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The Kids Stay in the Picture

“It wasn’t you. It was how they put it together.”

— Hannah Bailey, American Teen

High school senior Hannah Bailey — one of the protagonists of the documentary American Teen —  is talking to her boyfriend Mitch about a video segment on their school’s morning announcements, where Mitch come across as arrogant. But she might as well be commenting on the film they’re both in, an intimate portrait of a year in the life of a handful of teens that poses plenty of questions about what “real” means anymore.

This Sundance Film Festival hit from documentarian Nanette Burstein (The Kid Stays in the Picture) focuses on four seniors at the only high school in small-town Warsaw, Indiana: Megan — blond, tan, and wealthy by town standards — is the school queen bee. Colin — the best player on the school’s basketball team — is the jock. Jake is the shy, acne-riddled “band geek.” (“I do love the ladies, but the ladies do not love me,” he says.) And then there’s Hannah, who is described by a litany of classmate responses: “alternative,” “artistic,” “rebel,” “strange.” (Though one male classmate offers a description that immediately marks him as the best person in the film: “She’s got heart.”)

Each teen is driven by a clear, at least somewhat attainable, post-high-school goal: Megan wants to live up to family pressure and get into Notre Dame. Colin wants to earn a basketball scholarship as the only way to afford college. Jake wants to have a girlfriend and a normal life. And Hannah wants to go to college in California and make movies.

But the roles (along with second-tier subject Mitch as school heartthrob) linger, underscored by a film poster that cagily apes the iconography of John Hughes’ teen-flick classic The Breakfast Club. But one of American Teen‘s biggest questions is how much the film (and the kids) are trying to expose the limitations of these cultural types and how much the film (and, again, the kids) are trying to replicate them.

American Teen is a highly engaging, relatable film, but it’s impossible not to wonder how real it really is, both in terms of filmmaking and “performance.”

Are moments re-created? One of the most dramatic scenes of the film is Hannah crying on the street after her boyfriend (not Mitch) has broken up with her immediately after having sex. The camera also shows another male friend at another location receiving her tearful phone call. Capturing all of this on camera seems entirely too fortuitous, as does the capturing of meaningful text messages as they’re being written.

In terms of performance, Hannah’s mid-film, Pretty in Pink-style romance with Mitch also feels sketchy. Is this real or just a way for this boy, previously a non-factor in the film, to worm his way into a “starring” role?

Or is there a difference anymore? Quizzed by Megan about dating outside his circle, Mitch says of Hannah, “I feel like I can be myself around her. I can be nerdy.” It’s straight from a John Hughes flick, but have Hughes flicks now taught multiple generations how to act like teenagers? It’s a post-modern given that the camera changes what (or, more explicitly, who) it films. But for a post-Real World, YouTube generation, is it possible to film teens not performing?

American Teen

Opening Friday, August 15th

Ridgeway Four

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Pants, take two: This one’s for the girls.

If you can’t beat The Dark Knight, why not carve a little piece of the pie in the form of some surefire counterprogramming? While The Dark Knight is thrilling teen boys of all ages, this one’s for the girls: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2, a sequel to the 2005 hit based on a popular series of teen novels by Ann Brashares.

Just as Sex & the City scored big by providing an alternative to a summer of boycentric popcorn cinema, this reunion of four attractive, relatable TV-identified actresses tries to do the same for a younger and (hopefully) more innocent demographic.

Like in Sex & the City, an opening montage reconnects with old story lines and refamiliarizes the audience with the four principals in this ongoing gal-pal saga. Where the first edition (based on the first volume of the four-book series) was most definitely a high school movie, this one (based on the last book installment) is a college movie set over the summer following freshman year.

Tibby (Joan of Arcadia‘s Amber Tamblyn) is an NYU film student doing makeup work; Bridget (Gossip Girl Blake Lively) is a soccer star at Brown who’s heading to Turkey for an archaeology dig; Lena (Gilmore Girl Alexis Bledel) is sketching through the summer at the Rhode Island School of Design; and Carmen (Ugly Betty‘s America Ferrera) is a drama student at Yale heading to a summer workshop in Vermont.

Things are a little more grown-up this go-around. Romantic entanglements are considerably more complicated, including a pregnancy scare. In the first film, Carmen was dealing with an estranged father; here Bridget reconnects with an estranged grandmother, played by Blythe Danner in a very affecting sequence.

