"Sweet Neptune's briny pants!"

Avast, you wretched maggots! Put down that grog. Strike the colors. Hoist the main sail. Secure the rigging. Let the brass cannons roar. Once more unto the breach, my dear scallywags!

And you thought we were done with pirates?! I won't slap irons on your mitts or throw you in the brig for thinking pirates retired from the cinema, especially after Jack Sparrow — that salty pirate dog! — turned in a scurvy last performance in the most mediocre Pirates movie, On Stranger Tides, one I wouldn't pick over Captain Blood (or even Cutthroat Island) any day of the week.

No, the pirates have returned, and this time in clay. Or plasticine. Or whatever they're doing stop-motion movies in nowadays. It looks like bakery fondant to me.

The Pirates! Band of Misfits might be the cheeriest film so far this year. It made me smile and smile and smile. It also continuously surprised me: the way it worked in little jokes around the edges of the bigger ones, the way it hid little nuggets of humor in the background and the way it exaggerated, to the point of parody, every element of pirate culture. You've seen a man with a hook on his hand, or peg on his leg, but have you seen a man with a cork where his nose should be? What about a wooden elbow? Neither had I.

The film stars The Pirate Captain. That's his name, and I'm pretty sure if he could produce a birth certificate, on the back of a treasure map perhaps, it would prove it. Pirate Captain and his band of pirate droogs — ol' cork-nose, an albino teen, a British deserter and a woman pretending to be a man — are storming the high seas (and low ones) looking for gold booty. They don't really crave wealth, just a prized Pirate of the Year trophy that's given annually to the pirate who does the craziest pirate stunts. At the trophy party, one pirate arrives inside the mouth of a captured whale like a rock-star Ahab.

Pirate Captain is in for a tough competition, but he thinks he found an inside scoop when he discovers his chubby parrot is actually the last remaining dodo bird in existence. The bird brings the attention of Charles Darwin — a risky joke in a country where Darwin and science are being written out of school textbooks — and his scene-stealing human-like monkey called Manpanzee. Also turning up is Queen Victoria, who is a member of a foodie club that eats rare creatures. Her menu has a space for Dodo Delights somewhere between the Panda Face Fritters and Pygmy Elephant Nuggets. Don't tell me these plot elements aren't making you smile. 

The film has a wonderful cast of voices, including the great Brendan Gleeson as Pirate With Gout and Imelda Staunton as Queen Victoria. Hugh Grant voices Pirate Captain splendidly, though he was so good I didn't hear any of Grant's sheepish trademarks. In fact, I had to consult the credits to discover that Grant was the main voice actor, to which Pirate Captain might say, "Sweet Neptune's briny pants!" This is a small enhancement, but it helps animated films: Pirate Captain would not have been as magnanimous had we been picturing a celebrity's face. Adding to the audio is a soundtrack full of punk, British ska, fuzzy garage-rock, songs from TV's Flight of the Conchords and other music anachronisms. It's OK to walk out humming The Clash.

Band of Misfits was made by the British studio Aardman Animation, the company that previously gave us Chicken Run and Wallace & Gromit. I adore this studio and their high-functioning brand of creativity. There are no lulls in their films, just wave after wave of brilliant imagination. And they really jam it in, too, so much so that no two viewers will notice the same things. I noticed the name on one boat, the Napoleon Blownapart, that a colleague missed completely. And he noticed a gag about a peg-leg replacement store that I missed. There are hundreds of delightful little touches like this peppered throughout Pirates that it feels less like a film and more like a comedy scavenger hunt. My personal favorite was the cannonball delivery system that resembled a classic skee ball machine.

Two or three months without movies this exhilarating and I start to grow bored and frustrated with Hollywood. How many ways do I really need to see robots crush cities? If it's not Transformers 1-3 (a fourth is on its way soon), then it's Battleship or The Avengers. Those movies have spectacle for sure, but no pluckiness and heart. Do yourself a big favor and go see The Pirates! Band of Misfits, with or without your children. You will not see more creative filmmaking this summer. 

Author's Note: I love these photos so, what the hell, I'm going to include all of them. Here they are. They're all clickable. More after the jump.

Aardman Animation at work on Pirates!

My review for The Pirates! Band of Misfits will be posted momentarily, but before it goes live I wanted to post these photos of Aardman Animation hard at work on the film. 

