In their 17th feature, the perfectionists of Pixar once again give us a visually magnificent picture that’s complex without being complicated, poignant without being mawkish, modest but on a wide, rich scale. What other studio builds ambitious, uplifting gems that also pack a gut punch? Pixar balances the dark and the light so deftly that it’s hard to distinguish between the two.
The film, an animated coming-of-age tale with a very strong backbone, is the sort of triumph that fillets its competitors with a fish knife. The leading lady is Dory, an adorable, sometimes bumbling blue tang suffering from short-term memory loss (voiced by a perfectly cast Ellen DeGeneres). Introduced as a comic sidekick in 2003’s Finding Nemo, she spent her film debut helping a needy clownfish (with the deadpan delivery of Albert Brooks) reconnect with his lost son.
In this sequel she tries to reunite with her own parents (Diane Keaton and Eugene Levy), who went missing years earlier. Dory remembers them in flashbacks but is unable to recall where they might be. The quest carries her to a California marine life institute where she’s aided by a gruff octopus (Ed O’Neill), a whale shark (“It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s” Kaitlin Olson) and a beluga whale (Ty Burrell), all of them as imperfect as their little blue friend.
The only truly flawless character here is Sigourney Weaver, playing Sigourney Weaver. You’ll need to see the film to figure out that particular angle; I won’t spoil it here.
Dory’s return is also a comeback of sorts for the visionary Andrew Stanton, co-writing and directing as he did the original. When Stanton stepped away from making Pixar hits to helm Disney’s science fiction fantasy John Carter, some prophets of doom worried that Pixar’s golden years were ending. With that bigger (but not better) live action flop imploded behind him, Stanton returns to the kind of adventures and characters he was meant to put on screen.
The finale is a dynamic race and chase involving a truck transferring the aquarium’s fish to a faraway environment, a frantically funny sequence unlike anything in Finding Nemo. Here Stanton is building on his earlier hit to give us a follow-up with surprises we didn’t know we wanted. You don’t know how much fun there is in a sucker-armed octopod blindly driving a big truck against highway traffic until you see it.
This sequel is funny without sugarcoating its serious undercurrents. In classic Pixar form, the themes of family, home and identity are an ongoing subtext. As in Up and Inside Out, there are moments of touching heartbreak amid the lively humor.
In an existential moment, the harsh meaning of her limited memory hits young Dory. Anxiously, she asks her parents, “What if I forget you? Will you forget me?” Dory’s chatter is presented less like laughable absurd illogic and more like a genuine special needs disability. She’s the sober main focus, as if the film was about a lovable child with developmental delays.
The focus on a family of fish trying to reunite across an ocean reflects real-life gulfs between parents and children in ways that are painful, funny, suspenseful yet never melodramatic. Here there are none of the dangerous sharks, anglerfish and jellyfish we saw in the predecessor.
Finding Dory doesn’t deal in villains. It shows us that navigating life is a difficult challenge on its own.
Poignant and soulful, Finding Dory proves once again that Pixar is the pillar of the modern animated world, producing deeply resonant and instantly memorable classics almost without fail. You don’t need to have children or be a child or an animation fan to admire their work. All you need are eyes and a mind and a heart. —Star Tribune (Minneapolis)/TNS
Resurgence a dull disaster
By Michael Phillips
From the metallic shell of the 1996 smash Independence Day, director Roland Emmerich has pulled a seriously lousy sequel, dripping with alien goo and incoherence.
Will Smith, star of the original, passed on the sequel. Smart move. The list of performers who thought, instead, “Oh, what the hell, it’s money, and how bad can it be?” include the beloved Jeff Goldblum, back as alien-defense expert David Levinson, but this time pushed into strained panic-reaction shots throughout.
Bill Pullman, now the ex-president, is haunted by visions of a second alien invasion. Judd Hirsch returns as Goldblum’s dad, who commandeers a school bus full of orphaned preteens. Brent Spiner boomerangs back, in long gray wig and finally roused from a 20-year coma (“How long was I out?” he says, in the film’s sole amusing line), as Dr Brackish Okun, obsessed with alien technology.
Then there’s a fleet of calculatedly diverse 25(ish) hotshots, spearheaded by brash Liam Hemsworth; Jessie T Usher, portraying the son of the original Will Smith character; Maika Monroe as the former prez’s jet pilot daughter, engaged to Hemsworth’s Top Gun-inspired maverick. They’re joined by, among others, the Chinese actress Angelababy as Rain Lao, who plays another pilot hanging around the defense base established on the moon. Soon these pups are pressed into dogfight service, while the sound effects go “Ptew! Ptew!” and the audience wonders: Honestly, is this the best human/alien aerial dogfight ya got?
The aliens suck entire cities into the sky, and then plop them back down. A kid rescues a puppy. The queen-bee alien chases the little yellow school bus. The tonal switchbacks from camp to action to wisecracks to exposition to action again could give you whiplash, and little of it clicks.
There’s a new, bigger UFO, 3,000 miles in diameter, which is just dumb. Watching Resurgence, it’s clear straight off: You can up the ante all you like. But if your witty asides aren’t witty, and your digital effects are more of the same, and your editing juggles the various plotlines so ineptly … then you have a movie like this one.
What I remember best from the first Independence Day are two things: the alien autopsy scene, icky and startling and suspenseful, and, in the final confrontation, Goldblum and Smith taunting the alien like a couple of kids. Those scenes I remember. I saw Resurgence an hour and a half ago, and I feel like an alien wiped my memory clean already.— Chicago Tribune/TNS
Big in scale, tiny in originality
By Colin Covert
It’s hard to know whether to welcome X-Men: Apocalypse with melancholic disappointment or testy annoyance.
Bryan Singer, a more than capable director, once again returns to the Marvel mutant saga he began in 2000. He launched the first two films in the series with a level of craftsmanship and intelligence that turned the comic-book genre into big, serious business.
And now there’s this hollow, unfocused mess. Singer’s fourth X-Men film is not just a step down, it’s a fall down the stairs.
This time the story is action all the way. There are a dozen sequences where the camera tumbles down some rabbit hole of doom, or looks on while immense boulders crush casualties. They feel like visual diagrams of the movie’s collapse. It’s big in scope and scale and tiny in originality.
This X-Men episode deposits them in the 80s, but opens with a dismal prologue in Egypt, 3600 BC. Flattening landmarks is an action film staple, and here the destruction hits a gargantuan pyramid. Inside that structure is En Sabah Nur aka Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac), a ruthless entity absorbing eternal life through ornate enchanted technology.
His immortality is halted when guards betray him, crashing the sloping walls atop him like dominoes. Millennia later he returns to the surface like a really cross mummy, raising an army of evil mutant allies and making magic-wavy-hand gestures against humans.
Apocalypse also seems to be juggling the film’s convoluted plot lines and character back stories, which scarcely fit together; 16 comic book characters returns here, none of them holding center stage.
James McAvoy’s schoolmaster for young mutants, Professor X, delivers another serving of his signature charm, moving into new, anguished territory only when Apocalypse grows to Paul Bunyan size and pounds him with giant fists. Michael Fassbender reprises his role as the antihero Magneto, levitating himself while pinching his face into a constipated scowl. Jennifer Lawrence propels her scenes through sheer force of personality.
Never for a moment does this X-Men revisit the issues of tribal prejudice, minority rights and alienation that made Bryan Singer’s earlier films so compelling.
The film would be a success if the only thing that mattered in films was making profit.— Star Tribune (Minneapolis)/TNS
DVDs courtesy:
Saqr Entertainment Stores, Doha
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