And, yes, those damn pants are still around. The premise of the series is that the group of friends happen upon a pair of jeans that magically fits each of their very different body types and brings good luck. It’s a passable gimmick for high-schoolers, but it seems far sillier now that everyone’s grown up. Here, the pants-specific plotting seems as reluctantly dutiful as the appearance of these contractually obligated actresses. The premise — that the girls mail the jeans back and forth, thus the “traveling” part — also hurts the film by keeping the actresses apart too much.

Clearly, this fidelity to the source material helps connect the film to its built-in audience, but the dumb title and even cornier premise are probably non-starters for anyone outside the core demo.

Which is too bad, because, while The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 is as minor and formulaic as the first film, it also gives a group of engaging young actresses (mostly) realistic and respectful situations to negotiate. There’s some fantasy here, for sure, but the fact that the film doesn’t get too worked up about its color-blind casting or complicated families is just the start of its modest realism. In a world of Bratz and Britney, this is laudable stuff, and the lives of girls (or anyone else) should be of interest beyond the target audience.

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2

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Clearing the Road to Excess

he first words of Alex Gibney’s new documentary Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson are spoken by Thompson’s first wife, Sondi Wright: “He’d known for a long time that he was not a really great writer.”

That’s an important, healthy way to begin a film that tackles the artistic legacy of a man whose status as a countercultural icon eventually devoured his credibility as a journalist. But once upon a time, Thompson looked unstoppable. Gonzo correctly focuses on the era of his greatest creativity — a 10-year period between the late-1960s publication of his book Hell’s Angels and the early-to-mid-1970s of Nixon, McGovern, Watergate, and Foreman-Ali. Gibney zeroes in on the relevant years of Thompson’s life so well that it’s almost possible to forgive his taste for hokey images, such as the one of Johnny Depp fondling a pistol while reading Thompson excerpts aloud.

Several of Gonzo‘s talking heads, notably 1972 presidential candidate George McGovern, Nixon aide Pat Buchanan, and Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner, can’t resist this mythmaking either, and they make dubious claims about Thompson’s importance that only muddle his literary accomplishments. Contrary to media-generated legend, Thompson was not an inventor of “participatory journalism” (which ignores the efforts of everyone from Orwell to Twain to Herodotus), nor was he the first writer to write while high. (Anyone remember Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater?) And arguably, at his too-brief peak, he wasn’t the best all-around journalist of his age: Norman Mailer, Michael Herr, and Thompson’s Rolling Stone colleague Timothy Crouse all wrote more substantive, less self-indulgent nonfiction.

To his credit, though, Thompson introduced English illustrator Ralph Steadman to psychedelics in a turn-on that rivals R. Crumb’s dropping acid as a key moment in the development of 20th-century art. And Thompson was a personality of huge dimensions — a gun-toting roustabout seemingly impervious to drugs and alcohol. After running for sheriff of Aspen, Colorado, in 1970, he often appeared in public as a shaved-headed Muppet whose voice was as fun to imitate as Cary Grant’s or Peter Lorre’s. The first line of his 1972 novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas still works like catnip on people who like drugs and self-expression but prefer the latter to the former. At his best, Thompson could tap into personal reserves of anger, fear, and resentment that the curators of the officially sanctioned “Great American Sixties Story” (so-starring Creedence Clearwater Revival and more Haight-Ashbury hippie bullshit) seldom acknowledge.

Those responsible for the construction and maintenance of the Great American Sixties Story — the same ones, in fact, who are interviewed throughout Gonzo — hate it when their generation is scorned or criticized. But rage and disgust with the duplicity and failures of past generations fueled Hunter Thompson’s most insightful and poetic prose. Ignoring that anger in his work is almost as bad as agreeing with Jimmy Buffett’s false claim that Thompson “could have wielded a pretty effective sword” in today’s journalistic climate. No, he couldn’t have; he was too far gone by then.

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

Opening Friday, August 8th

Studio on the Square

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The Dark Knight Delivers

When director Christopher Nolan rebooted the long-dormant Batman film franchise with 2005’s Batman Begins, he sidestepped the pop-art goofiness of the cult-fave ’60s TV series and the dark-comedy fantasia of Tim Burton’s 1989 version for an unusually realistic approach to the comic-book material. The reaction was mixed: Some fans thought Batman Begins drained the fun and richness from the material. Others thrilled at the more serious approach.