I love this stuff: people hard at work on these little characters on their miniature sets. It's essentially grown-ups playing with toys for endless hours. Oh, and there's some photography thrown in for good measure. This is old-fashioned moviemaking and it feels pure and real. I adore most stop-motion animation, but Pirates! really surprised me. I found myself thinking about its gags, its set pieces, its moments of spontaneous action. There was one sequence with several characters riding a bathtub down Charles Darwin's staircase. It reminded me a lot of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the minecart scene that used optical effects, miniatures and live actors working in harmony to achieve a nail-biting sequence of peril. Pirates! doesn't just use stop-motion, but also digital effects and other tools to create sequences with just as much suspense, and humor to boot. This is a terrific film, and one of my favorite features of 2012. 

 

Three Stooges, as done by Two Stooges

In the world of comedy, the Three Stooges are a sacred cow. Look upon them with reverence and respect. Whatever you do, don’t remake them.

Someone forgot to tell that to Peter and Bobby Farrelly, the two dunces who have spent something like 17 years trying to bring this white-hot heap of disaster to the big screen. And what do we get for all that waiting? Baby urine!

Really? I mean really?!?! It was bad enough when one baby was peeing in Curly’s eyes and open mouth, but then three babies. And then a whole nursery of babies being aimed and squeezed for the amusement of the Stooges. At one point, so much urine is being shot around that Curly is nearly gargling on the stuff. Movies like this can’t be good for beverage sales at the snack bar.

Where this picture fails its audience is not with the baby pee — though that sequence certainly does help — but at the head-on collision the Farrellys orchestrate between the classic Stooges and a modern-day incarnation of the Stooges. The resulting mess is neither funny nor nostalgic. It is quite simply a failure of epic proportions.

The Three Stooges tries very hard to be a classic Three Stooges feature. You’ll hear the familiar music, you’ll see all the gags, and you’ll hear all of Curly’s nyuk-nyuks. But the spirit and soul is missing.

Frankly, it’s just not funny. I didn’t laugh for the first 20 minutes. The joke: Curly, forgetting that the head of a sledgehammer is in a bucket of water, douses a nun in the face. The sledgehammer bashes against her brow with a metallic clang, to which Curly says, “See, I told you there is too much iron in the water.” It wasn’t even a hearty laugh.

The movie starts at the beginning with Larry, Curly and Moe abandoned at an orphanage. Thirty-five years later and they’re still there doing the whole dog-and-pony show to prospective parents. They also torture the nuns, who might be willing to suggest contraceptives to the mother who bore these three imbeciles. “They are full of heart and dim of wit,” one nun says. Due to the Stooges’ excessive insurance liability, the orphanage is under threat of foreclosure, so the trio hit the road to raise some cash and save their home full of orphan clichés.

Most of the film is a series of slapstick routines that loosely follow a subplot involving a gold-digging wife, her rich husband and her desperate lover. And then the cast of The Jersey Shore shows up to shit directly into the proverbial fan. There’s a joke about the Kardashians — “Three idiots, where? The Kardashians are here?” — and I was half expecting them to turn up because, what the hell, Snooki’s here so why not.

Even novice fans of the Stooges will recognize all the trademark gags: eye pokes, hammering noses, nostril pulls, three-face slap, the belly punch and all of Curly’s exaggerated facial slaps. The physicality of the Stooge humor is commendable, and the actors inhabit the original jokes well enough. But it all just feels so wrong. A scene with a choking dolphin. A bit with a girl being lifted into the air by a dozen balloons. A nun in an outfit made with less material than one of Rick Santorum’s handkerchiefs. A prop gag with a salmon farm falls especially flat.

My real issue, though is with the pee sequence. The inclusion of the scene proves that the Farrelly Brothers have no respect for the material. And how do these guys get out of bed in the morning without laughing at the site of their own dicks? “It’s a penis! Haha! Let’s watch it urinate. Haha!” I can handle scenes involving semen in hair, pubic hair glued on faces, bad comb overs, freakishly tan and wrinkled old ladies, Amish men pooping into urinals, laxatives in coffee and all other kinds of immature boy humor, but not here with this film.

Could this movie, under different circumstances, ever be good? Maybe. The Artist aped from early silent classics and still managed to be a modern-day version of those genres. Surely the Stooges could get a similar treatment that would be equally new and nostalgic at the same time.

This version is not it. And in terms of bad ideas, this one is a milestone, right there with Steve Martin’s performance as Inspector Clouseau, another sacred cow that should have never been reinvented.

