainly a case of diminishing returns when it comes to a film series. Lightly recommended.
The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984): written by Tom Patchett, Jay Tarses, and Frank Oz; directed by Frank Oz; starring the voices of Jim Henson, Frank Oz, Dave Goetz, Steve Whitmire, Richard Hunt, and Jerry Nelson; and Juliana Donald (Jenny), Lonny Price (Ronnie Crawford), and Louis Zorich (Pete): Amiable third Muppets movie takes place in an alternate timeline from the first two. Or perhaps it's a movie made by the Muppets of the first two films, played so straight and non-meta that no one addresses the camera at any point.
As always, the Jim Henson Muppets are a fun and charming bunch. The film riffs on the old 'Let's put on a musical!' chestnut. It also sees all the Muppets graduate simultaneously from college at the beginning of the film. Clearly this is either Earth-2 or a fictional movie about the Muppets! (In)famous for introducing that blight The Muppet Babies on the world. Because it's not a non-fictional Muppet movie, any marriages performed seem to have been permanently treated as 'Out-of-Canon' afterwards. Recommended.
Wreck-it Ralph: written by Rich Moore, Phil Johnston, Jim Reardon, Jennifer Lee, Sam Levine, Jared Stern, and John C. Reilly; directed by Rich Moore; starring the voices of John C. Reilly (Ralph), Sarah Silverman (Vanellope), Jack McBrayer (Felix), Jane Lynch (Calhoun), and Alan Tudyk (King Candy) (2012): Jolly video-game-based fable about a hero who Learns Better. Ralph is the Donkey-Kong-like villain of a still-popular 1980's arcade game called Fix-it Felix. In the world of the movie, the characters in video games have regular lives when the games are over and the arcade is silent. They can even leave their games to visit one another in a central city that appears to exist in the electrical cables of the arcade.
Ralph is bored of being the villain for the last 30 years. Moreover, he's tired of being ostracized by his fellow characters. He may be a bad guy while someone is playing the game, but otherwise he's just a regular fella, the lonely Marty of the eight-bit world. So he decides to try to get a hero's medal. And things start to go awry.
Sharply written and closely observed when it comes to video games, Wreck-it Ralph is a really enjoyable piece of entertainment. The animators made their characters at least vaguely resemble their voice actors in many cases. Ralph, a hang-dog John C. Reilly, is perfectly acted and animated. Vanellope, voiced by Sarah Silverman, is equally enjoyable. Alan Tudyk does his best Ed Wynn as King Candy, and Jane Lynch and Jack MacBrayer do solid back-up work as a hard-case space marine and Fix-it Felix, respectively. My attention didn't flag. Recommended.
A Muppet Christmas Carol: adapted by Jerry Juhl from the novella by Charles Dickens; directed by Brian Henson; starring Michael Caine as Scrooge and the voices of Dave Goetz, Steve Whitmire, Jerry Nelson, and Frank Oz (1992): The first Muppet movie after the death of Jim Henson, with Steve Whitmire taking over the role of Kermit and other characters Henson voiced. And it's really a nice piece of work, with a remarkably sophisticated frame story in which Gonzo plays Charles Dickens as a narrator taking us through the events of Ebenezer Scrooge's fateful night. Michael Caine is solid as Scrooge, though the rest of the human supporting cast is a bit bland. The Muppets are in fine form, though. Recommended.
How to Lose Friends & Alienate People: adapted from the book by Toby Young by Peter Straughan; directed by Robert B. Weide; starring Simon Pegg (Sidney Young), Megan Fox (Sophie Maes), Gillian Anderson (Eleanor Johnson), Jeff Bridges (Clayton Harding), Kirsten Dunst (Alison Olsen), and Danny Huston (Lawrence Maddox) (2008): A fictionalization of Toby Young's memoir of working at Vanity Fair, How to Lose Friends & Alienate People wastes a metric shite-tonne of good actors with a bland, cliche-ridden script. It's not a terrible movie. It's just a boring one, with not one scene that rings with anything resembling verisimilitude.