Nolan’s follow-up, The Dark Knight, will not appease those already put off by the grim realism of his Batman vision. But those who thought Batman Begins was some kind of apex of comic-to-screen adaptation should prepare for a reassessment. Though only about 10 minutes longer than Batman Begins, The Dark Knight is far grander in scope and yet moves quicker and feels less bloated.

The earlier film was an impressive muddle, bracketed by an overlong origin prologue and a confusing, unsatisfying triangulation of villains at the end. By contrast, The Dark Knight has a much more elegant, satisfying, linear construction, with memorable action sequences (especially a street scene involving a flipped 18-wheeler) that aren’t set-piece breaks from the narrative but instead are woven into a story that deftly intertwines three primary characters: Batman/Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), anarchic villain the Joker (the late Heath Ledger), and crusading district attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart).

The opening shot glides along the building tops of a sleeker, brighter Gotham City, swooping down to catch a bank robbery just as a horde of masked perpetrators begin executing their plan. Here, Ledger’s Joker gets the grand entrance he deserves, his violent assault on what happens to be a mob-connected bank complicating a Gotham police crackdown on organized crime aimed at money-laundering operations.

As the film opens, good cop Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) is now head of the city’s major-crimes unit, where he is secretly in cahoots with the mysterious Batman, officially considered a vigilante and wanted for arrest. Crime is on the decline, but the presence of Batman has set off some unintended consequences — criminal copycats and an underworld moved to ever more desperate attempts to hold its ground against encroaching order. City government is still beset by corruption, with danger increasing for those on the good side of the thin blue line. Grandstanding new district attorney Dent suspects Gordon and Batman’s collaboration, but can he be trusted?

As that set-up might indicate, The Dark Knight is not a typical super-hero/comic-book adaptation. The Batman character is less central to the story this time out, making way not only for two, more-compelling points of a triangle in Joker and Dent but for an entire city apparatus of cops, courts, politicians, and criminals. These characters aren’t modern gods fighting it out across a landscape of civilian onlookers. They are exaggerated figures woven into the landscape and institutions of urban civic life.

In this way, The Dark Knight feels much closer to Michael Mann’s 1995 Los Angeles crime epic Heat (or even earlier Fritz Lang crime dramas like M and The Big Heat) than it does with other comic-book/super-hero movies, possibly including its Nolan-directed predecessor. There’s a procedural tension and insistent, palpable anxiety to The Dark Knight common to great crime films that’s unprecedented in comic-hero adaptations, which tend to follow the form of origin stories followed by oscillating bits of comic relief, psychological torment, and fight scenes. It’s grand, gripping, propulsive filmmaking — with a laudatory lack of obvious computer-generated effects — though not as distinctive shot-by-shot as it might be.

The Dark Knight is also a crime film whose central villain isn’t quite a criminal, at least not in the traditional sense. Ledger’s Joker seems to have sprung, fully formed, from the collective corruption and criminal desperation of the city. There’s no origin story (none that can be trusted, anyway), no name, no history, no explanation. His initial bank robbery isn’t motivated by money but as a way to gain entrance to the ongoing conflict among Gotham’s criminals, their law enforcement counterparts, and Batman. He’s an angel of chaos whose only goal is to be the creation of disorder and mayhem — with echoes of Osama bin Laden, Ted Kaczynski, and Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden from Fight Club.

When Bale’s Bruce Wayne describes this new figure as a criminal like any other, Wayne’s confidant/assistant, Alfred (Michael Caine), responds, “Some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

In his last completed film performance, Ledger sidesteps the flamboyant humor of most of the character’s iterations (be it Cesar Romero on TV or Jack Nicholson for Burton), substituting a grim, bitter sarcasm. In a movie where Bale’s Batman is the title role and the emotional and narrative arc follows Eckhart’s Dent, it is Ledger who owns the screen whenever he appears. It would have been an iconic performance even if the young actor hadn’t died tragically earlier this year, leaving behind a string of indelible recent performances — from his mumble-mouthed cowboy in Brokeback Mountain to his avuncular surf bum in Lords of Dogtown to his late-Sixties Dylan in I’m Not There.