I will say this, though, Stooges got one thing right: Shemp doesn’t show up once. 

Cabin in the Woods: Don't believe the hype

Cabin in the Woods acknowledges the horror genre by collapsing it onto itself, like a star going supernova. Unfortunately, the folding waves of cliché-busting gravity in the meta-horror experiment have an unintended consequence: rather than reinventing the genre, Cabin in the Woods shows us how limited and frustrating the genre has become.

Horror films have rarely deviated from the set formula: Young people are the stars. They are always woefully ignorant about dark places and creepy staircases. Sure enough, they begin to die in gruesome ways. A hero emerges. Someone is thought to be dead that isn’t; sometimes this may include the monster or killer. Wiggle room for a sequel is always left open. On and on into infinity.

This film veers very little from this formula, but it does so willfully acknowledging its own plot. It’s winking at us, but to what end? (By the way, I refuse to go spoiler-free on this one. The studios demand it, but I’m tired of having to restrict my opinion just so they can control the debate about their film’s merits. So, if you don’t want smallish spoilers stop reading.)

A group of college students set out to visit a remote cabin for the weekend. They bring their beer and pot and while they chug that RV through the wilderness, an elaborate concoction awaits them at this cabin. We see the cabin’s workers, blue-collar types who run the behind-the-scenes magic: electricians who control the grid, mechanical engineers who manipulate the traps, chemists who administer toxins and tranquilizers, and then the control room operators (Richard Jenkins is one of them), the directors of this macabre fright fest. They run the cabin’s HOA violations from within a bunker located deep beneath the top soil. The last time this crew of special effects artists put this many torture devices into one cabin it was called Star Wars Episode I.

Once the victims arrive, the cabin is turned against them: lighting is controlled, pheromones are blown in to put everyone in the mood, alcohol is spiked, trapdoors are set to pop open. The whole point is to guide them into the basement so they can unknowingly choose their fate from an archive of horror trinkets. For example, a music box might unleash a killer ballerina, whereas a puzzle-like sphere will unleash the carpentry victim from that Hellraiser series. At one point, all the workers are taking bets on what blood-thirsty murder monster the vacationers will unleash. One man has all his money on a rarely used mermaid beast. Up until this point I though the cabin, a mechanical puzzle in the style of maybe Cube (a much better movie, by the way), would be the sole murder weapon. Not so. The inclusion of supernatural elements was unexpected and they serve as the pivot point to Cabin in the Woods darker secrets.

So anyway, the bodies start piling up. Because of miniscule variables in configurations in the cabin, the killers turn out to be inbred backwoods zombies, but the implication is that there is a more malevolent force controlling them, more devious than even the control workers in the bunker. If only someone could get down into that control room and then beyond that! Well, fear not, someone does get down there and the payoff isn’t really worth it. Before that, though, there is a rather noteworthy payoff sequence where we meet all the monsters that could have been summoned on the cabin, like an all-star lineup of villains — a Monster Mash, if you will.

I will let you discover some of the more diabolical plot points, but know that the force at work here has demanded the cabin’s creation and implementation on attractive young people as some kind of sacrificial entertainment. Yes folks, the horror machine requires horror clichés to keep it running. Picture an elaborate machine that spits out a quarter when you put a quarter in it. I give you Cabin in the Woods.

My first question is this: If a force were powerful enough that it could create something as complex as this cabin for its amusement, why would it care about horror clichés like bare breasts, virgins and torture porn? Is the force a 14-year-old boy? And why does it get a rush out of horror movie staples and not, say, Greek tragedies or monster trucks or pole vaulting? Oh, I get it, because horror movies command big box office numbers. 

Is Cabin in the Woods a bad movie? No, in fact it’s above average when it comes to horror movies. But it pretends it’s grandiose and abstract when in reality it is everything that horror has already been. This is not the reinvention of the horror genre. It’s a rehash turned inside-out. It’s brave and bizarre, but it’s not the rebirth of horror.

The solution to the bully problem is ...

Bully has expired in its news cycle: rating wars with the Motion Picture Association of America, rallying (and bullying) producers, petitions on Change.org and then even more ratings bickering. Its makers have forgotten that pop culture is a fickle supporter, and Bully is already this week’s Trayvon Martin, which was last week’s Kony2012.

