The mailman is safe this time

Lucy is a dog and she does not poop in Wendy and Lucy. I assume she has all the parts to effectively make poop and dispense with it on other people’s lawns, but we do not see this part of Lucy’s existence, which is why I can safely say that this is a higher breed of dog movie.

But I’m not so sure it’s really a dog movie. The other character in the title, Wendy, is Lucy’s owner. She’s on the road in a beater car, heading to Alaska where a job in a fishery supposedly pays well enough that it’s worth the cross-country trip, and worth living near a fishery in Alaska. Lucy is her travel companion, although we’re denied the typical Dog Movie gags — Lucy doesn’t talk, doesn’t chase down bank robbers or the mailman, and at no point does she eat an expensive loafer or slobber on the record collection. Instead, Wendy and Lucy exists in the margins, in the subtle composition of a woman and her only friend and the closeness that exists between them.

Wendy is played by Michelle Williams (Brokeback Mountain) in a role that should have generated some Oscar buzz last year — the film was eligible since it officially came out in 2008. Her performance is comparable to Melissa Leo’s nominated performance in Frozen River. Both films are about hopeless people stumbling into final acts of hope and redemption. Williams, who’s now the custodian of Heath Ledger’s Oscar statue until their daughter turns 18, evokes a raw, realistic performance void of all the flirty nuance and camera winking of typical roles. She plays it — underplays it, although effectively so — like a real person, like she’s the subject of an impromptu documentary. Passages of the film are spent with Wendy walking, looking, thinking and planning, Lucy always nearby. The audience is just a pedestrian in the story, observing her journey in careful detail from 15 feet back.

As we watch these details — like Lucy’s dog bowls in the car trunk, and Wendy’s sink baths in rest stops — a plot slowly emerges: the beater has broken down in Oregon and money is getting tight. Alaska and the journey’s end seem to take five steps back. With her funds dwindling, Wendy tries to lift some food from a grocery store and gets nabbed by an overzealous stock boy. The police are called and she’s handcuffed and carted away with Lucy still tied to a bike rack. By the time she pays the fine and walks back to the store, her precious travel companion is gone. The stock boy, who she publicly shames, refuses to acknowledge Wendy or her missing dog, which complicate matters further.

The film essentially follows Wendy as she looks for Lucy, tries to get her car repaired and squeak by with what little money she has left. She meets people along the way who are beacons to her backward progression to her new Alaskan life. Will Patton plays a gruff mechanic who delivers bad news in a movie filled with nothing else. An animal shelter worker offers help, but little more than waiting can be done for a missing dog. A kind security guard offers moral support as Wendy’s world crumbles around her. In his last scene, the guard gives her all the money he can spare — it’s $6, and Wendy wants to sob when she counts it out.

Maybe you can sense this movie is heading toward calamity, or at the very least an emotional chasm, but it’s not one of those movies (Patch Adams comes to mind). It doesn’t pull needlessly at heartstrings or manipulate its way into our tear ducts. It’s an honest movie with an honest ending. It speaks eloquently to disenfranchised young people who leave the comfortable parts of their lives to experience new chapters, or maybe just entirely new beginnings. Sometimes their new plans work, and sometimes they don’t. The movie suggests that homeless people are Wendys, people with elaborate goals and dreams but no car, money or dog in which to drive them forward.

Some readers will read the praise I've heaped on this movie and feel as though they should run out and see it. I highly recommend it, although I realize it’s not a movie that everyone will enjoy. This beautiful independent feature doesn’t have all the filmmaking flourishes of bigger pictures: the colors are muted and cold, the soundtrack is quiet, there is very little dialogue, no action, and not even a love story or a cute dog moment. What it does have is a sincere character who makes choices that reveal her deeper humanity. Some people, sadly, will be better attuned to Scooby-Doo or Space Buddies or some other pet movie where the pets talk or fly spaceships or shit on the neighbor’s daisies. Wendy and Lucy is not one of those movies. And proudly so.

Someone reset the genre already

Do horror movies work when the monsters are no longer horrifying? I would argue for the negative, although Jason Voorhees’ fans, who cheered his very appearance in the rebooted Friday the 13th, would argue in the other direction. In their twisted worlds the machete-wielding murderer would have been knighted by now — Sir Jason, Lord of the Welsh Farthing, cousin of the Duke of Westerly. Sainthood would not be far behind.

