TONY PORCO’S MOVIE REVIEW NEWSLETTER (SUMMER 2006 BLOCKBUSTER EDITION)

ON SCREEN:

OVER THE HEDGE (ADP): Over the Hedge is yet another fun–talking-animals movie, much like Madagascar or Finding Nemo, and while there’s not much here that’s new, it’s still a lot of fun for that. The plot revolves around R. J., a rambunctious raccoon (voiced by Bruce Willis) who gets caught stealing junk food from the local bear (Nick Nolte) and has to get it all back to him in a week, when the bear wakes up from hibernation. To get help, he offers his services to a group of newly-awakened foraging animals led by the cautious Vern the turtle (Garry Shandling), whose lives aren’t quite the same after they wake up to find a huge hedge down the middle of their forest, with something even more frightening (a new human housing development) on the other side of it. R. J., like any good raccoon, knows how to forage in this new environment, and soon starts to teach the new arrivals the basics of suburban survival, all the while dogged by the cell-phone-toting, SUV-driving, and animal-hating president of the homeowners’ association (Allison Janney), the Bad Guy. The script is full of slapstick to keep the kids entertained, and funny jokes to keep the adults (and some kids) entertained. It is witty, although for some reason, I wasn’t laughing much until about midway through. The voice casting is done well. Besides Shandling, two standouts are William Shatner, playing an opossum who, being an opossum, gets out of scrapes by (you must have seen this coming) dying (over) dramatically, and Steve Carell, playing Hammy, the most hyperactive squirrel that ever lived on the face of the earth. (The filmmakers dodged a bullet by giving Hammy periodic funny lines here and there, instead of making the movie revolve around him, which would have made the whole thing much, much more annoying.) Besides the odd lack of humor in the beginning, my only major complaint is the loudness of the soundtrack. Why do kids’ movies have to be so damn loud? It’s part of my more general complaint (which I’ve made before) about the overstimulation that so often seems to be a part of movies made for children, something that makes me appreciate those old Charlie Brown specials all the more. I should add that this is hardly an adult-that-shouldn’t-judge-kids’-movies-because-he’s-an-adult issue; my son was often scared by all the noise on the soundtrack, although he seemed to enjoy the movie overall. More subtly, there’s an irony that the movie doesn’t quite seem to appreciate. The whole thing makes fun (often quite tellingly) of American suburban commercial excess, even though it’s going to be seen by many a suburbanite in many a commercial multiplex theater. This suburbanite still found it entertaining and telling, however. (I should add that the music was done by alternative rocker Ben Folds, and is a major asset of the film. I may buy the soundtrack when it comes out on CD.) RATING: 7.

ON TAPE:

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (ADP): I have reviewed many gay-themed movies in this newsletter, and I’ve pointed out how they so often resemble "straight" movies with similar themes; Kissing Jessica Stein is like a Woody Allen movie, Philadelphia is much like any other socially-conscious courtroom drama, and so on. Brokeback Mountain is somewhat different, because it deals specifically with how difficult straight society can make it to be gay, and how hard it can therefore be to express your love for another person, if you fall into that category. If there's a straight romance that it resembles, it's something like Wuthering Heights, or maybe a more drawn-out West Side Story. By now, most of you know the basic story: two tough Westerners, one quiet and stoic (Heath Ledger) and one more loquacious, though not by much (Jake Gyllenhall), take a job herding sheep deep in the gorgeous-but-foreboding Wyoming mountains. One of them tends camp and hunts for food, while the other stays up on the mountain with the sheep, dogs, and wolves, with the two meeting each other by day. The extreme isolation, and the arguable similarity of their arrangement to that of many marriages, bring them to a friendship, and after they switch roles, something more... and something with which they have difficulty discussing, let alone resolving. Ledger and Gyllenhall were given a lot of responsibility to make the movie work by the script; they both succeed, and while Ledger has gotten a lot of the critical praise, I actually think it was Gyllenhall who had the more challenging role. In any event, both of them are totally convincing. Anne Hathaway (from the Princess Diaries movies) and Michelle Williams (from Dawson's Creek and The Station Agent) are almost as good in equally-challenging roles, as the two women the men end up marrying. That makes them sound alike, but the roles and portrayals are actually quite different, which makes them even better. Granted, the movie isn't perfect. The second half crams too many years into too little film time, and there is at least one instance of totally gratuitous violence that really didn't need to be there. The opening scenes on the mountain drag a bit, although I didn't mind this since (as I've argued in many reviews before, most recently the one for Lost in Translation) the slow movement makes a hard-to-believe relationship easier to buy mentally. That, in the end, is what this film is about: a hard-to-believe relationship that really shouldn't have been so hard to believe. (As a side note, the Westerner in me was intrigued to see aspects of western life that few non-westerners know about, such as the Basque shepherds that settled in states like Idaho and Wyoming and lent them a more multicultural flavor, highlighted in this movie. Also, it goes without saying that the mountain scenery in this movie is absolutely stunning, and reminds me of a lot of places out west that I've been. Ironically, the state of Wyoming is actually played by the province of Alberta, in an interesting parallel to the fact that the two gay shepherds are played by two straight actors. More importantly, director Ang Lee does a great job of using the landscape to help tell the story, a talent he also showed with his earlier film, Eat Drink Man Woman. Randy Quaid is terrific as the surly rancher who hires the two men for that crucial summer up on the mountain.) RATING: 8.

