gdnickel

Heartbreaking because I can come to no other conclusion than that the good folks at Disney have lost their storytelling souls. I know I shouldn't make a bigger deal of this than it is, but it's very hard not to see Chicken Little less as the beginning of a bright new future at Disney animation and more as the dismal end of a very fine era in film-making come to an end.

It's not that the shuttering of Disney's 2-D studio is an earth-shaking disaster in itself. It's just that it smacks of the kind of sell-out to the masses that seeing Chicken Little simply confirms. Pee-pee jokes of the stupidest order, a cloying make-up between a Father and son whose dearth of relationship no one cared about for even a moment, romance where it is both unexpected and unwanted, aargh!

Really folks, this show is actually quite funny. It might have been years since I laughed out loud at a network TV show and I did at least a few times tonight. I love Steve Carell but I, too, feel like the character has a ways to go to find his rhythm but have you ever watched old Seinfeld before the characters gelled - yikes! As a Canadian it's a bit hard to tell if Steve is really way over the top or just your stereotypical brash American boss.

As for comparisons, let's give these guys a break. For a show like the original to fire on all cylinders right out of the blocks is a real testament to the genius of not only Gervais but of all the characters. That kind of chemistry is a very rare serendipity in any art form and, in fact, Gervais himself may be hard pressed to repeat it. Yes, having seen the original I have to suspend my discomfort a bit, but the issue is more mine than the show's. Think of those cover tunes you hear that you hate for every way they differ from the source but later come to love for those same differences. As for jokes the vagina/hysterectomy has made me grin for a few days now. And "coloured greens"! That has to be one of the best original American jokes ever written.

Having read about the comparisons between Mean Girls and Heathers I thought I'd go out and rent the latter to see if the similarity between the two was more than passing. It is. In fact, I think that Mean Girls is really a toned down approach to the ground already broken by Heathers in the late 80s. Where Mean Girls may seem bold in its unsparing discussion of cafeteria cliques, Heathers is withering in its dissection of the same; where Mean Girls employs some of the nasty language high school girls actually use today in school washrooms, the girls in Heathers say things of occasionally stunning vulgarity; where Mean Girls (SPOILERS) just glimpses our daughters' `hearts of darkness' in somewhat surreal altercations with school busses or hallway catfights, Heathers lays those urges bare in unabashed violence and gore.

But more than any of these similarities (three queen bees, one `good' girl, etc.), the endings are where these two films really match up. Both feature a central character who is too smart for all this high school stuff. Both girls become, for a time, pawns of vengeful forces and also victims of their own insecurities. And both girls eventually realize that neither side is going to win the Battle of High School if all out war breaks out in the gym. So whether you prefer the slightly sanitized version of this modern morality play with Lindsay Lohan as the "Spring Fling" queen who eventually embraces the school fat girl or Winona's more hardcore "there's a new sheriff in town" approach, you'll get much the same message after all - be nicer, please.

Mean Girls 7/10 -- Heathers 9/10

I'm really amazed that the profit motive would rule so large in the making of this film. It was so obviously and completely slapdash in concept - three unrelated flashbacks? come on! And the animation is really second rate - up close on a DVD it looks just awful. You really don't even want to subject your kids to this trash - my three year old was almost totally uninterested and I don't blame him. 2/10

Someone brought this movie to my house tonight and, recalling that I had read somewhere that it had grossed almost $300 million, thought maybe it wouldn't be too bad. The Sixth Sense was pretty original and fooled me right till the end - millions of people can't be that far off, right? Wrong.

** Spoilers to follow. **

The essential problem with this film is that it takes so long to figure out if the aliens are actually bad guys or not. Maybe this is my fault for thinking about it too much, but I'm convinced that the way the film is put together bears more than a little of the blame. Here's what I mean. The aliens make nice looking and weirdly beautiful crop circles and don't, initially at least, seem to be too malevolent. We catch an occasional glimpse of them but nobody is getting eaten or anything. In fact, we're not totally sure until a fair ways into the film that the signs are, indeed `signs' and the work of alien intelligence and not some hoax. Furthermore, the aliens have these funny/cute voices that sound a lot like the way dolphins speak and surely we've all seen enough movies to know by now how *very* smart dolphins are. Was this going to be like ET: a sci-fi reprimand of how our natural instinct to freak out and kill the thing we don't instantly recognize is actually a serious character flaw? Or was it going to be a re-telling of some good old-fashioned "War of the Worlds" flick. I don't think the answer to this essential question was ever especially clear in my mind or, for that matter, M. Night Shyamalan's.

