The House Next Door

Oh, thank goodness. I, too, loathed Happy Feet for the reasons specified, but everyone I know just thought it was delightful for some reason.

In Toronto, someone in the audience asked Harry Shearer how he came up with his FYC character, and he responded, "I started with myself, and took away all the parts that I like." That's the whole movie, really. That, and Guest saying with a straight face that there hasn't been a movie satirizing Hollywood since The Player.

Home for Purim - If that title makes you smile then you're in good hands here, as Guest seems to feel that Jewishness is, in and of itself, inherently hilarious.

I don't know why I feel the need to reply to this, but I must say, I don't think the title Home for Purim making you smile implies finding Judaism inherently funny. There's a specificity to that title - Purim being the sole day some consume alcohol - that makes me smile, if not laugh out loud. Unless the idea of family get togethers with an out-of-the-ordinary injection of alcohol is off limits for comedy, of course.

Had it been Home for Chanukah, I'd agree with you. Also, I can't speak for the rest of the film, as I haven't seen it, and don't plan to. Like I said, no idea why I felt compelled to post for this. But, there it is. Cheers!

I can't believe you both trashed For Your Consideration and didn't mention the amazing performance from Catherine O'Hara that anchors the film to a certain degree. She becomes a Hollywood Frankenstein over the course of this movie and it's heartbreaking and hilarious to watch.

Catherine O'Hara DOES deserve award recognition in the most vile Academy way: an honorary statue for a slighted but brilliant career. Her work with Guest is some of the best comedic acting ever. But FYC was a pretty awful movie, one note and obvious. I felt myself rooting for it for the first half only to be dumbfounded by the turns the second half took to undercut what came before.

Respectful disappointment seems to be the consensus round here for THE FOUNTAIN. Well, barring Sean. "[A]n audience unfriendly, unsatisfying, undisciplined, self-indulgent wank-off"? OK, but the Sorkin comparison was below the belt.

I haven't gotten around to FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION yet, as Guest's caustic misanthropy always seemed ill-matched by his soft-center formlessness, less chocolate-coated razor blades than a marshmellow stuffed with needles. But I'll wind up going for the actors and, based on Guest's previous efforts, will probably wind up enjoying it for them. Not just Fred Willard's effortless scene-stealing (though more credit for his hilarity in BEST IN SHOW should have gone to Jim Piddock's straight-man heavylifting), but Catherine O'Hara and Eugene Levy's ability to drag Guest's sketches into something recognizably, painfully human. Friends who've seen it, and weren't impressed, say O'Hara scores again at least.

And HAPPY FEET was a considerable disappointment to this George Miller fan, though I actually quite liked the eerie aquarium scene.

As for THE FOUNTAIN:

Yes it's problematic -- Matt's already detailed its deficiencies -- but the thing I respond to is its overflow of heartfelt emotion. I'm a sucker for it, really.

However, I don't like the characterization of Izzy (or Queen Isabella or the phantom) one bit but I did find myself liking Hugh Jackman. The worst thing is we're never given any good reason why in the fuck his Tommy would be so devoted to his wife other than the fact that she's pretty, much like in THE CONSTANT GARDNER, another idiot wreckage movie with a thin plot posing as meaty and shallow characters posing as deep all mired in the worst seventh-grade sociological statement about a real-life horrorshow imagineable. What THE FOUNTAIN has going for it is its beautiful compositions and a genuine striving to comprehend our world's mysteries. But it gets caught up in its own middle school philosophizing and weak writing, haulting it from elevating past Sean's apt description, "SOLARIS For Dummies".

I must admit, tho, that while watching the movie I was wholly wrapped up in its locomotion and when Tom cries "I'm gonna die?" it almost worked for me. My biggest problems are those outline by Matt's opening paragraph: it should have been longer and lingered on certain images or ideas. Even Soderberg's SOLARIS (I think his is severly underrated) has more believable human emotions despite its brief running time due to the evocative first act (itself too brief) on Earth and the chemistry of Clooney and Mackelhone (my sp is phonetic, way off, I know).

And the conclusion to the Conquistador segment was brilliant. If only he'd been able to tie the three together better than with the tired manuscript device and maybe shown Tommy finding the tree instead of simply planting the seed. But that may all be budgetary constraints... who knows... as is, it's a plenty worthwhile effort: something you won't see come out of HO'wood every year.

The fountain seems to be an exploding nebula of avoidance to making a considered character driven film. i read his interview in the Onion and what irked me was that when asked a question if he looked back at his films, he stated that to do that was self-hating and narcissistic. hmm..i thought narcissism was self loving..can you have it both ways?..but i pondered his holistic comment at length anyway.

