Blog

El Capitan’s organ was sadly silent during a recent kid-filled rainy day matinee, and the leading character does not make a live appearance, but at least Walt Disney’s classic 1941 picture, Dumbo, is being screened at the once-legendary studio’s Holllywood Boulevard movie theater. The animated feature, which was affectionately introduced by El Cap’s extremely knowledgeable manager Michael, runs at the historic theater through January 28 to honor the film’s 70th anniversary next year. Next door at Disney’s Soda Fountain and Studio Store, there’s a caramel-topped ice cream sundae and exclusive Dumbo merchandise. Unfortunately, Dumbo is preceded by a trailer for the latest Tim Burton horror movie, sharing the title of Walt Disney’s 1955 animated feature, Alice in Wonderland. The new, live action version looks like just another of his visually striking nightmares.

If only the currently volatile, unfocused, and increasingly generic Walt Disney Studios were creating movies of Dumbo’s caliber, showing them in venues to match the quality of these outstanding twin enterprises, and cultivating outstanding cast members (that means you, ushers Melvin and Lucia). Read my review of this wonderfully colorful motion picture here.

Disney’s Surrogates is a generic affair yet it is not without value. Written and directed by the creators of this year’s Terminator: Salvation, another dystopian picture about a society in which economics and state are mixed, Surrogates poses some interesting questions. Bruce Willis stars as a cop who, paired with Radha Mitchell (Feast of Love), investigates the murder of a young man who is the son of the inventor of the robotic surrogates that everyone uses as proxies for dealing with reality. That’s about it. With an underlying theme that it takes courage to face reality while most fake reality, certainly a timely message in this text-messaging age of heads buried in technology as a religion instead of as a tool for living, Surrogates scores some points. But it gets bogged down in static characters, a lack of suspense and a thinly plotted climax. Still, borrowing from Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives, Westworld, and, of course, Blade Runner, this slice of science fiction about a world in which everyone wears a mask, with society’s charismatic leaders urging us to “sacrifice yourself for the greater good,” offers more than most in the genre. A touch of irony: in one scene, the hero chases one government-sponsored machine by commandeering another: the Toyota Prius.

This weekend, The Proposal starring Sandra Bullock offers a sorely needed respite from the worsening news of the nation. The Disney comedy is defined by what it is not: it isn’t an endless stream of vulgar jokes; it isn’t an assault on the senses; and it isn’t another asinine star vehicle. Though it also is decidedly not among the greatest movies made, The Proposal, featuring Craig T. Nelson (The Family Stone), Mary Steenburgen (What’s Eating Gilbert Grape) and Betty White (The Golden Girls), and co-starring a young actor named Ryan Reynolds, who reminds me of Ashton Kutcher, is a delight. Miss Bullock portrays a hard-headed, Canadian-born businesswoman who, like most hardworking immigrants to America, is the victim of our arbitrary immigration system. She forces her secretary (Reynolds) to agree to marry her to avoid deportation, though she treats him (and everyone else) like dirt. The put-upon assistant to the boss from hell makes his own terms and conditions and the odd non-couple are off to his warm family home to keep up appearances and escape detection by a suspicious official. Yes, it’s sort of silly. But affable Ryan Reynolds balances his rising young New Yorker against her cold fish and his character’s disinterest in Miss Thing adds comic chemistry. Their ridiculous arrangement juices the movie’s screwball sensibility and it’s good to see Sandra Bullock in a decent role again. After a week of Obama fatigue, with the President doing to a housefly what he’s doing to capitalism, do yourself a favor and say ‘yes’ to The Proposal.

Up might have been called Down. It’s like that, really, more in line with Pixar’s post-apocalyptic Wall-E than with its delightful Ratatouille. Though I arrived late to a recent screening, the protagonist is Carl (voiced by Ed Asner), an old widower who ties balloons to his house and lifts off—with a stowaway on board. The trailer looked fine, but what Disney did not show is that the old coot’s up for assault and battery and he’s in for a grim future. There is adventure, as the pair head for an exotic locale, but much is missing from this movie, starting with a sense of wonder.

