Well-rounded ‘Pete’

By SYDNEY COHEN

For The Daily

Right on cue, the Disney movie 

mill has churned out another high-
quality film with a big-name cast, 
this time in the 
form of simple 
and 
frothy 

children’s 
film 

“Pete’s Dragon.” 
While the film 
is not altogether 
remarkable, 
it 

stands to argue 
that sometimes 
meeting expec-
tations of mediocrity can be pleas-
ing in its own right. With its own 
set of high and low moments, 
“Pete’s Dragon” boasts of child-
hood whimsy in the classic Disney 
fashion.

The film follows the story of 

its titular character, a young boy 
named Pete (Oakes Fegley, “Board-
walk Empire”) who is orphaned 
and stranded in the woods after 
his parents die in a sudden car 
accident. After wandering around 
the forest alone and afraid, Pete is 
rescued by a friendly and impres-
sively 
animated 
furry 
green 

dragon, whom he dubs Elliot. Fast 
forward six years, and cue a classic 
Tarzan-esque scene of Pete, long-
haired and loin-clothed, tromp-
ing through the forest with Elliot, 
carefree and uninhibited. How 

he’s survived for six years in the 
forest with no adult supervision 
is unimportant — the film offers a 
heartwarming picture of two lost 
boys who have created a home for 
themselves in the wilderness.

Pete’s status quo is interrupt-

ed by the introduction of a cast 
of human characters, including 
Natalie (Oona Laurence, “South-
paw”), the curious young girl; 
Grace (Bryce Dallas Howard, “The 
Help”), the maternal forest ranger; 
and Meacham (Robert Redford, “A 
Walk in the Woods”), the folkloric 
grandfather. Pete is discovered 
and reluctantly taken to the nearby 
town, and struggles to adjust to the 
civilized world in a stressful scene 
of sensory overload. As he begins 
to settle in with Grace and her 
family, Pete struggles to negotiate 
between his sense of belonging and 
his sense of home.

The largest blemish on an oth-

erwise pleasant story is the film’s 
overarching conflict; Karl Urban 
(“Star Trek”) plays the antagonist 
with a disturbingly bloodthirsty 
quality that seems starkly out of 
place in a children’s movie. Urban’s 
character hunts, shoots, chains 
and keeps captive the harmless 
green dragon with admittedly zero 
motivation other than to prove he’s 
capable of doing it. The result is 
equally traumatizing and comical 
as Urban’s unmotivated violence 
serves no purpose other than to 

further the plot. Disney insists on 
creating a human villain with vio-
lent tendencies rather than delving 
deeper into internal psychological 
conflicts such as culture shock and 
what it means to belong.

For the most part, “Pete’s 

Dragon” is a charming adaption 
of its namesake children’s story, 
wrought with fantastical story-
book charm. The score by Daniel 
Hart (“Comet”) is whimsical and 
infectious, and the gratuitous land-
scape shots of the north pacific for-
est are gorgeous. Furthermore, the 
film’s most prominent gold nugget 
is the ease with which the charac-
ters in the film accept the existence 
of the mythical creature. There is 
no conflict with what constitutes 
reality; for example, Pete’s crayon 
drawing of Elliot is not met with 
skepticism by Grace, but with curi-
osity. The film ultimately retains 
the theme that childhood belief in 
something that doesn’t seem plau-
sible shouldn’t be ignored or down-
graded, but instead explored and 
praised. The film stands out from 
other members of the children’s 
fantasy genre as it subtly sub-
verts the traditional development 
of skepticism to understanding, 
instead offering trust in the unbe-
lievable. Simple and predictable, 
“Pete’s Dragon” isn’t the worst 
thing to be pumped out of Disney, 
nor is it the best; it simply gets the 
job done.

DISNEY

You’re a wizard, androgynous child.

FILM REVIEW

By MADELEINE GAUDIN

Daily Film Columnist

It wasn’t even intentional. 

It wasn’t a cleanse or a detox 
or a challenge. It just sort of 
happened. I wasn’t supposed to 
learn anything.

I went three months without 

watching a movie. The last 
movie I watched was “The 
Lobster.” So, bonus points for 
a hard-to-hold indie, double 
bonus points for seeing it in 
theaters, triple bonus points 
for seeing it by myself (if you’re 

into that sort of thing).

That was in early June, and 

I haven’t been in a theater 
since. I haven’t even watched 
anything on Netflix. No DVDs 
(throwback!), no pay-per-view, 
no off-brand Blockbuster 
that is somehow still all over 
small-town New Hampshire. 
Nothing.

I was working as a counselor 

at a summer camp in Vermont, 
I had limited access to my 
phone and even more limited 
access to larger screens. The 
Wi-Fi was too slow to stream 

anything and the nearest 
theater was a half hour away. 
So, I was forced to completely 
unplug from my favorite 
strain of pop culture for three 
months.

And it was sort of incredible. 

I’m behind — I’m what’s-the-
name-of-that-new-Adele-song 
level behind. Part of me is 
happy that “Harambe” means 
nothing to me and that I don’t 
know what Donald Trump 
said last week. I am, however, 
a little upset that I didn’t get 
the chance to watch all the 

FILM COLUMN

The power of a pop-
culture sabbatical

wonderful and horrible and 
wonderfully horrible movies 
that came out this summer.

Yes, I know, I can always 

watch these movies (the power 
of the internet!). I didn’t wake 
up from a coma in an alternate 
reality where all popular 
culture had been reset. But, 
it felt overwhelming looking 
at this long list of movies I 
hadn’t seen and trying to find 
a place to start. Should I go 
chronologically or from best 
to worst reviews or vice versa? 
Things got more complicated 
as I began to include other 
films into the running movies 
from the long list I call 
“Movies I’ve Never Watched 
and Sometimes Pretend To 
Have Seen So People Will Stop 
Telling Me to Watch Them.” 
Maybe now would be the best 
time to watch “Star Wars”? Do 
I have to watch the original 
“Ghostbusters” before seeing 
the new one?

