Finding Dory (3/5 Stars)

“Finding Dory” is special in that special way that special people are special. It isn’t great but it has a lot of heart and its not mean or bad in anyway so what’s the harm in liking it.

It is a spinoff from one of Pixar’s best movies, “Finding Nemo.” In that movie a very worried father fish, Marlin, voiced by Albert Brooks, is searching for his lost son Nemo. On his journey he meets his polar opposite, a fish named Dory, voiced by Ellen Degeneres. Dory had a personality quirk that was all the rage in the early aughts: she suffered from the inability to create new memories. Yes, like that guy in “Memento” and Drew Barrymore in “Fifty First Dates.” She provided a delightful foil to the always anxious Marlin what with her blissfully optimistic mantra “Just keep swimming, Just keep swimming” and her complete inability to remember what her problems were or even what was Marlin’s mission.

She was a great sidekick. She is not so great a main character. For one thing, her character needs a reworking that doesn’t exactly fit with what we have been previously told about her. That is for the plot to kick in she has to first remember a rather big that she forgot: she had lost her way from her parents when she was young. Why she remembers this now and some other things at various times when she can’t remember anything else strains the suspension of disbelief. People pointed out that the main character in “Memento” implausibly remembered that he couldn’t create new memories. Dory has that one memory quirk as well and then a bunch of other memory quirks that surface up continually when…well whenever the story needs her to remember something for it to progress forwards.

This doesn’t happen too much but that in and of itself is also a problem. For Dory needs to find her parents somehow, and the only way she can do that plausibly is to simplistically bumble into them. So the story structure reflects that and in doing so is especially linear and almost entirely predictable. The problem solving required is at minimum capacity otherwise Dory would be completely helpless or not Dory at all.

It does not take many twists and turns to get Dory very close to where she needs to go and that is an Ocean Aquarium that rehabilitates injured fish before releasing them back in the wild. The nature of this aquarium seems to reflect the politically correct view towards aquariums nowadays in that they are more like prisons for the large animals in them than homes. Thus this aquarium has at its stated goal to rehabilitate injured fish and then at some point release them back into the wild. Good, now we can look at fish behind glass and not feel guilty about it.

At this aquarium she finds several “special” animals willing to help her. The best by far is a wily Octopus named Hank (played by Ed O’Neill of all people). Hank by and large solves the problem of how a fish can get around a big above ground place. He slithers along and camoflauges himself to fake out the humans. It is most definitely based on the true life notorious octopus that escaped from an aquarium via a drainage pipe a couple of years ago.

Other animals are more forgettable. Sometimes the most interesting thing about the character is who is ultimately voicing them. For instance, there are two sea lions voiced by Dominic West and Idris Elba, both of whom played main characters in “The Wire.” I got a kick out of that because I am a fan of “The Wire” That is to say my pleasure in watching them here is derivative as opposed to original. That is especially true of the disembodied cameo of Sigourney Weaver who introduces herself over the Aquarium loudspeaker as Sigourney Weaver and continues to provide information about the park as Sigourney Weaver. I wonder if small children several decades born after the apex of the Aliens franchise will know who Sigourney Weaver is? I liked it sure but that has very little to do with the substance of this movie. I just happen to like Sigourney Weaver.

I expect the message of the movie is the most commendable thing about it. It’s very kind and nice and comfort food. I hate to be a total downer and say that the idea that every one is special in their own special way and that certain specialness makes them useful in ways that other not special people cannot be is not entirely correct. But really think about it. Dory’s special ability (or disability more like it) to optimistically and impulsively act upon no evidence (because she can’t remember any) is not an entirely special quality. Her success, let’s be frank, is mostly luck. She could just as easily be someone's lunch many many times. 

I really don’t think I’m missing the point. I get the point. I understand why parents would like to tell their children that everything will be okay no matter how badly their genes have failed them. I just don’t happen to agree with it. I much prefer a movie like Pixar’s “Inside Out” that has the emotional maturity to see life with clear eyes. “Finding Dory” is all fluff.

John Carter of Mars (2/5 Stars)

Really expensive nonsense

“Only enormously talented people could have made "Death to Smoochy." Those with lesser gifts would have lacked the nerve to make a film so bad, so miscalculated, so lacking any connection with any possible audience. To make a film this awful, you have to have enormous ambition and confidence, and dream big dreams.”

-       Roger Ebert

The explanation of why "John Carter of Mars" exists is better than the movie itself. It’s director Andrew Stanton is best known as one of the great creative forces behind the golden age of Pixar. He was a cowriter for all three Toy Story movies and directed both “Finding Nemo,” and “Wall-E.” To a movie lover like me he is arguably one of the greatest living directors and I would put “Wall-E” on a list of the 100 best movies ever made. To studios he represents enormous profits, both “Toy Story” and “Finding Nemo” having broken box office records for animated movies. So when Andrew Stanton came to the producers at Disney with an idea for a science fiction/comic book movie with lots of violence and exotic locations, who in their right mind would say no. They granted Stanton full access to the Disney playground. $250 million dollars later in production value and $100 million dollars later in marketing produced the movie that last week grossed only $30 million and is destined to be one of the biggest flops of the year. What went wrong? Well, for one thing, the movie isn’t any good. But how could that happen? (See above). There are two main problems both of which could have been solved by a cigar-chomping asshole producer with only dollars for eyeballs. Those people are good for something.