Aside from being predictable, ordinary and modern (in the worst sense), Up lacks the chemistry to pull off its theme that letting go beats lifting off as a means of acting in accordance with reality. The obese kid, who lacks personality, and crusty Carl are as lovable as a pair of dirty, old shoelaces—and about as involving. They’re not bad, and they have their moments. But the script is cynical, jokey and it borders on absurdism—balloons are gussied up offscreen overnight, one thunderstorm and they’re instantly in South America, an aviator villain trains flying ace dogs—all of which chokes character development and undercuts the man/boy relationship. To top it off, the poor old man’s future is pretty bleak. His big moment centers upon saving a bird, which as a climax is as exciting as it sounds, and Up suffers from these tired platitudes throughout. Instead of being a lone man who stands against, say, seizure of his property, he simply seems to stand in the way of progress because he doesn’t know any better and Up’s idea of uplifting is saving an endangered animal or mentoring a child. Fine, but more appropriate for a Sierra Club film or a piece of National Service propaganda than for a studio that used to punch out clever, touching little animated gems. Incidentally, its ultimate point that material possessions do not matter is, I think, an absolute and total lie. Losing a loved one often means treasuring a cherished piece of private property for its meaning and memory.

An interesting postscript came across my desk: an Up publicity stunt went awry up in Seattle, Washington. The whole incident is a sort of real-life demonstration of why the otherwise innocuous movie does not fly.

This week’s opening movies look like they offer more of the same. I Love You, Man looks like another crude comedy about asinine men. The unfortunately titled Knowing looks like more supernaturalism. Duplicity looks like an amalgamation of every jaded picture released since Pulp Fiction created the sneering genre, from that influential Nineties movie to Thank You for Smoking and No Country for Old Men. It even stars the king and queen of babbling smart alecks, Clive Owen and Julia Roberts, who have been down this apparently cynical road before (Inside Man, Children of Men, Closer). They’re both capable of good work, so we’ll see whether Duplicity’s appearances are deceiving.

The horror movie The Last House on the Left opened with decent ticket sales, finishing in third place, surviving a round of denunciations for its brutality, including one from box office analyst Steve Mason, who wrote in his weekly report that he refuses to see it. Here’s my response to Steve:

“Why is Last House, which dramatizes vengeance for rape (suggested, not shown) considered unacceptable, while The Changeling with its caged, chained, and chopped up molested boys and sadistic fare such as 300, Sin City, and Pulp Fiction are heralded as brilliant? I don’t even like horror [movies], but I see a double standard in an industry that routinely praises torture (Slumdog Millionaire, No Country for Old Men, There Will be Blood).” I don’t understand why Hollywood thinks it’s acceptable to treat only males as subhuman.

Steve replied, saying I have a good point. But he differentiated between what he regards as stylized blood and gore, which he finds tolerable, and scenes depicting a person’s torture, which he does not. Without much competition—it seems everyone knew the unwatchable Watchmen would wipe out in its second week—Race to Witch Mountain opened at the top box office spot.

The nation’s number one movie is a remake of a 1975 pic called Escape to Witch Mountain, which I have managed to avoid. When I was a kid, a movie about a couple of kids on the run from a successful businessman named Aristotle looked stupid. Besides, Kim Richards had to have been the most overexposed child actress in the Seventies. It seemed like she was in everything. Disney is releasing a new DVD of the movie, which I watched, and it’s as stupid as it looks. Poor Ray Milland is imprisoned in a bad script with worse lines as the evil businessman and the kid characters are as likable as a brown paper bag. The DVD includes a techno-trippy video called “Disney Sci-Fi” which is an embarrassment of badly hitched clips without titles and the disc includes the usual round of extras. The studio is also releasing a DVD of the sequel, Return to Witch Mountain, starring Bette Davis.

An older DVD is a better choice—and this one is urgently pertinent to our darkening times. Though available for sale only, The Nazis: A Warning from History is a six-part, 290-minute British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) production that asks: How could a political party as fundamentally evil as the Nazis come to power? Did the Gestapo really impose themselves by terror on an unwilling population? This quality series, which is not perfect, is neither a proper introduction to the subject nor a philosophical examination of the Nazis. But for those who already grasp the roots of National Socialism—altruism, collectivism, and the notion of faith in, and duty to, the state—the series is interesting, if only for the dozens of interviews with Germans, ordinary people and top-ranked Nazis, who openly demonstrate their total acceptance of dictatorship and every idea the Nazis enacted with horrific results.