In any case, Jason is no longer a villain to his core audience; he’s decidedly blue-collar. Horrors don’t work when audiences cheer for the bad guy, especially since great pains are undertaken to introduce good guys, in this case (and in all cases for Friday the 13th movies) hormonal teens screwing around near Camp Crystal Lake, the site of some grisly murders decades back. So they have two-track minds (drugs and intercourse), but the movie requires us to care for their well-being, otherwise the scares don’t work because the victims might as well be ottomans in an Ikea display, just meaningless things.

In the original Friday the 13th from 1980 — way before Jason went to Manhattan, Hell and space (in that order) — Jason’s mother was the bloodthirsty killer; she sought revenge against the camp counselors that let her little boy die in the lake while they were playing naked Twister in the bushes somewhere between the archery range and the whittling den. Jason and his hockey mask didn’t actually appear until Friday the 13th Part II. With the remake, the original movie’s entire plot has been relegated to the opening credits, ending with Mrs. Voorhees’ head being separated from her neck in a method not recommended by most doctors. And that’s where this one picks up, basically at Part II.

It’s been untold decades since the Camp Crystal Lake murders, and the camp, totem poles and all, is overgrown and rotting by the festering marsh they call a lake. College kids searching for a hidden field of marijuana stumble into the camp and find Jason, who hacks up all of them save for one that he wraps in her sleeping bag and barbecues alive. Six weeks later another group of college kids venture into town to party at a rich father’s cabin. They also trespass on Jason’s right-of-way and meet grisly ends. The movie is a series of encounters with Jason, who has to one-up only himself on torture and killing devices — from screwdrivers and elk antlers to the machete that severed his own mother’s head, an implement that proves 98 percent of Freud’s theories true.

This time around, though, the hulking and massive Jason, who was a supernatural force in the original series, is rebooted as a severely disabled (and semi-mortal) orphan, who probably doesn’t understand the concept of his mother’s death. With Jason’s newfound transience from the original series, one gets the impression that with some therapy and some wabbits he might make a convincing Lennie for a production of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. I liked mortal Jason, and I liked that his behavior could be counted on. He's written with a Norman Bates-like crush on his mother, which would be even more twisted and deranged had he actually vocalized his feelings, but instead he skulks around silently with apparently no will, or mouth, from which to speak. I can see why fans appreciate the Jason character — he's dependable — although I will never understand how he has risen to cult hero status.

The college kids, with their floppy hair, Greek letters and sandals — just asking for some chest ventilating if you ask me — do everything that they’re supposed to do in movies like this: the men use drugs, the women show their breasts, they all wander out in the dark for no reason, they investigate strange noises, they never run faster than Jason can walk … it’s all a very defined routine, like they’re caught in the groove of a record and can’t get out. And the record came out in 1980.

One character, the Funny Asian Guy, doesn’t even have the ironic foresight to laugh when he says, “I’m going to the toolshed and I’ll be right back” … with a hedge trimmer rammed through my ribcage. Then there’s topless water-skier, the Hot Blonde, who is too dense to realize her nakedness just guaranteed her skull-splitting demise. Or the woodchipper operator, who forgot to install the “This Woodchipper Must Be Used As a Weapon In the Climax or Not At All” plaque to his machine's operating panel. Or the Witty Black Guy who acknowledges he's the only black character by making obtuse references to his blackness. Finally there's Girl's Boyfriend, who's like 28 years old but has apparently never had sex before, which is why he tries way too hard to get in the sack with his virginal co-star. That last douchebag has the movie's best line: staring up at a naked girl's chest he says, "Your tits are stupendous." The movie's writers must not have wives or girlfriends, because if they did they'd know better than to call breasts "stupendous" in fear of never seeing another pair again. I'm way off topic, but all these characters and their horrible dialogie are horror-movie clichés and the movie doesn’t even avoid them, or at least poke fun at their expense. It presents them as legitimate developments in a plot it's calling fresh and orginal.