But what it all comes down to is if it entertains in anyway. And I gotta tell you, from the stills and the trailer, I just find the colors, textures and compositions thoroughly tacky and..sort of like new age art.
I haven't seen it yet, but might just out of curiosity.

also I think it's thoroughly simplistic to say the message of Requiem was drugs are bad. C'mon, he didn't pull the story out of his ass. wasn't it a Hugh Selby novel? if anything, addiction is leathal...all four characters are caught in their own hells partly of their own creation and partly of society's.

I'll see FYC for O'Hara..but I think Guest lost his edge after Best In Show. Mighty Wind had one relationship of any worth (O'Hara and Levy-brilliant) holding the whole ensemble movie together. Guest (and co-writer Levy)..have the formula..but they are not digging any deeper. That's a waste.

I'm glad to see that the pendulum is starting to swing back the other way on Christopher Guest. Spinal Tap is a classic; what memory I have of Guffman is that it was amusing but not laugh out loud funny; same for Best in Show, but it at least made me know that I didn't really want to see Mighty Wind. This is truely the cinema of diminishing returns.

Guest likes to compare his style to making jazz (they're both improv, get it?), but if so, it's like hearing the same jazz musician play the same solo over the same song night after night after night, only he changes keys.

My take on The Fountain is here, but in general I think it's a heartfelt movie that overcomplicates its simple premise and reductive conclusions. I admire the passion behind it, but resented how it substitutes rhyming compositions, repeated design touches and somewhat forced attempts to be powerful and uplifting (expect sections of Clint Mansell's score to be used in Olympic qualifying routines) for the messy, powerful feelings inherent in Aronofsky's story. It left me cold -- a reaction I didn't expect, given the subject matter.

Happy Feet is an occasionally brilliant mixed bag. Its brains are in its eyes; I loved Miller's use of Cinemascope aspect ratio to establish both the scope of the two penguin communities and the relationships between its individual members, and there were several sequences so intricate and beautiful that you have to acknowledge their excellence (particularly the Dr. Zhivago-inspired journey to the human encampment, the action sequences with the sea lion and the killer whales, and particularly the first big underwater fishing scene, with the penguins assuming Blue Angels formations and then mimicking the rolling motions of waves). The high-speed crane shots and faux-helicopter shots were flashy and rather bludgeoning -- like something out of a Jerry Bruckheimer/Michael Bay/Tony Scott movie -- but in general this was the most visually intelligent new musical I've seen in a while.

But message-wise, the movie's a muddle, and its trafficking in ethnic stereotypes and hip-hop culture signifiers doesn't sit well with me. I like the idea of the penguins as stand-ins for exploited Third Worlders whose means of sustenance is about to be obliterated by industrial forces (taking their history and traditions along with it). And I like the idea of Mumbles as an ostracized outsider who hews to his muse and becomes an ambassador between different penguin cultures (and then to the human interlopers).

On the minus side: the film's structure is so lopsided that it feels like two, even three different movies; so much energy is expended on the familiar (even tired) outsider-saves-the-day stuff (yes, it's inspiring, but it's the plot of nearly every American animated feature of the last 20 years) that when Miller finally sets Mumbles en route to the human encampment (a much more powerful and urgent thread) it feels like a PC digression, and less resonant than it should have been for precisely that reason.

As far as the penguins as Third World stand-ins, it's fairly bizarre that Miller cast the Emperor penguins almost exclusively with white voice actors (some of whom, notably Brittany Murphy, affect a B-girl sassy whine) but built their musical culture around R&B-derived pop and dance tracks (some of which have sexual innuendo that's not appropriate for the very young children who are the studio's target audience), peppered the dialogue with slang that's going to be dated in about five minutes, and threw in wild card bits of casting that further muddled things up (particularly Fat Joe as the XXL-sized, basso-voiced Seymour). There's an element of liberal minstrelsy to the whole thing -- environmentally aware and pro-multicultural messages used as pretext for pretty clumsy racial/ethnic spelunking and eager-beaver pandering to commercial radio playlists (Moulin Rouge is despised by many here, but its lineup of songs and song fragments was much more surprising and wide-ranging). The idea of the Emperor penguins as the dominant penguin culture, lording it over the smaller (Mexican??) penguins was interesting -- a touch of School Daze in a kids' movie -- but it just seemed an unecessary complication of a film whose dramatic heart is the endangerment of the penguins by the developers (i.e., the same people who bought tickets to see this movie). And can the federal government just pass a law forbidding Robin Williams from doing his "black guy" and "Mexican guy" voice for, say, ten years or so? Well-meaning as Happy Feet might be, there were moments when it reminded me of one of my friends in high school, a white dude who affected a "black" speech pattern he learned from listening to old Redd Foxx and Richard Pryor records, and said things like "sheee-it" and "nigga, please" around black folks to show how "down" he was.

