Boy

Taika Waititi's Boy is a film I had been dying to see for over two years, since I first heard of it when it played at Sundance 2010. I occasionally dug around on the internet to see if there was any news of its U.S. release, and even considered buying an expensive imported copy of the DVD. I just loved the trailer that much. Now that I've finally seen it, I can say that Boy is every bit as funny, quirky, and heartwarming as the trailer made it out to be.

Set in a poor Maori area of New Zealand in 1984, Boy is the story of a boy named Boy (played fantastically by James Rolleston). His mother died while giving birth to his little brother, Rocky (Te Aho Aho Eketone-Whitu), and his father is in jail, so he lives with his largely absent grandmother and takes care of his brother and several cousins.

Boy worships his father. He sees him as all great things: a samurai warrior, a soldier, and most important of all, his idol, Michael Jackson. When his father, Alamein (played by writer/director Waititi), comes back from his stint in jail, Boy is ready to follow him anywhere. Unfortunately, Alamein is about as bad as a deadbeat dad can be, and is only back home so he can find a bag of stolen money he buried years ago.

While Boy hopelessly dotes on his father, Alamein uses his son to get whatever he wants. He makes Boy dig for his treasure, has him steal weed for him, etc., all the while dangling the empty promise that he'll take him away with him when he goes. Even worse, Alamein can't look his other son, Rocky, in the eyes, still blaming him for his lover's death. In the end, Boy must choose between following in his father's footsteps, or living up to his true potential, whatever that means.

Boy feels very personal and heartfelt, and maybe even partially autobiographical. I don't know for sure if anything like this actually happened to Taika Waititi, but I wouldn't be surprised if he had grown up in a similar situation as this. Waititi utilizes his quirky visual techniques, such as childish hand-drawn animation sequences, and fantasy dance numbers in homage to Michael Jackson's famous music videos for Thriller, to let us into Boy's world. There's also a great soundtrack by New Zealand band The Phoenix Foundation.

Newcomer James Rolleston is excellent as the title character. In fact, all of the children in the movie just feel like real kids. None of them have the artificiality of the type of child actor we get over here in America.

Taika Waititi is funny, too, as Alamein. While definitely a bit misguided, there's a childishness to him that allows you to want to like him, even when he's not exactly behaving like a very good role model for his kids. You hope that maybe he'll grow up one day and take responsibility.

Boy is worth looking into if you see it around. The U.S. theatrical release is pretty limited, but I have a feeling that if you miss it in theaters (or if you're reading this in the fuuuuuuuuuutuuuuuuuuure...), you will be able to find it at some point, on DVD, or streaming. Seek it out, if you can. Great movie.

The Fly (1958)

Kurt Neumann's original 1958 version of The Fly was way better than I thought it would be. I expected the usual 1950's monster movie, something along the lines of the stuff you would see on Mystery Science Theater 3000. There is some camp, of course, but there are some genuinely creepy moments, the characters are three dimensional, and the narrative structure is quite smart.

The story begins in a factory, where the body of Andre, a scientist, has been found, his head and arm crushed in a pressing machine. We meet the scientist's brother Francois, played by Vincent Price, and his wife, Helene, who was at the scene of the crime, and under suspicion for murder. They are unsure if she is insane or just faking it. After earning her trust, Francois gets Helene to tell the story of the events leading up to the incident.

In flashback, we learn that Andre was developing a matter transporting machine. He excitedly shows it to his wife, demonstrating it on an ashtray. When it dissipates and appears in another chamber, the letters on the bottom are all jumbled up, so apparently it still needs work. After fixing it, he tries it on the family's cat. It disappears and never reappears. It's one of the creepier moments in the movie, when you just hear the cat's seemingly tortured cry coming from nowhere. Finally, sure he's fixed it, Andre tests his matter transporter on himself. Unfortunately, a fly gets in with him and their bodies are crossed with each other.

The movie is told from Helene's point of view. She is unsure what has happened to Andre, just that he refuses to leave his lab and speaks to her through notes. When she finally does see him, he has his head covered up by a cloth, which is also creepy. She finally learns that the fly has his head and one of his arms, and the only hope of returning him to normal is to find that fly. She and her son and the maid all go on a hunt for a fly with a white head, before Andre loses his grip on his humanity and becomes a monster.

