The Tenenbaums in Pictures

A movie's worth can be gauged in several ways, but here's one: Are we still talking about it 10 years later?


In the case of The Royal Tenenbaums, the answer is a most enthusiastic yes. But rather than spew the exact same praise as everyone else as we mark 10 years of Wes Anderson's hit second film, I'd rather just look at still of the film. Each frame is terrific. Here are some of my favorites.

I get the feeling this movie's been kissed a lot

Filmmakers who remake classics confuse me. They adore the original works so much that they feel an inescapable urge to do them better? What?!? I call that misplaced love.

It produces a lose-lose situation: If the remake is bad, then they’ve shamed the original. If it’s good then they’ve made the original look pointless and obsolete, or maybe just dated and foolish. If they truly respected these films they’d leave their legacies alone instead of tinkering with them endlessly like George Lucas and his obsessive compulsive tics called Star Wars.

And now here’s Footloose, a remake of the 1984 Footloose, about a town where dancing is illegal and the preacher’s daughter must be rescued from herself by Kevin Bacon with spazzy hair and skinny ties. It was a popular movie, and I remember it fondly.

The remake is a nearly shot-by-shot retelling, but with a modern twist. The rebel teen from up north moves down to Elvis Country — Tony Soprano: “Anywhere there are no Jews or Italians” — where he’s chided by Barney Fife and the rest of Rick Perry America for playing his stereo too loud. This is Ren (here played by Kenny Wormald) and he can dance, which he frequently does in cowboy bars, drive-in theaters, cotton gins and abandoned factories. He needs a dance studio, or maybe just a tetanus shot. He quickly falls for Ariel (Julianne Hough), the preacher’s daughter who is facing a steep reduction of morals by dating Chuck Cranston, the local meathead. That Chuck is clearly nearing 30 and dating a perky high school girl is of no interest to the plot, nor to Deputy Doofus and his tactical team of stereo invaders.

Yes, this all sounds familiar, right? That’s because it’s the same exact movie. Not just the same story, but the same movie: the dialogue is often the same, as are the actual camera shots and scenes, the gags and all the visual Footloose cues, like the dancing feet in the opening credits. (For some odd reason, though, they replaced the game of chicken with tractors with a school bus demolition derby.) Remember that witless shot-by-shot remake of Psycho back in the ’90s? This is not quite that literal a remaking, but it’s pretty close. Yes, the songs are sometimes poppier, but even those are remakes from the original movie.

My favorite part about the 1984 film was the preacher, then played by the brilliant John Lithgow, who glowed with that crazy evangelical nuttiness. Rev. Moore was a troubling man, but his intentions were always noble. And his fears toward the town and its irascible youth sometimes exposed other deep-seated issues, like his resentment of women and their place in society. At God’s dinner table, there was no setting for women because who else would cook dinner. Lithgow played into this with a fiery zeal. Here in the remake we get Dennis Quaid in the reverend role, and he doesn’t come across a third as interesting, or as emotionally and spiritually wounded as the Lithgow version. Quaid has reached that point in his career where the daringness has all receded to bland banality.

Wormald is a commendable Ren, though. And the actor who plays Williard (Miles Teller) is no replacement for the late Chris Penn, though he is very funny. As for Hough, she does a noteworthy high school tramp impersonation, except her character feels more one-dimensional than Lori Singer’s version, which ached with loss and regret. I always felt that Singer’s Ariel was hiding some serious sin, not just the ones she bellowed to her father in those scenes in the church — “I’m not even a virgin!” Hough’s version is cutesy and more tart, but it feels like it’s there for sex appeal and nothing more.

I’m beating up on Footloose a little, and it deserves it simply because it remade a movie that some people — myself included — found sweet and silly in all the right amounts. I’m more frustrated at the idea of remakes, which is why I’m venting a little with Ren 2.0. Overall, I found Footloose to be a spirited remake with some of the charm of the original and some that it’s concocted from its own brew.

I do like how the film improved on some issues, like by including more black students at Ren’s school — though the only dances they can do are booty-shaking krumping. (I’ll admit, I don’t quite know if this is a crude stereotype, though, it felt unnecessary.) I also appreciated how the film wasn’t toned down: it is loaded with a shit-ton of swearing, features that odd “take-my-joint-to-make-you-feel-better” scene, and still casts Ariel as the panty-dropping slutmonster that she must be for the subplot with her good reverend father to work.

Footloose, you scamp, you served your purpose, though I wish there was no need improve on the original.