Here, Ledger seems to internalize the nameless madman, refusing to attempt to charm the audience or ingratiate himself in the manner of such overrated screen-villain performances as Nicholson’s Joker or Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter. Ledger won’t just scare audiences, he’ll rattle them.

More than a typical crime-film heavy, Ledger’s Joker is portrayed as a terrorist, albeit one without clear political motivation. He’s responsible for vicious individual murders, bombings, political assassinations, outlandish mass-murder threats, and shaky, menacing hostage videos. This new kind of threat is combated with rule-bending violence, illegal surveillance, rough interrogation, and at least the suggestion of torture. “When there was an enemy at the gates, the Romans would suspend democracy and appoint one man to protect them,” Wayne says to assistant district attorney and true love Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal, replacing and improving on Katie Holmes), by way of defending rough tactics in response to the Joker.

“Look what I did to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets,” the Joker says late in the film, as fear feeds into chaos throughout Gotham.

But, with all that provocative material in play, The Dark Knight manages to be resonant without straining too much for topicality. It isn’t preachy, and it leaves identifiable real-world politics and issues of patriotism out of the mix. Instead it grapples with elastic but relevant questions about ends and means.

“You’ve got rules. The Joker has no rules,” one character says to Batman. But does he? Ultimately, The Dark Knight is about the difficulty of combating disorder without giving in to it, questioning the ability of a person to self-impose limits on potentially unchecked power, even when well-intentioned, and also whether bending the rules isn’t sometimes necessary. As such, it could be taken as an almost sympathetic critique of post-9/11 government overreach.

In The Dark Knight, victories are short-lived and would-be good deeds are often counterproductive. “You die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become a villain” is The Dark Knight‘s mantra, one repeated by multiple characters, and it’s one that foreshadows the film’s print-the-legend denouement.

The Dark Knight

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Brit family drama gives middlebrow a good name.

Adapted from a memoir by British writer Blake Morrison and directed by Anand Tucker (Hilary and Jackie), When Did You Last See Your Father? is an unusually effective and tough-minded family drama.

On the surface, this story of a successful writer (Colin Firth, as Blake) returning to his family’s country home to bear witness to the death of his father (Jim Broadbent) is the essence of grown-up, middlebrow cinema, the kind of summer counter-programming that tends to find a decent audience of aging moviegoers alienated by the noisy, teen-oriented spectacles littering the multiplexes. But, while When Did You Last See Your Father? is likely to be cinematic codger-bait during its brief Memphis run, it deserves a wider audience than that. It’s a film that gives middlebrow a good name.

The film couldn’t have been better cast, as Firth and the great Broadbent (Topsy-Turvy, Iris) look like father and son and develop a believably uneasy familiarity that isn’t quite a rapport.

The film opens with a flashback to one of Blake’s childhood memories, of his father scamming the family into an auto race without proper tickets. “This is the way it was with my father … minor duplicities … my childhood a web of little scams and triumphs. He was lost if he couldn’t cheat in some way.”

This sense of aggrievement at being in the shadow of his father’s outsized personality is the chief resentment that drives Blake’s discomfort during his dad’s final days, as the film lopes back and forth between present scenes and flashbacks to memories from childhood and adolescence.

The teen Blake (expertly played by Matthew Beard) is a jittery, bookish kid who avoids family gatherings to stay in his room pursuing twin obsessions: Dostoevsky and masturbation. The film portrays him as a smart, sensitive, but ultimately arrogant youth who bristles at his father’s personality, unintentionally cruel in his lack of discretion. And you see how this dynamic continues into Blake’s adulthood, even up until the end — where Arthur’s death is physical and felt, an experience at once profound and mundane — which makes the primary mood of the film one of great regret.

When Did You Last See Your Father?

Opening Friday, July 18th

Ridgeway Four

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Weightless

The French phrase “roman de gare” roughly translates as “travel novel,” but while this film of the same name from septuagenarian New Wave veteran Claude Lelouch (best known for his 1966 art-house hit A Man and a Woman) is perhaps as ultimately insubstantial as a typical beach read, it doesn’t go down quite as easily.

Lelouch’s 49th feature, Roman de Gare is a twisty, slippery semi-mystery that takes mystery fiction itself as a subject. This blend of nationality, style, and subject matter draws strong comparisons to François Ozon’s 2003 crossover hit Swimming Pool — though Roman de Gare is harder to follow and less, um, eye-catching.