I liked the slow reveal of Andre in fly form. It's sort of like how you don't see the shark in Jaws until the end, just glimpses. This works the same way, where you know whatever is under that sheet is horrifying, and when you finally do see it, well, it's kind of fake looking but it looks pretty great for the 1950's.

I won't spoil the ending, of course, but since you know that Andre's head and arm are smashed from the very beginning, you know it can't end well. I actually can't believe they got away with the way they ended the movie. Or the whole pressing machine thing. The movie is pretty gruesome for its time, and unsettling.

I enjoy being surprised by a movie like The Fly. I had already written it off as B-movie fare before even watching it, and it wound up being genuinely good. It's nice when one's preconceived notions are proven pleasantly wrong.

Matilda

For some reason, I didn't grow up with the stories of Roald Dahl. I watched Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory many many times over, but nobody ever told me there were books! I would have loved them as a kid. It wasn't until adulthood that I started reading Roald Dahl's children's books, and even a collection of his adult short stories. I actually just read Matilda for the first time last year.

Adapted into a film in 1996 with Danny DeVito directing, Matilda is the story of a special little girl (Mara Wilson), born to the wrong family. Her dad (DeVito) is a greedy scam artist who runs a crooked used car dealership, and her mother (Rhea Perlman) is a preening, beauty-obsessed, Bingo-addict. While Matilda teaches herself to read and write at a very early age, her parents and big brother mostly ignore her, but sometimes berate her for not being more like they are.

As the years pass, Matilda proves herself more and more gifted, able to do long math, spending her days reading library books rather than watch game shows with her family. After a while, she sees her family for what they are, and decides that little kids aren't necessarily the only ones that need to be punished. She decides that when her dad does something especially bad, she'll turn the tables on him with a prank of some sort.

But when Matilda goes to school, she learns that her parents are the least of her worries. The monstrous and sadistic headmistress, The Trunchbull, is known for locking children in small rooms and throwing little girls by spinning them around by their pigtails. Matilda decides she must use her gifts to free her school of the tyranny of the Trunchbull.

More often than not, Dahl's books tend to make good movies. He never talked down to kids, and often wrote some strange and scary things. Matilda is loaded with that kind of stuff, with her mean, borderline abusive parents, and the villainous headmistress. But I can't see a kid being too scared, because they know Matilda is smarter than the grownups and will always have the upper hand.

DeVito does a great job adapting the story. He uses his trademark quirky visual style to create a fantastical world that feels true to Dahl's writing. He's also hilarious as Matilda's father. It's possibly some of the funniest acting of his career. Mara Wilson was quite a discovery for the role of Matilda, cute and innocent enough to get away with committing mischievous acts of revenge on adults without ever losing the viewers' support in this.

Of all the Roald Dahl films, Matilda may be the truest to the source material. As much as I love Willy Wonka and Fantastic Mr. Fox, they do both deviate from the books a good deal. I wish I hadn't missed out on this guy's books when I was at the age to properly appreciate them. Come to think of it, I have a niece and nephew who probably have no idea what they're missing. Perhaps it's time to change that.

Fantastic Voyage

I was really looking forward to seeing Fantastic Voyage. It's directed by Richard Fleischer, who had a respectable career, directed some real classics, and also Conan the Destroyer and Red Sonja. It has a really cool premise, with a crew shrinking themselves to go inside a man's body. I loved Joe Dante's Innerspace growing up. It also has groundbreaking for its time special effects and production design. Unfortunately, the movie itself just didn't hold my interest.

When the scientist developing the shrinking technology is nearly assassinated and rendered comatose from a blood clot in his brain, a small crew is put together to shrink down and go inside his brain to perform laser surgery on the clot. Unfortunately, I can't tell you that much about the crew, because I just wasn't very engaged by them. Raquel Welch was basically just "the girl" (though she looked amazing) and there was one scientist who constantly spouted out profound philosophical musings on what they were doing. The only performance that was fun to watch for me was Donald Pleasance as the claustrophobic scientist guy. Pleasance built a career on playing fun-to-watch supporting characters. When you're telling a high concept, fairly simple story like this, character is important. They need to be more colorful and memorable than they were in this case.