They’re calling this armchair activism: people using Twitter or Facebook to carpetbomb the internet for a cause without actually participating in it. I’m guilty of it. Many people are.

But Bully has another problem entirely — it offers no solution. Trayvon Martin supporters are wearing their hoodies out in mass trying to end a broader problem (gun violence) by starting with specific ones (the arrest of Trayvon’s killer, ending “Stand Your Ground” laws). Even the Kony2012 crew has a specific mission in mind (send in American advisors to arrest or kill warlord Joseph Kony).

Bully, though, just watches, and painfully so. At the end we’re supposed to know that bullying is bad, but didn’t we know that already? Certainly there is more to this problem than what comes after a hashtag. An argument can be made that a documentary is not supposed to answer questions, but ask them. My counter to that would be this: a great documentary tells a story and stories have endings, sometimes even ambiguous ones. Bully has no ending. It simply tapers off. The din of grief howls less and less until there’s silence, and then credits.

I heap criticism on Bully for not doing more, but make no mistake about it this is a powerful film, one that every young person in America should see before they’re allowed to return to school.

Bully follows several kids as they go about their lives in small towns in the Midwest and the South. The main star is Alex, an awkward and innocent boy who is terminally taunted at his middle school. This kid … you’ll just want to hug him every time he’s on the screen. During school he quietly wanders from one failed encounter to another, and then on the bus ride home he’s assaulted in a vicious daily cycle. Every word aimed at him is cruel and hurtful. Every punch is bitter and remorseless. What’s so shocking is that the camera, a silent witness, is right there and still they brutalize this poor kid. Makes you wonder what they do when there’s no camera around.

Alex, born premature and small, comes from a good home with loving parents. One day after school, Alex tells his dad that the boys on the bus punch him, choke him and call him names, but “they’re just joking.” His father gently reminds him that those aren’t jokes, and if they are Alex isn’t in on them. Late in the film, Bully starts to really get somewhere deep with Alex. He tells the camera: “I get bullied … and sometimes it makes me want to be the bully.”

The principal at Alex’s school is a kind and patient woman, but her head is planted somewhere that isn’t decent for publication in a family newspaper. In her opinion, bullying at her school isn’t that bad. “They’re right as gold,” she says about her students. At this point we’ve already seen the footage of Alex getting choked, punched, cussed at, harassed, threatened, poked, slapped and pushed, so we know she couldn’t be more wrong. Either the principal is blind, or she’s in denial. And what about the mountain of complaints about bullies? “They’re just boys being boys.”

The film shifts between several bullying victims. One is a teen from Mississippi who had quite enough from her tormentors so she took a gun on the bus and flashed it around before she was tackled and arrested. We pick up with her story as she works her way through the justice system, and as her mother plans her return home. Another subject is a gay teen from Oklahoma. She endures bullying from the students and the teachers and eventually has to move away to find a school where she can learn in peace. It’s funny how hate comes from areas rich in religious fervor.

Bully also follows several parents who have lost children due to bully-instigated suicide. These stories are especially heartfelt and raw. Watch as one mother goes into a room and calmly points out where her son hung himself. Watch as another parent, an avid hunter with a buckskin knife on his belt and a camouflaged hat, opens himself up and accepts the embrace of young people who have committed themselves to making a difference at their schools.

Director Lee Hirsch has a terrific eye for framing and close-ups. He gets his subjects to open up and share in ways that are honest and accessible. I love how his camera follows Alex, staring at him, allowing us to admire him and his uniqueness. Hirsch’s focus — literally, the sharpness of the picture — wanders wildly within each shot. This was a stylish accessory, one that doesn’t always seem necessary. What makes the movie so unforgettable is the unprecedented access that Hirsch gets. We not only see the bullying, but the bullies themselves, and only one has their face pixilated to hide their identity.

Behind all the ratings controversy — the film won a PG-13 in a lengthy and public appeal to the MPAA — Bully is a thought-provoking and moving documentary that attempts to expose a very large, very dynamic problem. The movie has noble intentions with its frustration-laden stories about bullying, but its ultimate goal is hard to make out in the haze. Bully suggests no action, no prevention methods, no problem solving. It’s purely awareness.

At one point in Bully there’s a town hall meeting to discuss how to handle bullying. Students, parents, community leaders, police … they all shake their heads in frustration. No one has an answer. But surely someone somewhere is doing something that works. That’s a story that I wanted in this film, the one that offered a solution.