I care about being able to 

hold my own in pop culture 
conversations. It’s easy to roll 
my eyes at boys in my film 
classes who cannot believe I 
haven’t seen “The Godfather.” 
But watching the value of my 
thoughts decrease (even in the 
eyes of a very eye-roll-worthy 
film boy) is hard.

I know I have something to 

say about movies, no matter 
what I’ve seen. If the pop 
culture reset I got this summer 
has taught me anything, it’s 
that it doesn’t matter. I’m 
not an expert. I’m not the 
most well-versed film buff at 
this school. But that doesn’t 
matter to me anymore. My film 
knowledge can’t be measured 
by what I haven’t seen, rather 
by what I have.

So, that’s why I’m still here. 

That’s why I can still be here 
(despite what film boy has to 
say), writing about something 
that I don’t know everything 

about. And as I begin to take 
residence in this weird little 
space called the Daily Arts Film 
Column, it is important for me 
to justify (mostly to myself) 
why I’m here. I’m not an expert 
and I never will be. I’m here 
because I like stories and I like 
art and I like to look at things 
and listen to things, and if you 
pour all that into one cup, it 
makes a mixed drink called 
cinema and that is something I 
really love.

Despite the sky clearing and 

the choir of angels singing, the 
queue on my Netflix still made 
my head hurt.

So instead, I chose what 

I wanted to watch. And I 
rewatched “Heathers.” And it 
was so very, and in my humble 
(yet very valid) opinion, much 
better than “Star Wars.”

Still hung up on “The 

Lobster”? Take a breather and 

e-mail mgaudin@umich.edu

BOOK REVIEW
‘Choice’ parodies 
modern testing

By KARL WILLIAMS

Daily Arts Writer

Chilean 
writer 
Alejandro 

Zambra’s latest book is a nov-
elty — it’s a novel written in 
the 
form 
of 

a 
multiple 

choice 
exam. 

The 
premise 

sounds like a 
joke and seems 
to resign the 
book to failure 
at first look. 
One wonders can he pull it off? 
Can he sustain the conceit for 
an entire book?

The short answer is that he 

does. And brilliantly so. “Mul-
tiple Choice,” the fifth of Zam-
bra’s books to be translated into 
English, is a strikingly original, 
funny and moving novel. At a 
little over 100 pages, a char-
acteristic length for Zambra, 
it’s a firework of a book in the 
mode of Nabokov’s “Pale Fire” 
and Cortazar’s “Hopscotch.” 
The book is an act of remem-
brance, a formal experiment, 
metafictional rift on education 
and Chilean society, a comic 
game of literary interpretation, 
a political critique and a parody 
of standardized testing — all in 
one. Few books can do so much 
with so little.

The book repurposes the 

college entrance exam under 

Pinochet 
— 
the 
Academic 

Aptitude Exam — becoming 
not just formally innovative but 
politically charged. It’s based 
on the test from 1993, the year 
Zambra, who loves to play with 
the ambiguities between fiction 
and life, took it. He recycles a 
piece of dreaded bureaucratic 
material and transforms it into 
a magnificent parody of the 
inadequacy 
of 
standardized 

testing. As a teacher says to his 
former students near the end of 
the book, “you weren’t educated, 
you were trained.” Zambra’s 
book is an exercise in this 
miseducation.

“Multiple Choice” is a series 

of vignettes of life in Chile under 
the Pinochet regime. Zambra 
tells the stories of everyday 
citizens during the dictatorship 
in the strangest forms. The 
book is divided into five tests: 
Excluded Term, Sentence Order, 
Sentence Completion, Sentence 
Elimination 
and 
Reading 

Comprehension. Zambra makes 
great use out of the narrative 
possibilities that these forms 
bring.

Zambra’s novel risks being 

merely clever but overcomes 
it. Because of its brevity (could 
anyone read a 500-page book in 
the same form?) and Zambra’s 
ability to realize characters 
almost 
immediately 
upon 

entrance, the book works well 

both as a series of revelations 
about Chilean life and as a comic 
enactment of the standardized 
test.

In Reading Comprehension, 

which consists of three different 
reading tests and is the finest 
section of the book, we get the 
stories of the Covarrubias, who 
cheat on the college entrance 
exam so that both can get into 
the best college; of a recently 
married couple in Chile, where 
divorce was illegal until 2004; 
and of a father who writes a 
letter to his son in which he 
expresses regret that his son 
was ever born. These are all 
good stories on their own, 
and when reading, one forgets 
they’re part of a test.

In 
the 
second 
section, 

about the married couple, for 
example, Zambra shows his 
acerbic wit. The fourth question 
reads: “According to the text, at 
the beginning of the twenty-
first century the nation of 
Chile was: A) Conservative in 
its morality and liberal in its 
economy. B) Conservative in 
its inebriety and artificial in all 
things holy. C) Innovative in its 
levity and literal in its tragedy. 
D) Aggressive in its religiosity 
and conjugal in its wizardry. E) 
Exhaustive in its chicanery and 
indecisive in its celerity.” It’s a 
90-question test, but somehow 
they’re almost all this good.

Multiple 
Choice

Alejandro Zambra

Penguin Books

B+

Pete’s 
Dragon

Rave & Qual-
ity 16

Disney

He recycles 
a piece of 
dreaded 

bureaucracy.

Zambra makes 
great use out of 
the narrative 
possibilities.

Few books 
can do so 

much with so 

little. 

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Wednesday, September 7, 2016 — 5A