SUICIDE KINGS (ADP): When a young, wealthy woman from New York (Laura Harris) is kidnapped, her brother (Henry Thomas) and boyfriend (Sean Patrick Flannery) get a bunch of their childhood buddies together to do the obvious thing--kidnap a (possibly) former ex-mob boss (Christopher Walken) to get the money to pay the ransom. It's all as hard to take as it sounds, especially at first; I spent the first half-hour or so of the movie wondering who was more stupid, the rich kids who kidnapped the boss, or the boss for letting himself get nabbed in the first place. As the film continues, however, it does get more compelling, mainly because of Walken's usual great performance. His manipulation of the men who abducted him is so skillful that you begin to wonder who really kidnapped whom after a while. The actors playing the friends, not surprisingly, suffer a bit by comparison, although the best of them really are good (my favorite was Johnny Galecki, playing the nerdiest of the five friends and the main provider of comic relief, with the moody Nathan Dana Aldrich as a close second). The plot twists and turns from there, but managed to keep me interested until near the end. I had heard that this movie was rather violent, but except for some grossness near the beginning, it is violent without being terribly graphic. RATING: 7.

CLASSICS ROUNDUP:

Jill and I have been watching a lot of old movies lately, so I happen to have a lot of them in the review hopper, which explains the cheesy section title above.

PATHER PATCHALI (JKP): Satyajit Ray’s 1955 lyrical , semi-autobiographical movie about his childhood years in India, Pather Pachali (Song of the Road), is simply wonderful. The movie, made on a small budget, eloquently captures the essence of childhood and of how children experience a family’s poverty. Ray spares nothing in conveying the family’s desperate situation to the viewer. Yet, there are moments of joy, such as when the children follow a sweets seller to their cousin’s house.

The director’s use of minimalist cinematography to show the twin beauty and destruction of India’s monsoons is quite effective. Worth noting is the fact that Ravi Shankar, now a famous Indian musician, wrote the music for this movie near the beginning of his career.

The family dynamics in the movie are complicated, yet touching. The mother, well-played by Karuna Bannerjee, dislikes her husband’s elderly aunt who lives with them, yet needs her to keep the peace in the family. The mother berates her daughter, Durga, for stealing guavas from a nearby relative’s garden yet again, and pulls her by the hair to punish her. Durga’s toy box falls to the ground and the aunt quietly walks over and picks the toys up and puts them back in the box. This scene is an example of Ray’s mastery at showing what happens without preaching to the viewer. The love between the father, a poet, and his son, Apu, is quite affecting, particularly in the scene that shows the father and Apu writing side-by-side.

Pather Pachali is the first movie in Satyajit Ray’s “Apu triology,” which also includes Aparajito (Unvanquished), and Apur Sansar (The World of Apu). Run, do not walk, to your nearby independent video store to rent these terrific movies! RATING: 9.

THE BICYCLE THIEF (ADP): This movie, along with Open City by Roberto Rosselini (which I've never seen), made the Italian "neorealist" style popular shortly after World War II. Having seen it, I'm not sure what the "neo" is all about, because there really doesn't seem to be anything "neo" about its realism. It's the grim story of a poor man in postwar Italy (Lamberto Maggiorani) who gets a job putting up posters. He needs a bicycle for it, so he pawns family heirlooms to get one, and then has the misfortune of seeing it stolen on his very first day. How he and his son (an extraordinary child actor named Enzo Staiola) deal with this adversity comprises the rest of the story. The movie is undoubtedly grim in tone, something which often seems synonymous with realism, although I've never thought that the two had to be synonymous. That said, it is grim because it's honest and powerful. This is a movie that speaks for millions, and that makes it unforgettable. One scene set in a pizzeria is particularly stirring for me as a parent. This movie got a lot of kind words from critics, and in this case, they are deserved. RATING: 10.

KON-TIKI (ADP): Kon-Tiki, Norwegian anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl’s story of his journey across the South Pacific in 1947 with five other men on a balsa-and-reed ship, happens to be one of my favorite books. The trip was intended to prove that South American Indians could have settled the Pacific islands, rather than Asians, as is usually assumed. This documentary movie consists of film footage that Heyerdahl and his men shot at sea, with no soundtrack, but with narration translated into English. The movie doesn’t really replace the book (I wouldn’t have expected that), but does compliment it well, providing visuals that mesh well with a reading of it and trying to make Heyerdahl’s case to a larger audience. Particularly stirring are sequences showing the crew meeting a whale shark in the middle of the ocean, sailing away from the ship in a small rubber raft and then almost not making it back in the heavy waves (one of the few times they were in serious physical danger), and, after a harrowing landing on a reef, finally coming upon their destination, an island in French Polynesia. Unfortunately, some of the footage that would have been the most revealing (showing the men meeting in the small cabin that sat midships on the boat, using their ham radio, and otherwise whiling away the many hours they spent during their three months at sea) was destroyed by water during the reef landing, which impoverishes the film somewhat. My other complaint is a technical one--the DVD is strangely hard to navigate, with no main menu and a scene selection menu that’s actually hard to find. Adventure movie and documentary fans should still enjoy this, however. RATING: 8.