Movie Box Review

Animation has, over the past decade, passed beyond being merely a movie genre to a veritable industry within the industry.  Every studio is in the business now, making films year-round that routinely cost $125-200M to produce, with another $100-150M for worldwide marketing.  It's worth the risk, because nothing is as profitable for a studio as an animated franchise that works, with its gigantic opportunities not just for sequels and spin-offs, but ancillaries like TV series and merchandising.  Plus, unlike superhero movies, most cartoons are original properties that the studios can own from the ground up, and even the superstar actors who provide voiceovers get just a fraction of the deals they command when they have to spend months in front of a camera.  That's a lot of pressure on what are mostly insubstantial comedies, but as the segment has matured, quality has become more widespread too--although Pixar/Disney still, of course, towers over everyone else, we've recently had excellent pictures from DreamWorks (How To Train Your Dragon) and Paramount (Rango).  The new RIO from 20th/Blue Sky (makers of the Ice Age series) isn't quite at that level, but it's a very creditable entertainment that should delight a lot of children without making their adult companions suffer.

The setting is, well--guess.  Actually, the story starts in Minnesota, where the only male blue macaw left in the world (named, with a certain lack of originality, Blu) lives in glorious mutual nerdiness with his owner Linda, in the bookstore she runs.  He's voiced by Jesse Eisenberg, and truly it's rare that an actor was so born to voice a part (Linda is Leslie Mann).  Blu's only shortcoming is an inability to fly, but in the limited life he and Linda have, he's adapted to it with ease.  One day, a Brazilian ornithologist named Tulio (Rodrigo Santoro) shows up to tell Linda that he has the only female blue macaw, and that she must let the two birds get together in order to save the species.  Reluctantly, she agrees, and when bird and girl arrive in Rio, nothing goes as planned:  the female, named Jewel (Anne Hathaway) is uninterested in the extreme in mating with Blu, and disdainful of his flightlessness.  Worse, a group of smugglers, aided by the villainous cockatoo Nigel (Jemaine Clement), capture the two macaws and shackle them together.  The rest of the tale is about the escape and romance of the heroes, aided by various wildlife voiced by, among others, Jamie Foxx, Will i Am, George Lopez and Tracy Morgan.

The storyline of Rio is rarely unpredictable--do you really wonder if Blu will take flight before the movie is over?--and one wishes the script had a little more cleverness and character (Pixar has spoiled us forever).  It's one of those committee jobs, with 4 screenwriters credited (Don Rhymer, Joshua Sternin, Jeffrey Ventimilia, Sam Harper) and 3 more for the story (Saldanha, Earl Richey Jones, Todd R. Jones), and as you'd expect, it doesn't quite achieve cohesion.  But it bounces along nicely, and sometimes it's downright funny.  Along with Eisenberg's perfect neurotic vocal, Hathaway is a most spirited romantic adversary, and she even gets to sing a little (listening to the two of them, you wish they'd do something live action together, like an updated spin on Midnight Run).  Clement is a terrifically vicious villain, and he has the best song, a paean to meanness called "Nasty Bird." Even the guest stars along for the ride, like Morgan and Lopez, are pleasant company.

 

One of the main complaints about 3D--that the lenses dull the colors so much, the visual experience is often less pleasing than 2D--definitely doesn't apply to Rio.  The picture takes full advantage of its setting and Carnival atmosphere, consistently vibrant with sharp, bright colors that are a joy to watch,  The director Carlos Saldanha, a veteran of the Ice Age series, also makes strong use of the 3D itself, with lots of vertiginous flight and chase sequences, not to mention the Carnival setpieces at the climax; people, animals, birds and objects are constantly popping unexpectedly into frame. So this is one time that paying the 3D premium doesn't feel like a tax on moviegoing. 

Rio is content to be nothing more than a lightweight 90 minutes of floating entertainment, but that's harder to pull off than it looks; you can't begrudge Fox its revenues from the new franchise it's probably created  Based on the trailers for the summer's 3D blockbusters to come, we should enjoy it while it lasts.  