The film opens with Judith Ralitzer (Fanny Ardant), a famous mystery and crime-fiction novelist, being interviewed on a TV talk show about her latest bestseller. From there, the movie flashes back to give background on exactly how the novel came to be, though it isn’t entirely clear for a while that that’s what you’re seeing.

We see an anxious, chain-smoking young woman, Huguette (Audrey Dana), having a fight with her fiancé en route to meet her parents in rural France. When the couple stops for gas along the highway, the fiancé abandons her. After spending a lonely night on a bench at the station, the woman hitches a ride with Pierre (Dominique Pinon), a man stopping at the station for his morning coffee.

Along the ride, the film drops conflicting hints as to what Pierre’s story might be. He may be Ralitzer’s ghostwriter — or merely secretary. He may be a recently escaped serial killer. He may be a high school teacher who’s run out on his wife and kids. Or he may just be a guy with an overactive imagination.

This set-up is intriguing, but the mystery doesn’t hold up long enough. Attempts to build the kind of suspense found in roughly similar Alfred Hitchcock films like Suspicion or Shadow of a Doubt fall flat.

In the midst of this, there’s a comedy of errors sequence, as Huguette convinces the mystery man to stand in for her fleeing fiancé and meet her parents. Purely on its own terms, this material is the most enjoyable stretch of the film.

The actors are engaging. The statuesque Ardant doesn’t have a lot to do except look fabulous on her yacht, but her star power carries her along. Dana is attractive but with a hint of palpable desperation. And Pinon is a skinny, little frog-faced man who somehow maintains his own brand of charisma.

Ultimately, however, the shifting identities here — Is Judith a fraud? Is Huguette a hairdresser or a hooker? Is Pierre a killer, a maligned genius, or a schlub suffering a mid-life crisis? — never amount to much.

As summer counterprogramming, it’s nice to see recognizable adults on the big screen, but that’s about the strongest recommendation I can give to Roman de Gare.

Roman de Gare

Opening Friday, July 11th

Studio on the Square

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A middling Chinese, historical drama.

The Children of Huang Shi is a “based on a true story” movie that feels about nine degrees removed from what probably really did happen — and that within those degrees was probably a more interesting story.

The movie kicks off in 1937 China, in the midst of civil war between the Communists and Nationalists and regular war between the Japanese and the combined Chinese.

We’re told in a tag as the movie starts that the Japanese are assaulting the Chinese city Nanjing and that war reporters are eager to get past Japanese forces to get into the city and get the story. One such is the “young, inexperienced English reporter” George Hogg.

Cue actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers (The Tudors, Elvis, Vanity Fair), who’s all stratospheric cheekbones and icy eyes. As Hogg, Rhys Meyers seems neither young nor inexperienced. But he’s a good enough actor. You can get past the filmmakers throwing him under the bus in the editing room.

Hogg masquerades as a Red Cross worker to get into Nanjing, where he encounters rubble-strewn streets stinking of dead bodies and dogs eating them. Hogg sneaks around before witnessing the massacre of dozens of innocents, which he captures with his camera — at such times I wonder if I’m so desensitized to cinematic war atrocities that even the rape of Nanjing can’t get a rise out of me.

Hmmm, better to blame Huang Shi director Roger Spottiswoode (Tomorrow Never Dies, The 6th Day). The action in the film isn’t convincingly shot or edited, be it firing squads or Japanese Zeros on strafing runs. I’m tired of the shaky camera that tries to cover up the fact that there’s not much to see.

The script is undercooked too. Hogg encounters a Communist resistance fighter (Chow Yun-Fat), a beautiful, flawed white-lady nurse of indeterminate nationality (Radha Mitchell), and a noble merchant (Michelle Yeoh) whose honor is intact but compromised by the war. They all add a little spice, but the plot never simmers. Plus, Yun-Fat and Yeoh never appear together on screen. Outrageous!

Hogg ends up at a Chinese orphanage, where he’s conscripted to be the protector of a rabble of boys. He teaches them English and basketball (Yao Ming, you know who to thank), and they help him become a man. This two-thirds of the movie is all a little too predictable, even if it is based on a true story. I bet the real account was something.

