As a filmmaker, Tim Burton's mostly been working on reanimation projects lately --
taking old movies and making them rise from the dead as remakes crammed
with computer-generated imagery. The results have been up and down,
generally scoring at the box office but leaving lovers of his earlier
work (I count myself) feeling disappointed.
If "Frankenweenie" has a fresher feel than most of his recent movies, that's because it's a remake of his own short film.
The
original was live action, a black comedy about a boy who zombifies his
pet pooch using Frankenstein-esque science. The spiffy new version is
stop-motion animation, which suits the material well -- a mix of
heartfelt pathos and creepy-crawly horror movie elements.
Victor
(voiced by Charlie Tahan) is crushed when his beloved dog Sparky is, er,
crushed in a car accident. Indirectly inspired by his eccentric science
teacher, Victor jolts the canine alive with electricity. But then the
other kids in the neighborhood discover the trick, and soon the whole
town is overrun with zombie pets.
The animation is truly
spectacular, dark in palette but joyful in its intricacy and attention
to detail. I loved how many of the individual children resemble
horror-flick denizens, like the blonde girl who looks like she stepped
out of "Village of the Damned."
Despite the subject matter,
"Frankenweenie" is sweet-natured and should be suitable for all but the
smallest children. And adults will enjoy the references to classic
horror creatures, especially the classic Universal Studios menagerie.
The
film comes with a decent array of video extras, though you'll have to
shell out for a higher price point Blu-ray edition to get the best
stuff. The DVD comes only with one featurette, a "Touring Exhibit" of
the Frankenweenie world, plus a music video.
Upgrade to the
two-disc Blu-ray/DVD combo pack, and you add Burton's original
"Frankenweenie" live-action short, the making-of doc "Miniatures in
Motion: Bringing 'Frankenweenie' To Life" and an original animated
short, "Captain Sparky vs. The Flying Saucers."
The four-disc combo pack also includes 3-D and digital copies of the film.
"Frankenweenie" is another repackaging of previously used material from Tim Burton, but its dazzling black-and-white stop-motion animation and sweet tone -- despite the creepy horror film undertones -- wins the day.
This movie is a remake of Burton's own live-action short film from 1984 that launched his career: misfit boy heartbroken over the death of his dog reanimates the pooch using mad-scientist methods. But Burton and screenwriter John August use this concept merely as a launching pad to deliver an homage to classic horror film tropes, especially the Universal menagerie of creature features.
I really loved how the entire cast of characters, even the supposed "normals" like Victor Frankenstein's mom and dad, seem a little sinister and hollow around the eyes. Victor himself (voiced by Charlie Tahan) is a slightly morose loner who likes to tinker with making movies (stop-motion, of course) and experimenting in his suburban family attic.
Things get especially good when we get to Victor's classmates, every one of whom looks like they stepped out of a classic horror flick.
There's the blonde girl with the spaced expression who seems to be straight from "Village of the Damned," the tall kid with the Frankenstein monster's shoulders and Peter Lorre's lisp, and so on.
Best of all is Edgar E. Gore (get it?), a humpbacked kid with a three-tooth overbite from hell.
Deliciously voiced by Atticus Shaffer, Edgar acts as Victor's toadying sidekick-turned-blackmailer, demanding that Victor teach him the secret to pet resurrection. Of course, he spills the beans to other kids and soon all sorts of terrifying creatures are besieging the town of New Holland.
The inside joke is that, other than Victor, the children aren't doing this because of their love of knowledge or the desire to get their critter companions back. No, they're all out to win the prize at the Science Fair.
"They like what science gives them, but not the questions that science asks," laments Victor's condescending-but-wise teacher Mr. Rzykruski (Martin Landau), who resembles Vincent Price and comes from a vague Eastern European country where, he says, even his plumber has a Nobel Prize.
Victor is the only one with pure motives. He absolutely adores Sparky, a scrappy little mongrel who resembles a Jack Russell Terrier interbred with a throw pillow. Alas, Sparky wanders into traffic and is smushed. When Victor witnesses Mr. Rzykruski use electricity to stimulate the muscles of a dead frog, it's not long before he's brought back Sparky in zombie form.