Full-blown aggravation, though, set in when I realized that this could have been a reinvention, not just a remake. Yes, the film needs to acknowledge its roots by setting up dopey twentysomethings like lambs to the slaughter, but here those roots are deified for the faithful fans who expect nothing less. Yes, a remake is a very literal word: the film was made over again, as in re-done, re-filmed, re-examined. But usually such things are done to involve us in more story, better special effects or just something that the original didn’t have. This Friday the 13th lacks nothing that wasn’t in the first franchise. Yes, the mood is scarier, the violence a bit more visceral, and modern cinematography has nailed nighttime photography, but otherwise there’s nothing new that warrants more Jason. It’s frustrating that with so many horror writers working in Hollywood, none could come up with an original premise for the veteran slasher — at this stage even Jason should be bored.

The movie is rebooted by Marcus Nispel, the same guy who rebooted the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise. Nispel has done something appalling: he’s remade the two franchises the same way, nearly overlapping them in fact. In both, the villains are large, beastly men who are mentally challenged as well as mentally deranged. Both have signature weapons: Jason uses a machete so large it probably serves no purpose, and Leatherface uses a chainsaw in a part of the Lone Star State where there are no trees. Both films feature run-down houses with macabre shrines made of questionable bone and skin fragments. And both films are nihilist by design, with characters and villains who represent nothing but their own ends. Even the horror feels like black voids of emptiness.

Jason kills out of necessity perhaps, and Leatherface out of dietary requirements, but I can't say they kill for thrills — they're too emotionless and disabled to experience any emotion that might be mistaken for happiness or joy, or even just some kind of bizarre violent perversion. Truth be told, they kill to fulfill the fans' urge for blood, which is why I will never trust the opinions of gore-hounds — their appetites require only blood and every plot they endorse is just a vehicle for more carnage.

The horror genre is desperately waiting for its rebirth. Don’t break out the cigars, though, for Friday the 13th.

More Coraline impressive artwork

Here's more Coraline artwork that further proves how amazing the visuals of the animated film are in relation to its whimsical, if also frightening, story. Also, I neglected to mention the film is shown in 3-D, something that's going to be happening more often in 2009. I must agree with Ebert and say the 3-D goggles dim the picture, and I barely noticed the three-dimensional effects, which leads to this question: If you don't notice it, why have it? And why create an effect that can't be reproduced at home with a DVD release? Apparently, they're working on a home-version 3-D system, but even if they come up with something that works I'm not so sure 3-D is a selling point for a film, especially compared to story and characters.

Winning hearts one frame at a time

Coraline is about a girl who wanders into a dream world where adults try their darndest to transform her into a lifeless doll. Ironic considering the movie was filmed by adults who photographed a lifeless doll a frame at a time, transforming her into a convincing little girl. Call it life contradicting art.

Stop-motion animation, as old as King Kong himself, might be a special effect that’s impossible to outdate. It’s a very technical art form, tedious and exact: pose a figure, take a picture, move it a little, take a picture, and then repeat into infinity. Even the most sterilized, uncreative scenes are fascinating dioramas of toys in static poses. The complex scenes, the ones with action or more than one moving element, are logistical nightmares, juggling feats for animators striving for consistent speeds and movements — mouths that match dialogue is enough to cause brain swelling. When it’s done right, stop-motion animation can jumpstart the imagination. And Coraline drives the imagination bonkers.

It helps that the plucky, resilient star is the driving force behind every scene, every adventure, every burst of energy. Coraline is voiced by Dakota Fanning and after the film, as a testament to Fanning’s curious conviction to the voice acting and the filmmakers’ skills as animators, I could not picture what the young actress looked like — I could only see sweet blue-haired Coraline in her yellow slicker and boots. As spunky as she is, though, in some ways she’s a very sad character: her parents, gardening bloggers, have uprooted her from her friends and moved so they can mope around the house sipping cold coffee and barely noticing their daughter screaming for attention. And Coraline has serious doubts that either one has ever actually been in a real garden — “Mom, you hate dirt!” This distressed image of our main character is foreshadowing of the whole film's frightening images and themes. Little children might appreciate some of the fantasy, but later elements will … well, just bring extra underroos.

The gardening family move to the Pink Palace, an apartment complex out in the sticks. Coraline and her parents occupy the main house with other tenants in the attic and basement. Life is gloomy for the young newcomer, whose only friend is the local goofball Wybie — “Wybie as in ‘why be’ born?” he says to Coraline, who reprimands him when he says Care-uh-line as opposed to Corr-uh-line. I made the same mistake.