As for the Guest film, I laughed a lot at For Your Consideration, but it was probably more out of familarity and affection for Guest's actors than out of respect for the movie. There were some nice touches -- the fades-to-black, particularly -- but this was the first Guest film that I felt added nothing new to his established formula. Waiting for Guffman had an element of self-loathing (depicting the showbiz impulse as a form of clueless exhibitionism, and making the brutal but necessary observation that just because being creative makes you feel good doesn't mean that what you're doing is worth a damn -- for some reason, this is interpreted as "cynicism," but to me it seems like a dose of hard reality in an otherwise sweet movie). Best in Show, the pinnacle of Guest's filmography, had empathy and melancholy and a generosity of spirit (manifested in even his most cutting films) that Guest's detractors either overlook or choose not to notice. (Altman himself would be proud to have filmed the relationship between Guest's trucker and his bloodhound, or that astounding scene where Michael McKean's character gets on the phone and straightforwardly and unironically sings his dog to sleep like it's a child.) And A Mighty Wind pushed further into sentimentality than any of Guest's films, successfully I thought. (That climactic "A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow" performance is just lovely.) But this time I often found myself wishing I was watching another Guest movie instead. It was pretty much the same story as Waiting for Guffman, except the naive hope of being anointed by a critic had been turned into the native hope of being anointed by AMPAS. And yes, the disconnect between the way Oscar campaigns are actually waged and Guest's pre-Internet ignorance of same is rather pathetic. The scenes where Fred Willard' showbiz "journalist" humiliates the "losers" on camera wasn't just a cheap attempt at pathos, it was bullshit, like a Howard Stern prank transplanted onto Access Hollywood; Hollywood's infotainment industry may be craven, stupid and opportunistic, but it's never done anything remotely that vicious. It plays like Guest's hysterical projection of whatever insecurity he has about being a public figure.

Also -- and this is a big problem -- the movie-within-a-movie is so clearly awful, an obvious parody along the lines of the Gone With the Wind sendup on the old Carol Burnett Show, that there's no way anyone involved in this supposedly professional production would take the Oscar talk seriously. It would have been much more interesting if the film-within-a-film had been played straight, if it seemed as though it might actually have been a good story with strong dialogue and acting and direction. That would have made the Oscar talk more believable (thus making the ensuing intrigue more intense and the suspense more acute), and it would have amplified the pathos when the inevitable Guffman anti-payoff finally arrived. As is, it makes everyone in the film seem like a moron, and that, in turn, makes the laughs rather cheap. The Best in Show and Mighty Wind characters were delusional, too, but they seemed like decent people in addition to being eccentrics, and they were clearly good at what they did; the dog trainers in Show clearly knew how to raise and handle dogs, and the Mighty Wind folk tunes actually sounded like tunes from a particular era. Strange that this new movie, set in an environment Guest presumably knows intimately (see his other Hollywood sendup The Big Picture), would feel so much more misinformed -- and unreal -- than his other films.

matt..
"that astounding scene where Michael McKean's character gets on the phone and straightforwardly and unironically sings his dog to sleep like it's a child."

the fact that the song Mckean was singing to his pet was so depressing was what made me enjoy that scene.

I thought Best In Show was Guest's best aswell..
My favorite line:
Eugene Levy in the Hotel storage room asking Ed Begley Jr about the ammenities: "Um..room service?"

Also, the studio really needs to put this Sean Burns quote on the DVD box: "Happy Feet made me wish I still smoked weed."

The minstrel aspect of HAPPY FEET is the weirdest part of a deeply, deeply weird movie. (Like the old Looney Tunes, it wouldn't have had a prayer of getting made if it weren't aimed at children.) I mean, does the hero of the movie really tap-dance his way to social acceptance? And could they not have put a non-white face in the audience at the zoo?

RE, Happy Feet:
As is any project Miller's involved in, you have to wonder how much over all controll he had. With the second BABE, it seems like he was given free reign due to the first film's successes and he made a masterpiece. A masterpiece that's hardly remembered by families because it was so wildly different (in tone, in spots) than its predecessor. The first trailer for HAPPY FEET made me cringe and the end credit music has done nothing but keep me from watching the whole thing...

RE, Guest:
Matt, you identified the baffoonery as it is: a bunch of unrealistic morons. I, too, was laughing out of respect for the actors and their quirks rather than the film as a whole. I expected the cast to eat their hats but I didn't expect the sophomoric touch of the altruistic actor-boyfriend as the only cast member to get a nod. My only guess as to why all the films-within-the-film are bad is another juvenile assumption that everything made in HO'wood is, well, juvenile and idiotic and bad. So bad that there's no barometer of good left and only the worst gets recognition. Except, of course, Home for Thanksgiving. And why not address the idea of, Maybe the multi-culti Jew-picture would have garnered nominations based solely on its religious politics? Mostly, I felt let down.

