the b-side Thursday, January 25, 2007 - 3B
The Michigan Daily - michigandaily.com
STYLE
From page 1B
not only from a continuous stack of visual
surprises, but from a message that is knit
into every plot twist and character rather
than tactlessly pasted on.
Visual playfulness is, of course, a wor-
thy attribute in itself, and even with CGI
kids' movies aside 2006 was a year for
color. "Little Children's" deep palette
offered nighttime shadows as lush as the
red of Kate Winslet's bathing suit, "Babel"
color-codes the rich landscapes of its vari-
ous story lines and Pedro Almodovar's
"Volver" is practically a paint-by-numbers
done in highlighter. Even the darkest mov-
ies offer an opulent gloom, with "Children
of Men," "Pan's Labyrinth" and "Letters
from Iwo Jima" all as lavishly high-con-
trast as they are grim. Ingenuity wasn't
absent either. For all the wasted poten-
tial of "Stranger than Fiction's" meta-lit-
erature concept, director Marc Forster
successfully included a series of quick
diagram-like pop ups which sporadical-
ly appeared onscreen like the scribbled
notes of a TV football commentator.
If only such style had worked to empha-
size an underlying substance, rather than
smothering it completely. Take, for exam-
ple, "Marie Antoinette," the ultimate les-
son in hollow-headed fluff. With director
Sofia Coppola's sharp eye for composition,
"Marie" boasts cinematography so wispy
and light-suffused you'd think you could
float through it -- not to mention the mov-
ie's impressive array of Barbie-fantasy
ballgowns and delicate pastries straight
out of a confectioner's wildest dreams.
But, like Yimou Zhang's similarly over-
long palace-drama "Curse of the Golden
Flower," Sofia's royal treatment doesn't
dig beneath "Marie's" luxurious surface
in any meaningful way. Even Kirsten
Dunst's lead performance as the young
queen is left solely visual. When she opens
her mouth, it's without the barest attempt
at a French accent.
The year's profusion of other period
pieces further played up this image-ori-
ented trend. Isn't the venerated "Dream-
girls" as much a candy-colored fashion
tour of twentieth-century style as it is
a musical? But dressing characters like
mannequins emphasizes their look over
their humanity, and "Dreamgirls's" leads
end up feeling like types rather than
people. Ditto for Outkast's "Idlewild," for
though it revels in the dapper 20s style
of its Prohibition-era South, even Andre
3000's flash and bravura can't cover the
fact that the film's potential goldmine of
a concept is directed with the subtlety of
an after-school play. "The Black Dahlia"
suffers the same woeful curse, depend-
ing so heavily on its sumptuous noir set-
ting that it entirely overlooks such measly
details as a semi-logical plot. Sure, Scar-
lett Johansson and Hilary Swank recall
the glamorously wavy-haired starlets of
early Hollywood, but that doesn't explain
why on earth this movie turns unbearably
loony in its final third.
There was more to 2006 than just
looks, of course, though many trends were
simply continuations of long-term tenden-
cies. There were more increasingly insipid
college-audience offerings ("Employee of
the Month," "Van Wilder 2: The Rise of
Taj"), and more quiet, underloved indies
("Half-Nelson," "Conversations with
Other Women"). Samuel L. Jackson con-
tinued his ascent to Christopher Walken-
like cult-status ("Snakes on a Plane"). And
our cultural move towards increasingly
graphic violence was never more appar-
ent than in this year's updated (for better
or worse) James Bond, "Casino Royale."
Gone are the days when 00/ dodged a
henchman's theatrical punch or patiently
waited while the latest villain intoned
an obviously hollow promise of impend-
ing doom. Now James demonstrates an
unheard of athleticism chasing a parkour
expert through a construction site. Now
James-ends up captured and made to suf-
fer a beating so unspeakably below-the-
belt that it's impossible to picture Sean
Connery ev'er submitting himself to it.
Many other mini-trends came in pairs
-- we got two sets of magicians in turn-of-
the-century Europe ("The Illusionist" in
Vienna, "The Prestige" in London), two
based-on-a-true-story tales of murder-
ous Hollywood folklore (an infamously
slain prostitute in "The Black Dahlia," the
mysterious death of old TV star George
Reeves in "Hollywoodland"), two awk-
wardly-executed improv-heavy comedies
(Christopher Guest's disappointing "For
Your Consideration" and the Will Ferrell
feature "Talladega Nights"), two Matt
Damon films that ran a half-hour two long
(Scorsese's slightly bloated "The Depart-
ed" and Robert de Niro's unnecessar-
ily sprawling "The Good Shepherd"), as
well as a second telling of Truman Capo-
te's investigation of Holcomb, Kansas
("Infamous," following Philip Seymour
Hoffman's triumphant turn in last year's
"Capote").
If only style and substance could have
composed another trendy pair. Why pull
them apart when they complement each
other so well? Consider the car-ride scene
in Alfonso Cuaron's impressive "Children
of Men," a single-shot sequence that builds
beautifully upon moment after moment of
unpredictable action, only to breeze mov-
ingly over its final emotional consequence
and segue on into the next scene. It's an
expert demonstration of what a movie can
truly achieve -- edge-of-your-seat sus-
pense and honest engagement with the
action and characters onscreen. By com-
parison, the merely visual of 2006 isn't
enough.