In the living room of the Pink Palace there’s a miniature door behind the wallpaper. Coraline, brave beyond her years, ventures through the small portal to find an alternate universe: another Pink Palace, another set of parents, and new versions of tenants in the top and bottom of the house. But everything has a cheery edge to it: Mom is pleasant and bakes mountains of exotic treats. Dad actually looks at Coraline when he talks to her. And the house itself takes on this magical glow that’s warm and inviting.

The fairytale world is almost better than Coraline’s real world, but there’s a catch: characters from the other dimension have buttons sewn through their eyes. (The button eyes remind me of a favorite Perry Bible Fellowship comic.) Slowly the polish and sparkle fades and Other Mother and Other Father turn into the monsters they were hiding from the beginning. Coraline, who enjoys her real eyes, has to use her inventive personality to get back into her own reality before she’s locked out permanently. Strangely enough, the villainous Other Mother looks a lot like Teri Hatcher, who does the voice acting. She starts out sweet and caring, but of course turns into a wretched, and very desperate, housewife: spiky boobs that begin halfway down her chest, exposed ribcage, stretched skin, elongated facial expressions, needle-y fingers ... it's a caricature of the part-time actress. Ooh, that felt kinda mean, but she's a mean character.

The film is based on a popular childrens book by Neil Gaiman, and it’s directed by Henry Selick, whose Nightmare Before Christmas has achieved cult status several times over. Between the two of them, they’ve created the most believable little girl in Coraline. She really wins your heart right at the beginning and guides your through the film’s funky visuals — manic player pianos, living gardens, bug furniture, acrobatic mice, a theater full of Scottish terriers and Mr. Bobinksy, a pot-bellied contortionist with chest hair thicker than garden hose.

Nothing against the other forms of animation, but stop-motion holds something over hand-drawn and computer animation — it’s real! Somewhere in this world, Coraline exists, either in storage, on display, or imprisoned in a glass cube on the director’s desk. The locations, those worrisome-looking Scottish terriers, the Pink Palace, Mr. Bobinsky … they all exist three-dimensionally in this world, not just on an animation cell or in computer code in Pixar’s archives. We occupy the same plane of reality that they do, and whether we comprehend it or not, there’s a closeness we allow ourselves to feel because of it.

This isn’t a new idea; I’ve felt the same affection for other stop-motion, or claymation, movies like Chicken Run, Wallace & Gromit and Corpse Bride, wonderful movies that transport us into their little creative universes. All of them are essentially time-lapse photography of adults playing with toys, but telling marvelous stories at the same time. With movies like Coraline — and characters like Coraline — stop-motion will live on for generations to come because there’s no outdating a brilliant method of storytelling.

The Rather Large Game: A Review™

(This piece originally ran in Volume Feb. 3, 2009.)

EDITOR’S NOTE: Due to trademark issues that violate the First Amendment, yet are too expensive to fight in court in this sluggish newspaper economy, this review has been excised of many NFL trademarks and brand names, including team names, sports equipment, field descriptors, colors, event titles, players names, days of the week, calendar months, weather conditions, TV networks, and derivations and nicknames for all of the above. Of considerable consternation are the team names and logos, which will not be relinquished for review purposes by the NFL. Also, we’re limited to three references of NFL (including this one) so in the following text the sports organization will be referred to as the Major Tackling Sport League, or MTSL, which Volume has counter-trademarked (logo pending) for its exclusive use.

To further clarify, Arizona Cardinals, Hometown Team, Cards, Reds, Red Birds, Growling Winged Creature in Crimson Color, and Helmet Team From Glendale That Does Not Play on Ice are all trademarked and have been identified as such in this sentence, even if they will not be appearing in the following review. For the other team, the one from the populated city in Pennsylvania, we’re bound by trademark and copyright legal precedent and must avoid references to any building which may contain the construction material steel. Even iron and aluminum — which aren’t steel, but are considered “steel-like” — are thereby owned by other entities with MTSL ties. Volume lawyers have also notified the section that Big Game has been trademarked by the event that sounds like Trooper Roll, which of course has been trademarked by the MTSL, which attempted (and lost) to allow copyright law to extend to rhyming words. Other titles, like Sunday Game or That Thing People Watch For the Commercials, as well as anything with the words “mega” or “ultra,” have had preliminary trademark paperwork started, which leaves us with only “rather large game” and “awesome sports spectacle.”