Sam Adams: I mean, does the hero of the movie really tap-dance his way to social acceptance?

I think they should have called Miller's movie Crash of the Penguins. Its message of "can't we all just get along," combined with the Jim McGreeveyesque barely hidden message of "I'm a gay Antartican" is just as loopy, contrived and loony as Paul Haggis' take on "human nature." Critics seem to be falling over it for the same reason they blew their loads over Crash: If you believe the shit they're shoveling, you'll feel superior.

Miller seems to want to perpetuate goofy stereotypes before scaring the shit out of kids. Roald Dahl heain't.

Minstrelsy is a good word to use. We have Robin Williams playing the suburban White interpretation of Black, and a penguin who tap dances and smiles so furiously I expected his eyes to start bugging out, like Willie Best, before saying "Feets, do yo' stuff!" All I needed was a Shirley Temple penguin to join him. (As much as I love Savion Glover, his angry-as-hell choreography doesn't fit a smiling cartoon penguin.)

The entire thing felt like Pat Boone's version of Tutti Fruitti: It thinks its hip because it sings a rowdy song in the blandest way possible. And if Robin Williams drags out one more tired-ass ethnic voice, I hope they sentence him to a reality program on BET.

As for FYC, I loved Catherine O'Hara's performance, but I agree that the film is half-assed and lazy. I walked in expecting to adore this movie, and was disappointed at nearly every turn as Guest let so many ripe opportunities wither and die on the vine. The meanspiritedness of the piece didn't bother me; I was distressed by the number of scenes that went absolutely nowhere.

Sean Burns, I am going into Photoshop right now and altering a Happy Feet poster to include your blurb on it. I'll send it to you.

I loathed Happy Feet because most of it was cliched, with a by-the-numbers plot and resolution, and tonally it was a horrible mishmash of random irrelevant details at cross-purposes with each other, peppered with tiresome cultural stereotypes.

And it had a deus ex machina ending solely intended to let the audience off the hook. A much bolder film would have ended with Mumbles in the aquarium and his community starving to death. If the film had cared about its characters much, it might even have been able to work up the viciousness to close with a family sitting around the TV watching the Disney channel with a cut to a commercial for Captain D's.

There was a fleeting moment near the end of Happy Feet where after 75-minutes of over-caffeinated ethnic stereotypes and pat messages about being yourself no matter what anyone else said, I was convinced the film was going to end with our hero a drugged-out drone, content as a slave happily gobbling down the food fed to him and dancing for snot-nosed kids after engaging in a Sisyphean journey. I quickly looked around the audience, counting-off how many of these kids were going to be escorted from the theater in tears on their way to a baby's first visit to the therapist, and a perverse smile creeped across my face. Of course, all of that's thrown completely out the window in time for our hero to get the girl, the respect of his dad and save the day. Now that's depressing.

Having just found this post by the late (of some two and a half years, almost), I'll be the odd-man-out and say that a lot of these complaints about "Happy Feet" are - a little ridiculous. Sure, some have weight, when you're talking about the plot and the structure of the film. But, when you start calling it "liberal minstrelsy" and "pandering to commercial radio playlists" and all of that, you lose me, because it's - well, ridiculous.

As far as Robin Williams goes - that was one of the things I enjoyed most about this film, was that it reminded me why he'd become such a large name in the first place, as voice acting goes. He's used in measured amounts, where he's needed, and he's not allowed to overtake it. I know, I know. He's doing a "black" voice, and a "Latino" voice - although, the latter I don't see how you could foster any complaint toward, given the context. And, the same goes for the "black" voice - which seemed to be more of a Southernly Baptist pulpiteer voice than anything (I've spent a lot of time around many of them, black and white, I should know).

Somebody said that most of the film's energy is used up by the time Mumble goes off for the encampment by the "outsider-saves-the-day" plot - but, that's the thing. He hasn't saved the day. He's been outcast, again, by family and the rest of the penguin colony, and there's no real indication that he's going to succeed until the scene in the zoo. Up to that point, it's "Don Quixote."

As far as the songs go, they seemed to be cherry-picked with far more skill than Moulin Rouge, which throws that element in your face repeatedly with "LOOK AT ME" in big red letters, and is a hodge-podge of anything they could throw in. Here, as somebody else said, Miller spends no time in explaining these rituals to the audience, and lets contextualization fill in the gaps; there was a subtextual basis in the story for every song used, and some of them were very un-obvious choices, aptly used - The Beatles during that final montage, for example.

And, while I don't have much to say about Mumble-as-minstrel (I even think that was intentional, given some of the interpretations of the film I've heard), anyone who's seen Savion Glover knows that he's smiling almost eternally, during his performances - he loves his art, and I'd far from call that 'minstrelsy.'

Still, ironically, the comments here ring far more of 'white guilt' than the film does.