We may have been awed, but we want
more to be moved.
courtesy of s
When Penelope Cruz is on screen, you cant look at anything else (subtitles included).
TASSI
From page lB
anything you may have liked about
that movie or that show.
The suggestion that the story is
meant to be "a modern-day fairy
tale" is only a cheap way to cover
up the dialogue that sounds like
it's something out of an ABC Fam-
ily movie. We get it: The adult
characters act like children, hence
the title, but it gets entirely too
overbearing. it ultimately climaxes
in an absurd scene where the line
"Let's run away together" exists in
complete seriousness, and to which
Kate Winslet giggles and emphati-
cally replies "M'kay!"
I'm not entirely sure what is
supposed to be oscar-worthy
about Winslet's performance
here. Besides being adept at act-
ing like an 8-year-old, she also
proves once again that she excels
at playing a bored, naive woman
who likes to get naked. Not that
I'm complaining, of course. She
was supposedly slighted when
"Titanic" swept the Oscars, hav-
ing the dubious honor of being
the only person involved in the
film not receiving a statue. But if
she didn't win for her role in that
film, she shouldn't be considered
for gold here as she plays the
same character aged 10 years.
There you have it, now bring on
the hate-mail. You have the right to
convince me I'm wrong.
But I'm not.
- E-mail Tassi at tassipumich.edu.
Is "Pan's Labyrinth" the new live-action ch
KIDS
From page 1B
ity plays. The G rating today is obso-
lete, with the marketplace calling
for edgier PG films with more uni-
versal appeal. If you can get adults
to go, with or without the kids, why
not do it?
But the live-action children's
movie has failed to find its place in
this new paradigm, and filmmak-
ers with creative aspirations in that
direction have simply begun mak-
ing their movies for adults. Even the
last of the conventional live-action
children's franchises, "Harry Potter,"
has now descended into full-on PG-13
territory,leadingsome in the industry
to joke that by the time the seventh
and final film is released, an R rating
might not be out of the question.
That might be going a little far for
a franchise valued in the billions of
dollars, but looking back on the past
year, two movies that might have
otherwise been children's prod-
ucts are now R-rated films aimed
squarely at adults. "Duck Season,"
a little-seen feature from Mexico,
follows two boys who are stranded
in an apartment on a Sunday after-
noon with no power and nothing to
do. The film morphs into a hilarious
and at times philosophical tale of
the boys as they spend the afternoon
ildren's movie?
with a pizza guy (who they refuse to
pay because he was 11 seconds late)
and an older girl one unit over.
There are revelations and back
stories, weed brownies and personal
epiphanies, and the entire time you
can't help but shake the feeling that
the whole thing is so completely,
inescapably adult. I showed the film
to my 15-year-old brother, and he
responded only to the loss of the
video games and the kids getting
high. And when I tried to explain the
duck metaphor to him, he gave me a
bitch-please look and left the room.
An even clearer case comes with
"Pan's Labyrinth," 2006's best-
reviewed movie, which takes a
bizarrely imagined fantasy world
as its mode for exploring fascism
in World War Il-era Spain. In the
film, a young girl's adventures in
the underworld add a fanciful alle-
gorical subtext to the more tradi-
tional side of the story. Based on
the visual-heavy marketing, a typi-
cal moviegoer could be forgiven for
mistaking the film for a dark kids'
fantasy, although in actuality, it's
among the most violent and fright-
ening movies of the year.
Most reviews, sensing the poten-
tial for a younger audience, have
been careful to warn parents not
to take their kids; Picturehouse,
the film's American distributor, has
spent a huge number of marketing
dollars to encourage the opposite.
Yet last Saturday, in an evening
screening at an area multiplex, the
near-sold-out auditorium was filled
with expectant adults. The numbers
for the film's expansion out of tradi-
tionally art-house-friendly urban
centers and into suburban theaters
have been strong, and it was just
nominated for six Academy Awards,
extremely rare for a foreign-lan-
guage film. "Pan's Labyrinth" has
clearly found an adult audience.
Contrast that with, say, "Down-
fall," another movie about fascism
released last year that was equally
well regarded (and even touted by
some to be the best movie about
Hitler ever made). "Downfall" never
expanded from 174 theaters; "Pan's
Labyrinth" is already in 609, and
last weekend was the No. 7 movie in
the nation.
It's clear "Pan's Labyrinth" has
captured so much attention because
of its fantasy elements, although
they actually make up a rather small
amount of the movie (much more of
the story is devoted a fascist general
and the grassroots resistance against
him than to the advertised world
of fauns and fairies). This fantasy
outfitting for a conventional adult
tale paired with the film's smash-
ing success make "Pan's" a textbook
example of how to satisfy the cre-
ative hunger left in the absence of
youthful live-action stories. While
animated movies now strive to bring
in alldemographics, live-action mov-
ies about kids might begin to give up
entirely on a younger audience.
It's far too early to see if movies
like these will continue to thrive,
and live-action blockbusters like
"Night atthe Museum" arestillbigat
the box office among young people.
But as kid-centric movies starring
real kids living real lives become
increasingly rare, it seems a logical
direction for the genre to go. And
maybe that's OK. With innovations
in 3D animation alone guarantee-
ing the continued attendance of the
coveted adolescent demographic,
and adults with HDTVs simultane-
ously fleeing the multiplex setting,
any creative movement that can
help preserve the theatrical experi-
ence is worthy of exploration.
DAILY ARTS.
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