Apparently, Toby Young was banned from the set because he kept making suggestions. Given what a bollocks the writer and director made of this production, my sympathies are with Toby Young. A book that criticizes selling out, sells out to a bland Hollywood ideal. Megan Fox, as a scheming, ditzy starlet, steals the movie. Pegg looks lost as a Romantic Lead with no good lines. Jeff Bridges just seems miscast as a fictionalized version of Graydon Carter. Not recommended.
Muppets Most Wanted: based on characters created by Jim Henson; written by James Bobin and Nicholas Stoller; directed by James Bobin; starring Ricky Gervais (Dominic Badguy), Ty Burrell (Jean Pierre Napoleon), Tina Fey (Nadya), and the voices of Steve Whitmire, Eric Jacobson, Dave Goelz, Bill Barretta, David Rudman, and Matt Vogel (2014):
The fundamental problem with a Muppet movie is that the Muppets were best on their 1970's and early 1980's TV variety show (well, or on Farscape, but that's a different story).
That said, this is an enjoyable sequel with a lot of winning moments and funny songs. Its box office suggests that the Muppets aren't a draw for children, but I think that's mainly the problem of there not being a Muppet TV show. Or podcast. Or whatever. The actors, human and puppet, all seem to be having a marvelous time. Cameos abound, as the movie takes its cues from the first Muppet movie (that being The Muppet Movie) when it comes to cameos.
Muppets Most Wanted is all a bit music-heavy, and the plot creaks in its machinery. Ricky Gervais makes a fine villain who could use more lines. And boy, Tina Fey has lost weight since 30 Rock! Recommended.
Gunga Din: based on the poem by Rudyard Kipling; written by Joel Sayre, Fred Guiol, Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur, William Faulkner, Lester Cohen, John Colton, Vincent Lawrence, Dudley Nichols, and Anthony Veiller; starring Cary Grant (Cutter), Victor McLagen (MacChesney), Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (Ballantine), Sam Jaffe (Gunga Din), and Eduardo Ciannelli (Guru) (1939): Tremendously dated in its presentation of racial, cultural. and colonial values, Gunga Din nevertheless still has its moments of comedy, action, and drama. It's also one gigantic crib-note for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
Set in colonial India in the 1890's, Gunga Din is somewhat improbably based on a poem by Rudyard Kipling (who shows up as a character towards the end, along with a partial reading of the poem). Cary Grant, Victor McLagen, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. play three sergeants tasked with investigating an uprising by the Thugee cult of murderous Kali worshipers.
Grant wisely took the best role in the film, that of the treasure-obsessed Cutter who's nonetheless the soldier who most treats water-carrier Gunga Din like a man and not an object. And Sam Jaffe manages to invest Din, who's about one step away from Stepin Fetchit, with a certain amount of dignity and heroism.
As the villainous cult leader with the oddly generic name of Guru, Eduardo Cianelli steals every scene he's in. At this point in history, his opposition to British colonialism seems perfectly legitimate. Maybe if he'd just have his followers stop strangling everybody! But he's the most articulate character in the movie, he has a self-sacrificing end that parallels that of Gunga Din, and he has one terrific speech about why he fights for Indian self-rule. He's like Gandhi, only with a lot more strangling and killing! Also, there's a lovable elephant, and enough historical inaccuracies in the types of weapons used by the British to keep any gun enthusiast up all night. Recommended.
Trollhunter; written by Andre Ovredal and Havard Johansen; directed by Andre Ovredal; starring Otto Jespersen (Hans), Glenn Erland Tosterud (Thomas), Johanna Morck (Johanna), Tomas Alf Larsen (Kalle), and Hans Morten Hansen (Finn) (2010): This Norwegian film takes the 'found footage' horror movie sub-genre and makes a funny, scary, large-scale adventure out of it. Norway has trolls, as a student film-making camera crew finds out while tailing a man whom they assume to be a bear poacher.
He isn't. He's the government's official trollhunter. And, pissed off at the bureaucracy, the secrecy, and the increasingly endangered status of the trolls he's hired to contain, Trollhunter Hans decides to take the students along with him as he tries to figure out why a number of trolls have escaped from Norway's largest troll preserve and are running around eating sheep and German tourists and the occasional car tire. Trolls, as Hans notes, will eat almost any crap -- traps are baited with sheep and goats, but also with concrete and charcoal.