Here's the thing about prequels ...

The thing about The Thing remake is that the Thing is not like the original Thing and some Things should be left alone, among other things.

But right there I started with a mistake: The Thing is not really a remake, but a poorly conceived prequel to John Carpenter’s 1982 horror classic The Thing. (Before I go any further, yes, that Thing was a remake of Howard Hawks’ 1951 film The Thing From Another World, which was itself based on the book Who Goes There? by John Campbell Jr. — these things are going to get confusing.)

If you recall, at the beginning of Carpenter’s Thing, out in the endless snow of Antarctica we briefly meet some Norwegian scientists trying to kill the Thing, which had morphed into the form of a sled dog. The Norwegians make some poor decisions and ultimately die from grenade clumsiness and a rather unfortunate linguistic misunderstanding, in that order. Then the story quickly focuses on the Americans, including Kurt Russell and Keith David, who are later stranded in the slowest game of metaphorical chess ever conceived, a game we can assume is still going on down there on that cold Antarctic plane.

This Thing goes back in time about a week from the onset of the earlier movie. We meet some scientists, they discover something creepy, and then they dig it up, though they mindlessly forget to duplicate the famous shot of all the scientists standing in a circle over the frozen ice containing the flying saucer that stranded the Thing on Earth. For heaven’s sake, it was even in the earlier film; we watched a videotape of these characters actually doing it. This clumsy overlooked detail illustrates this film’s many failed prequel-original mergers.

Amid all these grisled Norwegians, with their ale-soaked beards and kind spirits, is someone more foreign than the alien thing: a young America woman. She’s played like an icy Terminator by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who does the sexy scientist routine until she’s required to be calculating and tough. And she's no Ripley. This is a troubling and inconceivable character written, no doubt, by a marketing expert who said that the movie would make 4 percent more at the box office if there was woman in it, 4.5 percent more if she were attractive. I’m all for women in tough, manly roles, but not when they have to be wedged in to balance a marketing analyst’s pie chart.

Anyway, the Thing escapes from the ice — I wish I could teach meat to unthaw that way — and begins to systematically devour and clone all the scientists. The only way to tell if they’re the Thing or the real person is to check for crowns, fillings or metal plates on bones because the Thing can’t digest inorganic material. “You’re going to kill me because I floss,” one character complains when everyone thinks he’s the Thing. This scene looks an awful lot like the Kurt Russell scene from the original, when he meticulously drew blood and scorched Petri dishes with a hot wire. The Thing couldn’t be killed then because of a malfunctioning flamethrower, which is exactly what happens here. Funny thing, flamethrowers.

Eventually it’s revealed that the Thing is in several people at once, which leads me to almost call them Thing 1 and Thing 2, with many apologies to Dr. Seuss, but I will refrain. As the alien Thing starts to infect more and more people this is where the internal logic of this new Thing goes haywire. In the original, it was revealed that a person would burst out of their clothes when absorbed by the monster. But here characters are absorbed by the Thing in minutes only to return to the film wearing the same clothes. Hey, screenwriters: We’ve already been taught that this can’t be possible because the first film was meticulous about this detail.

The actual Thing, is a hodge podge of grotesquery and gooeyness that is more often a digital effect than a physical one. Carpenter’s Thing was puppets, animatronics, matting and plate effects, stop-motion animation and many other physical devices; today the film is still terrifying and gruesome. This film though looks like it was created under harsh florescent lighting in a server farm by people who have never once put red dye in corn syrup.

In the end, all you’ll care about this Thing is how it interacts with Carpenter’s Thing. The answer: very little. To make the connection between the two pictures this film needed a helicopter, a dog, two Norwegians and some hand grenades. It ends with none of them, as if director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. forgot he was making a prequel. Only in the end credits due the pieces start to line up, and hastily so. 

And no, there’s not a Kurt Russell cameo. That’s one thing you can stop looking forward to, though I can always suggest another thing.

Clooney goes very dark in Ides of March

(Many apologies for the long delay in posting new reviews. I had a good excuse: I got married! So now that the wedding is over, I will once again start reviewing films again, maybe even with Mrs. Movie Critic.)


The Ides of March is so bleak and despairing that I don’t think voters are ready to stomach it. Its main character begins the film with many values, and ends it with none whatsoever. The film arrives to that appalling conclusion because that’s the reality of modern politics.

I knew this film was venturing down a gloomy road when it began with Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again,” a song that was last heard on film before nuclear bombs lit up Doomsday in Dr. Strangelove. That’s a dire warning indeed.

