It’s an easy thing to see the success of Coraline the film resting squarely on Neil Gaiman’s shoulders. Indeed, his sly storybook writing is the base of the film’s narrative, which sees young Coraline (Dakota Fanning) stuck in the day-to-day doldrums of a dreary, lifeless existence in suburbia. Every detail of narrative is very much Gaiman-esque (which, if not yet coined, most certainly will be soon enough). One day, Coraline finds a portal to another world, alike in some ways but different in many others, as though it was built by the same architect in an altered state. There she meets her “other” parents, alike in every physical detail except one: black buttons sewn in where eyes once were. Emotionally and mentally, however, the new parents are polar opposites. While her old ones are overworked and uninterested, her new mother and father spend every waking moment perfecting Coraline’s world. It’s a dream come true, but young Coraline is about to discover that behind every dream lies a nightmare waiting to burst out. Continue reading
Review(s): Laika, Part One (Coraline)
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Ahh, the biopic. Lionizing and valorizing when you ought to humanize and critique, you are the greatest filmic manifestation of the hyper-individualist tendencies of modern America society which favor a view of the world where-in individuals are its chief agents. You emphasize not the complicated and conflicting causation of change in society, but the “greatness” of certain individuals who can rise above others and lead. As a result, you tend to see something innately compelling about individuals and displace how these individuals developed in the first place, what social factors drove their development. If you are particularly adventurous, you will pay lip service to how complicated and flawed these individuals can be in secret, but nothing more.
Gone Girl really is the ideal movie for David Fincher at this point in time. A stylist who transitioned from music videos to lurid, gloomy B-thrillers, he perfected his crime film aspirations with the deliriously good clinical descent into the mundane in Zodiac, an attempt at “serious-mindedness” that implicitly challenges all other so-called “serious-minded” films for their audience-baiting emotion. More than anything, it was a deeply cold film, a complete re-reading of every grandiose stylistic convention he’d use to make B-thrillers “fun” by taking the same kind of B-thriller and making it deliberately anti-fun to the core. Then, not one year later, he went “warm” with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, an attempt at Oscar glory, followed by an actual success at Oscarbait with The Social Network (despite, you know, not winning the consummate Oscars, but those matter little anyway).
For the grand denouement of Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and Edgar Wright’s “Three Flavors Cornetto” trilogy, everything implicit in the first two acts is pushed right up to the forefront to the point where it hurts. Namely, what we’ve all been suspecting for a while is now crystal-clear: this is one of the great filmic commentaries on the modern male, as much as it is a parody of the genres of film called home by that particular subset of humanity. In this tripartite comedy reworking of horror, action, and now science fiction tropes, the cheery bad-boys of the UK are exploring the mindset of the male through the genres of film men put their lives on hold for. They give us men, epitomized by Nick Frost and Simon Pegg, who play out the male fantasy of these films, and we get a genial mockery of their childish in-fighting snuggling cuddly with a light-hearted homage to the youthful spirit that keeps these guys so young and alive. It’s filmic cognitive dissonance, nervy and anxious to the core. But, like main character Gary King, it plays it so cool we’d never know if we weren’t looking.
Once upon a time there was a genre of film called the Bible Epic. More devourers of money than movies proper, they went the way all such genres eventually do: imploding on their own gluttonous mass and dragged kicking and screaming into a hell of their own making. The rise of European cinema in America had a lot to do with it. The American New Wave had much more. But the Bible Epic was doomed just like its dear bedfellow, the sword-and-sandal film, both with nowhere to go but the way of the Romans so often depicted with a curious confusion in both genres: self-immolation, a death from inside attempts to fly closer and closer to the sun without any sense of themselves. If the Bible Epic needed a few extraneous factors circling like vultures to truly crash-and-burn, that’s only insofar as reacting to these outside influences caused a need for even more strained, draggy, self-indulgent screenplays that insisted all the louder and prouder that they were just hot shit to increasingly deaf ears. 
Public Enemies
District 9 is not a nuanced film, nor is its metaphor. Filmed in the slums of Johannesburg, there’s an eerie, earthen verisimilitude to the film’s physicality that simultaneously lends South Africa a depressing gritty realism and expounds upon its alienized social distance. But it is very obviously a parable of human exclusion and prejudice, literalizing the alien in the “other” of race by fitting it into a sci-fi story about actual space travelers. Parable isn’t quite right though – the film is more a vague satire, not particularly pinpoint but workmanlike in its broad-based feeling. Nonetheless, sharp it is not. If it really wants to stake its claim as something more than a bit o’ fun with new filmic toys propping up the seams, it’s on less sure-footing.
Science fiction was in vogue in the late ’70s, largely due to the success of George Lucas’ Star Wars, which kick-started perhaps the greatest popular revolution in American film history and drove the medium to new commercial heights. Of course, it saw mixed results for the art-form: a rebirth of genre filmmaking married to the deadening and eventual end of the New Hollywood drama which had married classical themes to European New Wave modes of storytelling to brilliant effect and which, in fact, made American film interesting after a long drop-off in the ’60s. After Star Wars, many studios grew less interested in drama and shifted toward pop commercialism, aiming for big, big, and bigger at the expense of nuance.
The Long Take 