To be honest I was expecting the now-indispensable Shyamalan Twist Ending to lead me down the "aliens are just folks like you and me" path. By now in Hollywood movies I'm used to kids and dogs and other such unsophiticates being held up as the truest barometers of what is really real in the universe. I mentioned ET already, but the list of such movies could go on for miles and include films like Phenomenon and even The Sixth Sense. In fact, isn't that what The Sixth Sense is basically about? Ghosts who, like the vomiting girl, initially scare us adults half to death are revealed, through the eyes of a child, to actually be tragic figures trapped by their unjust or untimely deaths. Having such recent films as my context, I was wondering up to the very end of Signs if perhaps these aliens had just been misunderstood and that their motives in attacking the house were really - I don't know - misguided attempts to honour the wide-eyed little girl Bo as their queen or something similarly sappy. When Graham (Gibson) cuts off the fingers of the alien in the pantry haven't we been trained by other films to wonder if the claws reaching out wasn't some misunderstood gesture of friendship or, at worst, desperation? When Merrill Hess (Phoenix) goes up the stairs out of the cellar at the end of the film the symbols blasted through the door above seem to be very creative and beautiful - moons and stars; certainly not obviously the destructive work of some demon-spawn hell-bent on creating mayhem and destruction. But eventually we find out that, in fact, the aliens are as bad as can be. Too bad it's ten minutes from the end of the film!

So, it was bad enough that the movie took so long to really engage me and have me figure out who to cheer for, but the actual punchline is even worse. It turns out that the whole crux of the story is that a message from the wife-with-one-foot-in-the-grave can be as fatuous as "Believe in Coincidences. Oh, and by the way, when you see a nasty alien in our house get your troubled/funny brother to beat the crap out of him with a baseball bat until he falls against a bureau and you suddenly discover that in fact something as simple as the water our spooky/angelic daughter always found funny tasting is as deadly as cyanide to these guys.' Give me a break!

After all, this movie is lousy because it cannot make up it mind. Is it an update of the creature feature movies of a xenophobic, isolationist 1950s America or is it more in line with the `tolerance is best' emphasis of Close Encounters in the later 20th Century? Signs wants to be everything to everyone and ends up being nothing for anybody beyond a few cheap thrills from (Children of the) cornfield steadycam shots and loud telephones in quiet rooms. Ultimately too thuggish and macho to be tender, too obvious and campy to be ironic, too sentimental to be truly scary, and too shallow to be as profound as it so desperately wants to be. 4/10

* Some Spoilers *

Though I have never read the much-lauded book by E. Annie Proulx, it has to be infinitely better than this movie. Whereas a book might take a person ten hours to read and have the scope and time to flesh out characters and situations without compromising a central narrative, a two hour film cannot. In the Shipping News movie we are constantly being introduced to little "moments" or quirky characters that have no discernable bearing on the film and simply distract at the pace by which they're dispensed. Take, for example, the carpenter working on the house. In about a two minute scene we are told the story of why he and his father (Spacey's boss) do not get along. Then, absolutely nothing about this revelation is even mentioned until, at the last moment his recently-resuscitated father barks out that all is forgiven in a kind of voice-over as he is whisked away on a gurney. The inclusion of this story-line (such that it is) is entirely useless to the general plot and one can only imagine that it was kept in to somehow accommodate the hordes who will scream that "IT WASN'T THAT WAY IN THE BOOK!"

I had the exact same sensation watching The Shipping News as I did during Angela's Ashes - another noted book I had not read but knew the movie was based on. Every scene seemed to be fraught with some vague deeper significance that was surely fleshed out with memories of fuller descriptions from the book for those who had read it, but which was completely unsupported by the film itself.

Novels are episodic, divided into chapters and made long enough that no one is expected to read them in one sitting. They are meant to be savoured as much in the moments away from them as when one is in the midst of reading. They actually get better the longer it takes to read them and one arguably does a disservice to a novel to read it all at once. As such, novels generally make lousy movies since movies, more like short stories, are meant to be consumed all at once and digested later. I'm sure a fine novel like The Shipping News would have been much better served by an HBO miniseries-type production like Tom Hanks's Band of Brothers in order to let its breadth of scope be realized.

I know many of us who already love the Veggie Tales crew will be keen to see how the wider world responds to our produce pals. Having just seen the movie I have to commend the filmmakers - funny jokes, great tunes and superb art (poncy critics who sniff that the animation is far below standards set by Shrek need to get their eyes checked). But what I liked best was the emphasis on Mercy and Compassion as the core components of the Jonah story - how can anyone disagree with that? From every viewpoint this is a super movie.