This isn’t one of those feel-good movies that will “get out the vote.” Recall Swing Vote from 2008, that quirky satire about “every vote counts”? That was a picnic in the park compared to this parade of political supervillains and their many underlings. No, here your vote is worthless because, the film suggests, an election battle is waged long before the voting booth ever opens. How true that is I will let you decide, but I don’t think you’ll be looking forward to next year’s presidential election after witnessing this dark wonder.

The film follows presidential candidate Mike Morris, an ambitious governor fighting with a prickly foe in the Ohio democratic primary. Every movement of the Morris campaign is planned by the calculating, though sheepishly worrisome, Paul Zara (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) and his overzealous staffer Stephen Myers (Ryan Gosling). I liked some of the film’s smaller details, like how the staffers don’t ever watch news events of their candidate simply because they’re planning the next speech during the current one. Or how the offices are crammed with enough political history and props that they’ll make the pause button very useful for the DVD release.

The plot mainly focuses on Stephen, who is handsome and determined, though also naïve about the risks of sinking your life into politics. Stephen is a dangerous opponent on the campaign trail, so dangerous that the other candidate tries to poach him from Team Morris. It doesn’t work, but the meeting sends reverberations through both campaigns.

I didn’t entirely believe the importance of this meeting, but the movie throws an awful lot of weight behind it. Apparently, it’s wrong for two high-level staffers from opposing teams to meet and discuss the campaign. Baseball teams do it, so I don’t really see the problem. Later it comes up that maybe Stephen wasn’t loyal to his candidate, but I would counter that Stephen didn’t take the job offer so he was loyal after all. In any case, this single meeting factors into the plot in ways that aren’t totally sound. It’s a minor annoyance, but one the film continuously revisits. The scene does involve the great Paul Giamatti at his most flatulent and egocentric, which is always a plus.

Later, after a reporter gets wind of a damaging story, Stephen has to defend his actions to the press as well as to his bosses, who are quick to throw him under the campaign bus and speed out to the next primary state. At this point, Gov. Morris (George Clooney) is an honorable candidate, someone most voters would respect if not vote for. But what Stephen does is the unthinkable: he brings a good candidate to the very edge of treachery and then pushes him in.

Stephen does this when he finds out that the good governor has some buried secrets. That is Stephen’s backdoor entrance back into the Morris campaign. In the real world they would call that blackmail, but in politics it’s called leverage. Of course, there’s more to it that I’m not including: bureaucratic horse-trading, shady cabinet appointments, leaked media stories, dirty politics and questionable money donations. The film really hits most of the highlights when it comes to political ethics on the campaign trail.

Clooney stars in, but also directs, Ides of March, which is a reference to the assassination of Julius Cesar. Clooney finds the movie’s theme in the failure of Morris’ principles. Politicians by themselves are mostly honest men and women, but put them in an election surrounded by a staff that will do anything to win and it will bring out the worst in a candidate. It provides a scary scenario: there’s no such thing as a good president because they all had to campaign to get the title.

Now, a word on the political leanings of this movie: Clooney, a prominent democrat and supporter of President Obama, could have easily made this film about the GOP, which would rather nominate Mayor McCheese than stand behind one of its rotating frontrunners. But he didn’t do that. He let these politicians be democrats — as they were in Farragut North, the Beau Willimon play that the movie is based upon — and by doing so he’s allowed Ides to be a message movie as opposed to a public bashing on the other guys. It must have stung Clooney to beat up on his own party so close to an election, but he does it because he thinks the message — campaigning drains the soul from a candidate — is of vital importance.

I was mighty impressed with Ides of March, but I’ll admit it terrified me, especially when you start thinking about these kinds of games being played right now in the race for the White House. Even if the movie is making up 80 percent of it, that’s still 20 percent rooted in truth. Scary stuff.

The film is marvelously acted, with great performances by Gosling, Hoffman and Evan Rachel Wood, who plays a low-level staffer with line after line of witty and seductive dialogue. The movie also employs some rather neat, but very simple, camera tricks, including one involving an SUV and a fired campaign manager, and then another with a vibrating cell phone that produces some chills in this political thriller. Above all, though, it’s Clooney as director who knocks this one out of the park. He understood the material and had fun exploiting all the nuances of the script.

By the time the Gosling character steps into the darkness — like Anakin turning into Darth Vader — Clooney has embraced the political horror enough to give us a payoff worthy of material this dark.