The first big problem is way too much faithfulness to the source material. This movie is based on more than a century old comic book series. In this book we are introduced to made up weapons, made up languages, made up peoples, made up places, made up cultural customs, made up powers, made up gods and goddesses. Everything is nothing I had ever heard of before. When a character dramatically intones that they have to find the ninth ring of iths from the gates of Barsoon before the tharks release the giant white ape and the thurns shapeshift for the red man blue man widget marraige at Helium, my reaction is like, “Huh? What?” And this sort of thing goes on for much of the movie. They keep throwing in new shit, giving no explanation or time for it to sink in, and then expecting big dramatic payoffs. A very big problem has to do with the story’s technology. People in flying warships are fighting with swords while big green men on the ground have calvary and guns. Then there are these other dudes that have the ability to shapeshift and vaporize anything within a few seconds using a blue widget thingy. I haven’t the slightest idea what that thingy is or why nobody else has it or why it was not used in the battles far more often. This movie could have been a lot shorter if the blue vaporizer thingy had not been used so sparingly. Then there is John Carter himself, a civil war veteran from Earth, transported to Mars via a little thingy, to find that his Earth muscles provide him with superior abilities on Mars’ lower gravity. Basically, he is super strong and can jump really high. But how high can he jump? The movie is very very unclear about that. At points it is just a few meters, but at other times it could very well be a football field. It is this critics opinion that for action sequences to be effective, the laws of physics must be followed, even when it is on Mars, or if they are to be bent they are bent in a clear and predictable manner (See “The Matrix.” Do not see “Matrix Reloaded” or “Matrix Revolutions.”) Otherwise nothing makes sense and the story’s momentum and suspense deflates. The suspension of disbelief gone we are merely witnessing an actor in a weird costume skipping around a room with a green screen.

That actor would be Taylor Kitsch a remarkably bad choice in casting whose responsibility for the failure of the movie is only somewhat alleviated by the even worse choice of Lynn Collins, as the Martian princess. Put these two together and you have some of the most horribly acted scenes I have seen in a long time. And you cannot merely just say that the material was arcane and stilted. Sure they are speaking about weird lore and strange happenings but that still doesn’t forgive the utter lack of excitement or range in the performances. Let’s say a horde of green Martian barbarians was descending upon you for the express purpose of killing you. Perhaps your facial expression and body language should suggest you were doing anything other than posing for the Mars version of GQ magazine. Or consider John Carter’s reaction to learning that he is on Mars for the first time. That Taylor Kitsch reminded me of a young Keanu Reeves, and that is about the worst compliment you can give an actor. One of the producers of this movie should have required that Andrew Stanton cast a well-known action star as the lead in his $250 million dollar epic. This is not simply a cynical attempt at more dollars via a better marketing platform. “John Carter of Mars,” is Stanton’s first live-action movie. He had never worked with actors before. If the director casts unknowns who do not know what they are doing, guess who has the responsibility to teach them what to do: the director. And if the director does not know how to direct actors and the actors do not know how to act, what you get is this silly drivel, made even sillier as it is being performed against a backdrop of a ridiculously expensive, intricate, and extensive amount of costume, makeup, CGI work, set design, and production value. What a colossal fuck-up this was.

I keep thinking back to that other live action foray by an acclaimed Pixar director, Brad Bird’s “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol.” Whatever similar problems Bird may have had were alleviated by a familiar and franchised story that took place in present day and was anchored by Tom Cruise, who is, private weirdness aside, quite frankly one of the best actors in the business, and may very well be the best action actor. For future studio reference, the next time a great director wants to spend an extremely large amount of money on something he has never done before with a bunch of inexperienced collaborators, it might be a good idea to sign him up for two movies and make the first one a much less expensive test run.  

Wall-E

The one word I keep going back to when I think of this movie is 'visionary.' This movie is visionary. It's deep, it's dark, it's intelligent, and it stands next to other Pixar masterpieces like 'Ratatouille, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, and Toy Story' as yet another vastly superior (at least in the realm of animation) work of art. I haven't seen any other animated movies this year, but as i said about Ratatouille the year before, it would stun me if another movie took away the Oscar statuette. This movie is that good. 
Wall-E is a chaplinesque fable about a the last robot on Earth. His name is Wall-E (which stands for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth Class) and he was left on Earth as all the humans had turned the place into an unlivable garbage dump and exiled themselves to a spaceship resort. Being the only thing left on Earth Wall-E is unbearably lonely and spends his time making trash skyscrapers, hangin with his cockroach pal (apparently the last of his kind too), and watching an old VCR tape of 'Hello Dolly.' When a spaceship lands and unloads a hi-tech female robot named EVE, there is nothing more that Wall-e would want to do than hold its hand, which is seemingly as far Streisand got in 'Hello Dolly.' To say this movie succeeds as a sweet robot love story though is too sell the story short. It is also as a cautionary portrait of dystopic future. 
The Second Half of this world is contained in the human space colony where the race has turned into severely obese couch potatoes who live in front of TV screens and have robots take care of their every need. Its a harrowing portrait. Everything is really bright and cheerful, but everyone is fat, stupid, and lazy. Does that sound like something you'd see in a children's movie. Like Ratatouille this movie will generate more appreciation, I think, in adults or those with some life experience. The ideas in this movie are profound. I had seen a few of them in small unknown movie called Idiocracy (like huge Costco's, and stupid fat humans) but here they are handled in a superior movie. 
But I'm leaving something out and that's this movie is also very funny. It also works as a comedy. Since it is mostly wordless most of the jokes are robot beeps and physical comedy. Still its very funny at parts. I especially liked it when he tried to get Eve's attention on Earth and when all the humans attempted to walk. 
Overall though the greatest joy is the sheer beauty of the world Pixar has created here. The attention to detail, the magnificent spacescapes, the whole other world. This movie succeeds not only as a comedy, a love story, a social satire, but also, more importantly perhaps, a top-notch science fiction tale.