Hans is the centrepiece of the movie -- the cameraman gets stuck offscreen for the most part, understandably, while the other two students primarily act scared and baffled until they get something of an understanding of the bizarre world of trolls that the Norwegian government has been hiding from its citizens for centuries.
The visual effects are mostly excellent, especially for a low-budget movie. More importantly, they're 'fantastic': the trolls don't look literalized the way that, say, CGI King Kong in Peter Jackson's King Kong looks literalized (he's simply a larger version of an existing gorilla species) rather than fantastic as the original King Kong did, a 40-foot ape clearly NOT of any known species.
The trolls, CGI though they obviously must be, are clearly in the tradition of Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion animation and not the mainstream of CGI, where apparently imagination has been all but outlawed in the past few years. One species even looks like muppets -- if Muppets were 12-feet tall, had been sleeping rough for twenty years, and enjoyed eating people. Will there be a sequel? I sorta hope so, though I'd also like to see the filmmakers tackle other fantastic creatures in a modern context. Highly recommended.
They Live, written by John Carpenter, based on the short story "Eight O'Clock in the Morning" by Ray Nelson; directed by John Carpenter; starring Roddy Piper (Nada), Keith David (Frank) and Meg Foster (Holly) (1988): John Carpenter's snarly dystopic satire looks as fresh and relevant now as it did in 1988. Maybe moreso, given the increasing ascendancy of corporations Uber Alles in the interim, the Occupy movements, and all the other stuff that's happened since then.
Wrestler Roddy Piper makes an engaging hero as Nada, an umemployed manual labourer who arrives in Los Angeles looking for work and instead discovers a conspiracy aimed at destroying the middle-class and working-class. Nada's a man of action (he is played by a professional wrestler, after all), and soon he and his initially reluctant compadre Frank (the always marvelous Keith David) are going toe-to-toe with the Secret Rulers of the World.
Is this a perfect movie? No. Some of Piper's witticisms fall pretty flat, though others ("I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum.") have justifiably become classics. The cinematography looks amazingly crummy, which fits the film without necessarily being intentional (Carpenter's films often look crummy, as if they were shot on videotape and then transferred to film).
Nonetheless, this is one of the two or three best science-fiction films in the sub-genre of Paranoid Conspiracy That's Actually True. It may not look as good as The Matrix, another film in that sub-genre, but the eight-minute fight between Nada and Frank, as Nada tries to get Frank to on the sunglasses that allow a person to see what's really going on in the world, beats almost any fight sequence I can think of for sheer stubbornness on the part of both the characters and the filmmakers. Highly recommended.
The Muppets, written by Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller, based on characters created by Jim Henson; directed by James Bobin; starring Jason Segel (Gary), Amy Adams (Mary), Chris Cooper (Tex Richman), and the Muppets (2011): The Muppets return to the big screen after more than a decade away thanks to the slightly unlikely Muppet-love of Jason Segel. It's great to see all of them again, and the gossamer-thin plot doesn't get in the way of an assortment of great Muppet moments and the occasional song. Segel, Adams, and Cooper strike just the right note of earnestness mixed with gently self-mocking metafictionality. Recommended.
Waiting for Guffman, written by Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy; directed by Christopher Guest; starring Christopher Guest (Corky St. Clair), Fred Willard (Ron Albertson), Catherine O'Hara (Sheila Albertson), Parker Posey (Libby Mae Brown), Eugene Levy (Dr. Allan Pearl) and Bob Balaban (Lloyd Miller) (1996): It's Blaine, Missouri's 150th anniversary, and resident little-theatre guru Corky St. Clair will write and direct a musical tribute to the history of the small town. Oh, boy, will he ever.
Writers Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy hit pretty much all the right notes in this affectionate but clear-eyed tribute to the delusions that theatre can bring on in people who long to be something other than what they are, even if they dream of being something they're not actually good at. It now looks like a satire of the American Idol generation, though of course it isn't -- in tone and execution, it hews closer to Stephen Leacock's scathing, sympathetic Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. Highly recommended.