I did appreciate the attempt to ground Fantastic Voyage in real science. Obviously, the shrinking part is all made up, a necessary conceit of the premise, but Isaac Asimov worked on the story, straightening out some kinks, and giving it some scientific credibility, in terms of being inside a body and everything. It's really hard to do a science fiction movie right when you're actually paying attention to the science part of it, and I wish it happened more often.

I'm pretty sure I'm in the minority on this one. I know Fantastic Voyage was and still is a well regarded sci-fi adventure. I can appreciate it on a technical level, for sure. Unfortunately, the movie just didn't reach me on a human level. This is one of those rare movies I'd actually be interested in seeing a remake of.

The Avengers

I have been waiting four years for this. Marvel Studios announced the Avengers movie the Monday after the first Iron Man came out in 2008. Heck, they announced it even earlier by putting Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury at the end of the credits. Now four years later, having seen The Avengers, I can't believe they not only pulled it off, but knocked it out of the park.

Admittedly, I'm a lifelong comic book reader, so I don't know how that colors my opinions. I'm also a part of the cult of the movie's writer/director, Joss Whedon, whose career I've been following since the first episode of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV show aired when I was in 9th grade. The Avengers was pretty much made for me.

But Marvel and Whedon didn't just target the nerds with The Avengers. They crafted a giant event film for the largest audience possible. An event film that truly feels like an event. Not since the Universal monsters started meeting Abbott and Costello has a studio so successfully combined characters from four separate movie franchises into one movie.

For those of you that live in a cave, The Avengers is the story of Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, and The Hulk all team up to defeat a world-threatening evil. Rounding the team out are superspy Black Widow, crackshot archer Hawkeye, and Nick Fury, the morally ambiguous director of SHIELD, a global peacekeeping organization.

The Avengers are not well known for how well they get along. These guys have big egos, and wildly clashing personalities. Part of the fun in the first half is watching the good guys duke it out with each other, in basically the most epic pissing contest in cinema history, before things start going crazy in the second half and they have bigger fish to fry.

The second half is where The Avengers really takes off. It's a slow build, but once the last 45 minutes come along and the heroes battle an alien army, ravaging New York City in the process, the movie provides one huge crowd pleasing moment after another. I think just about every thing you ever wanted to see done with these characters is done.

Joss Whedon is a lifelong fan, too, and he understands what we, the viewers want to see, and he delivers it with wild abandon. The characters are imbued with all the complexity and humanity that made them endure in the first place. Downey Jr. shines as always as Tony Stark/Iron Man, and the Chrises Evans and Hemsworth bring it with Captain America and Thor. Scarlett Johannson gets a whole lot more to do this time around as Black Widow, the spy with Red in her past. But the characters who stole the show for me were Mark Ruffalo's Bruce Banner/The Hulk, finally done right in a movie, and Tom Hiddleston's Loki, the perpetually monologuing, pompous Norse God of lies and mischief.

Also, did I mention the movie is extremely funny? The dialogue is endlessly witty, and there are several big comedy moments throughout. The audience laughed more at The Avengers than a lot of comedies I've seen.

I could go on and on and on about The Avengers, but I feel like I would be in danger of falling into one of those "and the part where this happened... and then the part where THIS happened..." situations, where I just list everything. I loved it. And I don't think you need to know the comic books to love it too. The Avengers is a real-deal phenomenon.

The Front Page

Billy Wilder is one of the greats. No contest. I believe I've said something along those lines just recently in my review of Ace in the Hole. In fact, Ace in the Hole inspired my wife and I to seek out another Wilder film. The combination of Wilder directing and Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau starring convinced us to take a look at The Front Page, a remake of a 1930's movie, based on a play. It was made pretty late in Wilder's career, and it's not even close to his best work, but it's still enjoyable enough.