The Children of Huang Shi

Opening Friday, July 4th

Ridgeway Four

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Wanted: Dead, Not Alive

It’s always a little agonizing wondering what the worst movie of the year is going to be, but here we are at the halfway point, and the title of the year’s worst has already been claimed: Wanted, the new action-movie comic-book adaptation starring James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie, and Morgan Freeman.

Let’s be clear up front: Wanted has a few great action sequences and intermittent visual panache. It’s based on one of the better comic miniseries of the last five years. The film’s ambitious, but it plays out as a negative. It doesn’t walk the tightrope between too much and not enough — it hangs itself with it. Wanted is truly terrible.

Wesley Gibson (McAvoy) is a white-collar loser, an accountant stuck in a cubicle-correct world with no desire to move beyond it. Gibson’s regularly subjected to a bullying boss, and his girlfriend is cheating on him with his best friend. Hell, even his dad left him when he was only 7 days old. As Wesley says in narration, “I’m the most insignificant asshole of the 21st century.”

That’s until Gibson is rescued from a gunman’s bullets by Fox (Jolie) and is informed that his dad was one of the greatest killers of all time — a member of a secret group of assassins called the Fraternity — and that Wesley has inherited all of his pop’s genetic badassness and million-dollar fortune.

Faster than you can say “montage,” the pathetic weakling becomes a force to be reckoned with, and he’s inducted into the Fraternity. He’s charged with assassinating select people, all determined by a loom, which spits out a hit list based on a complex code built into the threads. The code of the Fraternity: Kill one person and maybe save a thousand. They’re the warriors of fate, the weavers of doom. Oh, yes.

Wanted piggybacks on Fight Club, Office Space, The Matrix, Terminator 2, comic-book origin stories, and fantasy coming-of-age formulas. The movie is so preposterous, it even draws into question the worth of its source material. I almost don’t like fiction anymore after watching Wanted.

The film is directed by Timur Bekmambetov, who also made the visually exciting but dramatically discombobulated Night Watch (and its sequel, Day Watch). Bekmambetov is talented but shows no restraint. Wanted is shot and edited like an epileptic seizure. There are a number of gee-whiz moments — usually spooling in slo-mo — but it’s hard to appreciate them amidst all the chaos. Bekmambetov makes 100-image-a-second movies in a 24-frame-a-second medium. It’s too much.

The comic book that Wanted is based on is light years away from the film in terms of plot, back story, and theme. In the book, Wesley becomes an actual villain — a murderer and a rapist who, in the infamous last few pages (Spoiler Alert!), tells the fanboy reader just what’s going on in the world while everybody’s spending their time consuming pop culture.

Sure, no studio is dropping tens of millions of dollars to make that movie. But, in trying to make the characters fundamentally good guys, the filmmakers have made the whole enterprise morally repugnant. The comic was mean; the movie is mean-spirited. There’s no subversion or satire, just good ole American violent consumerism. Built, as it is, on the absurd loom-and-weavers premise (an addition just for the movie —  thanks, screenwriters!), Wanted is a great cinematic abortion. It’s not as steep a drop-off from source material to film as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but that’s the ass it’s sniffing.

Wanted

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WALL-E sacrifices kiddie wonder for mundane action.

Pixar goes futuristic in WALL-E, an animated story about a lonely robot that looks something like a mechanical E.T. or a mini-me of the ‘bot from Short Circuit. In this dystopian vision, humans have abandoned an Earth made toxic by garbage and now live in a gigantic floating space ship while sending robots back to clean up the planet.

The film is set in a further future in which even this attempt has been abandoned and the protagonist is, apparently, the last functioning worker-bee robot on Earth. WALL-E stands for Waste Allocation Load Lifter — Earth Class, and, as the film opens, there’s only one functioning WALL-E left on the deserted planet, diligently performing his programmed duties by converting human refuse into neat, stackable bricks. But WALL-E has a personality too, setting aside interesting remnants of human civilization — a Rubik’s Cube, a Twinkie, and a VHS of a film musical — to take back to his metallic shelter.

One day WALL-E is visited by a more advanced ‘bot, Eve, sent back to Earth on a reconnaissance mission. Eve looks something like a cylindrical iBook, and she and WALL-E are well-conceived and animated creations, with distinct, relatable personalities discernable despite minimal dialogue. (There’s a passing nod to silent cinema here with the relationship a kinda, sorta reworking of Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights.)