Furthermore, and as an act of sheer greed, newspapers are forbidden from using Roman numerals containing characters that could spell the word “civic” or phrase “mix CD,” which is basically all numbers — zero through infinity — except 50. This strategy has gone as far as issuing an injunction through time to Julius Caesar, should he or any Roman buddies want to stage a sequence of events that would be identifiable by Roman numeral. Godfather Part [2] is exempt due to an apparently far-reaching deal between sports and the Mafia.

Further correspondence with our attorneys have netted other issues that need printed clarification for readers: the center of the grassy field of play will be called the 150-foot mark, the banana-colored (or Yellow) goal posts will be referred to as the vertical scoring zone, we may cite no instances of Gatorade (a trademarked beverage) being dumped onto coaches, and the use of phrases like “season of hope” or “a team’s destiny” have been earmarked for DVD release and are thereby off limits.

In fact, due to a mid-broadcast uttering of the word “volume” during a Rams vs. Bears game from 1986, litigation is still pending on the title of this very entertainment section. A federal judge has allowed its use here under these conditions: this review not negatively refer to any sportscaster, living or dead, or their speech patterns or hairstyles; and that Volume concedes that the MTSL is “the only form of entertainment now or ever.” Another condition is that we must refrain from using the word Pigskin, which is being trademarked by the Pigfarmers of America Coalition, and their lawyers drive Bentleys.

Of course, all this is very unfortunate for newspapers, who have not had this many trademark issues since KISS member Gene Simmons trademarked all things he claimed to invent, including electricity, pocket watches, “rocking,” water, both hydrogen and oxygen, and Everything, the abstract idea of all things everywhere. Please don’t be dissuaded from reading sports commentary, though. Although it should be noted that both “sports” and “commentary” used together will be forbidden by the end of the current Supreme Court session.

With the technicalities out of the way, here’s Volume’s review (or what’s left of it) of that thing that happened the day before yesterday:

Our team lost. They put up a good fight, but couldn’t pull through. It was sad.

— Michael Clawson

Take my daughter, please

Taken is a how-to on knocking people out. In most circumstances it only requires the butt of a pistol; in others a stale fart will do just fine. I’m reminded of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s entire career: he could snap necks like they were glass pretzels. As brittle as the bad guys’ spines were it’s amazing they didn’t kill themselves putting their shirts on in the morning. The baddies in Taken apparently come from the same weak-neck gene pool.

Liam Neeson, who plays Taken’s knocker-outer, has a daughter who jets off to Europe to follow U2 on tour. Three minutes in Paris and she’s kidnapped to be sold on the black market as an unspoiled American teenager — they fetch a high price apparently. During the abduction she’s able to phone daddy, an ex-CIA operative named Bryan Mills, who gets some important clues from the hectic phone call. The movie provides us the villains’ names, although I’m sure it was fudging a little because the clues weren’t that specific.

Mills feeds off the Jack Bauer/Jason Statham adrenaline rush that most action movies are plugging into these days. That’s not a complaint, just an observation. In fact, the short attention span feeds into Taken rather smoothly — it’s a movie that is best not left to dawdle. It helps that Neeson, a gifted actor, can play the maniacal father with a deep-seated rage that makes his avenging angel terrifying and also cathartic. In one sequence he massacres an entire house of teen smugglers, a scene that in another movie would have seemed cruel and vicious — in Taken it feels necessary. Mostly, though, Mills just knocks people out on his daughter’s zig-zagging trail into the underworld of human smuggling; after all, Taken’s PG-13. The same film with an R rating would be kinda interesting.

Taken, which moves fast enough to feel like a cardio routine, paints Paris worse than most movies paint Tijuana or Fallujah. Paris apparently is the scum-bag capital of the entire northern hemisphere: hunky spotters stalk the airports, dirty cops lead the police force, and coked-out prostitutes are chained to every radiator in Paris. They’re also in the break room at a 24-hour construction site, where foreigners toil through the night producing mud pits, showers of sparks and fire drums that people can warm their hands over — the perfect setting for an action scene. And these aren’t just prostitutes: they’re kidnapped tourists, often Americans like Mills’ daughter, who’s played by Maggie Grace (Lost), a 25-year-old actress who conveys a 17-year-old by running everywhere giggling and/or sobbing.

Taken is not the smartest thriller made, nor is it the most comprehensible, but it makes up for its failures with pure neck-snapping adrenaline. So much so that it should come with a chiropractor.