Jack Lemmon stars as Hildy Johnson, a newspaper man through and through, who comes into the office to tell his editor in chief, Walter Burns (Matthau) that he's out of the game. He met a girl and fell in love, and they're about to take the next train out of Chicago. Burns won't have it, though, and he uses every dirty trick he has to pull Hildy back in.

Burns sends Hildy on one last assignment, to cover the hanging of a supposed radical. When the radical escapes death row, and basically falls right into Hildy's lap, Hildy's reporter instinct takes over and he goes to any length to hide the escaped inmate from the police, his fellow reporters, and the woman he's quitting the newspaper business for.

Though it came out in 1974, Wilder infuses The Front Page with snappy 1930's style dialogue, and frantic comedic pacing. It's always a joy to see Lemmon and Matthau, one of the great comedy duos, working together. I also liked seeing a young Susan Sarandon as Hildy's fiancee Peggy, who knows their marriage won't work as long as Hildy is married to the newspaper.

Despite the good things, though, the movie isn't exactly fresh. Wilder was one of the edgiest filmmakers of his time, that time mainly being the 1940's and 1950's. By the time The Front Page was made, the face of cinema had changed. Movies like The Godfather, Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, and Badlands had all come out, and they were all able to tackle mature issues head on in a way that Wilder was only able to allude to in his day. The Front Page feels kind of limp compared to those movies, and also compared to Wilder's early work. Ace in the Hole is a Billy Wilder film from 20 years earlier, and it explores the lengths a newspaper man will go to get a good story in a much more subversive and edgy way than this.

The Front Page was still worth watching. It was well executed and funny and Lemmon and Matthau are a delight. But if you haven't already seen Wilder's other films, such as Sunset Boulevard, The Apartment, or Some Like it Hot, I would recommend you skip The Front Page and watch the classics ASAP.

The Five Year Engagement

I'm generally a fan of the comedies produced by Judd Apatow. He has a pretty high hit rate with me so far, and I like the people he works with both behind and in front of the camera. Knowing this going in, and the fact that it looked like a lot of the subject matter mirrored my life in some way, I was pretty sure The Five Year Engagement was going to be right up my alley. I ended up disappointed.

The Five Year Engagement is the story of Tom (Jason Segel) and Violet (Emily Blunt), a couple who get engaged, but have to keep repeatedly pushing back their wedding whenever life gets in the way. The longer they wait, the harder things get, until they question whether they should get married at all. It's a good enough premise, and I like the leads, but I found the movie just really light on laughs.

It was a weird feeling for certain aspects of the story to really hit home for me on a personal level, even though I wasn't laughing a great deal. Hey look! They have to move to Michigan! I grew up in Michigan and they're making Michigan jokes! They move because Violet is working on her psychology doctorate, and he's miserable there. MY wife is working on her psychology doctorate. I moved with her from Chicago to Texas and, no, I don't like it here either. We didn't delay our wedding, though. This movie reflects my life a whole bunch, yet I still wasn't feeling it.

My biggest problem came in the section of the film set in Michigan, where a depressed Tom tries to make the best of his situation and throws himself into the Michigan way of living. He starts hunting deer almost obsessively and grows a funny beard. Once that happens, I found it hard to believe Tom as a character, because they push it all too far. And I take pride in my very durable suspension of disbelief.

It's not all bad, though. The characters are all quite likeable. Segel and Blunt are actually upstaged by Alison Brie and Chris Pratt, as Violet's sister and Tom's best friend, who hook up at the engagement party, and end up married and with children while Tom and Violet are stuck in purgatory. I could watch a whole movie about Brie and Pratt.

The Five Year Engagement was directed by Nicholas Stoller who cowrote it with Segel. The two of them typically make a great team. My favorite Apatow production is Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which they made together. They crafted such a likeable cast of three dimensional characters in that, that I even wanted to hang out with the ones I wasn't supposed to like. Segel also helped out with the hilariously vapid songs in Stoller's 2nd film, Get Him to the Greek, and they also cowrote last year's glorious and sincere love letter, The Muppets. I have no reason to think they won't make another great comedy together at some point, but this one didn't work for me.