(RIO - 20th Century Fox/Blue Sky - 93 min. - G - Director:  Carlos Saldanha - Script:  Don Rhymer, Joshua Sternin, Jeffrey Ventimilia, Sam Harper, story by Carlos Saldanha, Earl Richey Jones, Todd R. Jones - Cast:  Jesse Eisenberg, Anne Hathaway, Leslie Mann, Rodrigo Santoro, Jemaine Clement, George Lopez, Tracy Morgan - Wide Release)

Not Even For Free.

There's a key scene in the new SOUL SURFER where the one-armed teen surfer Bethany Hamilton, who's had her other arm chewed off by a shark and who despairs of her career in competition, is in Thailand on a Christian mission to tend to tsunami survivors.  And these survivors, having gone through, you know, a tsunami, are all depressed and traumatized, especially a cute little Thai boy who hasn't been able to speak since the disaster.  But Bethany knows what to do:  she takes that little boy down to the beach with her surfboard, and manages to bring them all back to life--not just the little boy but a whole beachfront full of damaged, starving people--by getting out there with her one arm and showing them just how to handle that board, while her voiceover narration tells us that this is when she learned that the most important thing in this world is Love.  And I, heathen that I am, couldn't help thinking of Robert Duvall on that Vietnamese beach in Apocalypse Now, roaring:  "CHARLIE DON'T SURF!"

But then, Soul Surfer wasn't made for me.  It's an aggressive example of Hollywood's strategy of producing and marketing films for "faith-based" (which means Christian) groups.  This started.with the massive success of Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ (a unique example of religion intersecting with cover-story controversy), and has included such recent films as the Narnia saga and Secretariat.  With its relatively low budget, Soul Surfer is a good test case for whether this is a viable market to support a film that might otherwise have limited appeal.

In truth, the religious pandering in Soul Surfer is only moderately obtrusive:  that annoying narration, a few hamhanded scenes with Bethany's church counselor (Carrie Underwood, very much a non-actress), and a little Bible quoting.  The film's more hellish problem is that its script (based on Hamilton's memoir, the screen story is credited to 7 writers, with 4 of them sharing script credit) is a collection of every possible sports-movie cliche.  When Bethany's father (Dennis Quaid, who had his own inspirational starring role in The Rookie) tells her "You just wait for your wave--you'll know when it's coming.  It's a gift, and you have it," you can practically set your watch for what's going to happen in the final competition. 

Quaid keeps his dignity, as does Helen Hunt as Bethany's mother (although she looks distractingly little like the actress who used to star in "Mad About You").  AnnaSophia Robb, who starred in Bridge to Terabithia and played Violet Beauregarde in Charlie & the Chocolate Factory, is likable as Bethany, and an actress named Sonya Balmores flashes her eyes and makes an impression as the closest thing the movie has to a villain, another surfer who takes a while to appreciate Bethany's goodness.  But director Sean McNamara (also one of the many writers), who comes out of children's TV, does little more than drag the picture from point A to point B, and neither he nor the writers have the slightest interest in developing the personalities or complexities of the characters; that might get in the way of the Message.

Soul Surfer is the kind of movie where, if you hear what it's about and think it's something you'd want to see, you might well enjoy it.  But for some of us, that Asian beach becomes really inspiring when it's got crazy soldiers on the boards and flares exploding around them.