This vision of a future in which cities are submerged by skyscrapers made of trash and humans have been reduced to lazy, passive, sub-verbal consumption machines is essentially Idiocracy for kids, except the evil-corporation subplot — starring Fred Willard, in the flesh — is clearly aimed at parents in the audience, and that hints at the problem.

Instead of merely following its premise into what should have been a Pixarized version of the Spielbergian wonder of movies like E.T. and A.I., WALL-E lapses into noisy, semiviolent confrontations that mimic run-of-the-mill sci-fi and action flicks for teenagers and adults. It might be a little too scary and violent for younger children, but, really, kids of all ages deserve better.

A better model for a good kids’ film comes from one of the year’s other animated hits, Horton Hears a Who! (or, to cite an earlier Pixar triumph, Finding Nemo, which was the directing debut of WALL-E‘s Andrew Stanton) — a film not saddled, Shrek-like, with would-be-clever pop-culture references or content clearly aimed over the heads of the kids who make up its alleged audience. As such, Horton won over this adult viewer in ways that WALL-E — which panders to me, though not as baldly as Shrek — couldn’t and also won over my 3-year-old, who sat rapt for Horton but bailed after 10 minutes of WALL-E.

WALL-E

Opening Friday, June 27th

Multiple locations

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The Path of Khan

Sergei Bodrov’s Mongol is a summer movie made from anti-matter. Not only does this Genghis Khan biopic avoid showing too many of the lavishly gory historical battles that typify movies like 300, it approaches its legendary subject from an unglamorous, dutiful angle. Rather than focusing on the 13th-century ruler’s reign over the largest contiguous empire in world history, Bodrov’s film charts the long, hard road that brought Khan to the head of the Mongol hordes in the late 1100s. It’s not your average ancient-times bloodletting party, but it earns respect on its own severe terms.

The film’s strangeness and dislocation begins with the fact that no one in the film actually says the words “Genghis Khan.” The presence of Khan, the fearsome and revered warrior, leader, and statesman (and ancestor to about 16 million males currently walking the Earth) is only implied in the film’s final shots. Instead, the film recounts the life of Khan’s “alter ego” Temudgin, the resilient wandering son of a former Khan who was poisoned at a watering hole. As played by Odynam Odsuren (as an 8-year old) and Tadanobu Asano (as an adult), Temudgin’s life is nasty and brutish but far from short; his growth is measured by the size of the cangues that continually ensnare him. What keeps Temudgin moving stubbornly forward is his desire to reunite with his wife Börte (Khulan Chuluun, in a fine debut) and wipe out those who have wronged him.

The fade-outs that punctuate key moments in Temudgin’s life story reflect its status as cultural myth. It’s never explained how Temudgin survives a plunge into an icy lake, the arrow that pierces his chest, or the multiple run-ins with his enemies. He’s treated like both a savior and a necessary force of order, especially when he intones, “Mongols need laws. I will make them obey, even if I have to kill half of them.”

That proclamation is no laughing matter. Only Sun Hong-lei, who plays Temudgin’s adoptive half-brother and eventual nemesis Jamukha, is allowed to smile at it. Jamukha doesn’t possess Temudgin’s focus or drive, so he bends his neck and back, growls like a dog who’s taken Tuvan throat-singing lessons, and watches as his half-brother’s historical moment arrives. Jemukha seems to know that he will be a footnote in history at best, so he takes a rueful joy in his rival’s stamina and cunning.

Mongol‘s vast, harsh landscapes threaten to overshadow the human drama. Through the depiction of coniferous forests and rolling, snow-covered fields, cinematographers Sergei Trofimov and Rogier Stoffers reveal some of the stark, parched beauty of the Mongolian countryside. However, no amount of natural light or magic-hour footage ever softens these unforgiving landscapes. The environmental conditions are inherently alienating; the isolation of each village and each family is so total that Temudgin’s proposal to unite these nomadic tribes feels like the wildest fantasy.

And fantasy is what everyone’s seeking these days, isn’t it? If the main objective of summer moviegoing is to provide escapism, then Mongol is some kind of success; it’s like a medieval version of There Will Be Blood without all the self-justifying cant. How about that?

Mongol

Opening Friday, June 27th

Ridgeway Four