(SOUL SURFER - TriStar/FilmDistrict - PG - 106 min. - Director:  Sean McNamara - Script:  McNamara, Deborah Schwartz, Douglas Schwartz, Michael Berk; story by McNamara, Schwartz, Schwartz, Berk, Matt Allen, Caleb Wilson, Brad Gann - Cast:  AnnaSophia Robb, Dennis Quaid, Helen Hunt, Carrie Underwood, Lorraine Nicholson, Sonya Balmores - Wide Release)

Of all the "Friends" who kept America company in its collective living room for a decade, David Schwimmer has taken the most concerted step away from the work that made him famous.  While Courtney Cox, Matthew Perry, Matt LeBlanc and Lisa Kudrow have mostly continued in TV comedy, and Jennifer Aniston's movies are essentially sitcoms for the big screen, Schwimmer has made it clear that he's now a director and not an actor.  (He does keep a profitable finger in performing by providing a voice for the Madagascar cartoons.)  After a fair amount of TV directing, he made his segue to features with the dim comedy Run Fat Boy Run, and now he's jumped to very dark, serious drama with the new TRUST.  

Trust takes on one of the most chilling subjects in our new technological world:  predators who pursue minors in internet chatrooms, pretending to be their peers and earning their confidence.  14-year old Annie (Liana Liberato, a TV actress with exceptional screen presence) befriends a boy via chat, text and phone who she initially thinks is 16, falling for him so completely that she ignores every sign that he's not remotely who he claims to be.  When they finally meet, the worst happens, and Annie's family all but falls apart, as her dad (Clive Owen) throws himself into tracking down the man in lieu of dealing with his daughter's raw feelings, and her mother (Catherine Keener) tries ineffectively to reestablish contact with her child.  

The thing about a movie like Trust--and it's unfair--is that its subject matter is so unpleasant and uncomfortable that it gets no leeway; people will only buy tickets if it's declared to be just about perfect and critics demand that they go (and maybe not then).  Trust did what it could--it premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, hoping for raves--but despite being admirable in many ways, it was also too clearly flawed to break through.  (And although Owen and Keener are very fine actors, they have limited boxoffice value.)  Consequently, it's being released by the small Millenium Films, and its debut this weekend averaged just about $2000 per theatre, probably on a fast track to homevideo.  

Which is a shame, because Trust takes a lot of chances.  The script, by Andy Belin and Robert Festinger, doesn't shy away from emotional complexity (Festinger was co-writer of In the Bedroom).  This is particularly true of the character of Annie.  First, Schwimmer cast an actual 15-year old actress in the role; thanks to union rules and CW-type TV shows, we've grown used to actresses who are clearly in their 20s playing sexual characters, and the casting of someone who looks her real age makes viewing certain scenes as disturbing as they're meant to be.  In addition, Annie doesn't react to her attack with outrage:  she continues to believe herself in a romantic relationship--she thinks she's in some version of "Romeo and Juliet," with her parents unfairly keeping the true lovers apart, and the movie doesn't condemn her for feeling this way.  We're not used to people in stories like this acting in such a disconcerting way.  There's believability, too, in Keener's fumbled attempts to keep the family together, and even minor characters like the FBI agent on the case (Jason Clarke) and Annie's therapist (Viola Davis) have some depth.

But there are missteps, mostly centered around the father character.  Not Owen's fault--his performance is very strong--but in his semi-vigilante hunt for the bad guy, we're in a world of contrivance that doesn't fit the rest of the movie.  And although Schwimmer is first-rate with the actors and in his pacing of a difficult story, he's far from imaginative visually, and sometimes he doesn't trust his audience, underlining ideas in a way that feels like a scream in our ear.  (When Owen's character becomes sensitized to the way teens are sexualized in our culture, you can practically feel Schwimmer checking off items from a list.)  And it would have been nice if Schwimmer hadn't directed the film's last scene as a virtual homage to the ending of Ordinary People, a film whose shadow hangs over this project anyway.

A serious American film that dares to poke into the psyches of, well, ordinary people, is always a rarity; for this audacity and for the excellent performances, Trust is worth its imperfections.  And Schwimmer may not have a hit or an award winner here, but he's moving closer to the day when the word "Friends" doesn't have to lead off his bio.

(TRUST - Millenium - 106 min.- R - Director:  David Schwimmer - Script:  Andy Belin, Robert Festinger  Cast:  Laura Liberato, Clive Owen, Catherine Keener, Viola Davis, Jason Clarke - Limited Release)