Sparky doesn't realize he's undead, though the fact that his tail or ear keeps falling off might serve as a hint. He's criss-crossed by stitches and has two metal bolts sticking out of his neck -- which Victor uses to "recharge" him from time to time -- but is more or less the same joyful pup.
The film takes almost an hour to really get going, but by the time the town carnival is being assaulted by giant reptiles and a mummy gerbil, it's a genuine hoot.
Despite the tame PG rating, I wouldn't recommend "Frankenweenie" for very small children, who might find the dead pets and scary moments a bit too much.
The great cast is rounded out by Martin Short and Catherine O'Hara, each of whom voice several characters, and old Burton standby Winona Ryder as the Goth girl next door.
"Frankenweenie" is an amalgam of previous stories and themes Tim Burton has been churning out for nearly three decades now. Even if, like Sparky, it's not exactly fresh anymore, there's still some juice in there.
"Lucas" is one of those movies that you look back on and are flabbergasted by how many talented young performers appeared in it. Corey Haim, Charlie Sheen, Kerri Green, Courtney Thorne-Smith, Tom Hodges and Jeremy Piven would go onto careers of varying length and quality, but the collective impact is just tremendous. It even featured a 13-year-old Winona Ryder in her very first screen role.
Other than "School Ties," it's hard to think of other movies where so many youngsters have so forcefully announced themselves to the world. Another is Ryder's own "Girl, Interrupted" from 1999, which was to have been her big Oscar showcase but ended up as the launching pad for Angelina Jolie, Brittany Murphy, Clea Duvall and Elisabeth Moss.
"Lucas" didn't make many waves at the box office back in 1986, but it's gone on to become a cult hit on video. It's a tender drama with both comedic and tragic undertones, and does a better job of busting out of the jocks-vs.-nerds conformity than do most teen movies.
It was written and directed by David Seltzer, who's had a long screenwriting career and also directed three other features besides "Lucas,' his first. ("Punchline" and "Shining Through," both underrated in my opinion, among them.) He's got a nice touch with his cast, who don't try to fit their characters into squares and circles, but let them breathe -- their failings, idiosyncrasies and goodness seem to just spring out of them naturally, rather than being forced by the necessities of the plot.
Lucas, despite being the stereotypical outcast at Park High, doesn't moan and mope about his status. He seems perfectly content with being different, because that's who he is, even if it means occasionally getting picked on by the football team members. Like jocks at most high schools, real or fictional, they assume their prowess on the playing field entitles them to special treatment, especially from teachers and administrators who will turn a blind eye to their hooliganism.
But not all athletes are bad guys, they just react to the environment around them. Their primary relationships are defined by competition, so that's how they think they should interact with everyone. Lucas, who's only 14 and small, becomes their target of choice.
He's probably do better if he just kept his head down, but Lucas has the gumption to talk back -- so much so that his nickname is Leukoplakia, or cancer of the mouth. How many kids would've come up with such an esoteric insult? Maybe it was Lucas himself, who's a science whiz who's been bumped ahead a couple of grades, and some dolt overheard him and turned it around.
I really liked the part of Cappie, the captain of the football team played by Charlie Sheen. Movies of this genre usually insist that he be the worst of the worst, but in fact Cappie is a friend of Lucas who does what he can to protect him from other jocks. There's just something so heartwarming about Cappie as a sort of big brother, a decent young man who probably would have turned out a lot different if it weren't for influences like Lucas -- who helped Cappie out with schoolwork when a bad illness laid him up for two months.
Seltzer instinctively understands the nature of adolescent romance, the way everything seems so fatalistic and certain to teens. Lucas takes a shine to Maggie (Kerri Green, fresh off "The Goonies"), the cute new redhead in town. Over the summer they bond and become best friends. But once school starts, Maggie gravitates to the circle of athletes and cheerleaders. She soon develops a crush on Cappie, which he obviously reciprocates despite a long-term relationship with Alise (Thorne-Smith).
It's no surprise that Lucas is smitten by Maggie. For him, she represents not just the perfect girl but everything that is good and right about the world. When she disappoints him by rejecting his appeals for something more than friendship, it sets his whole world to spinning.
Ryder has a small but pivotal role as Rina, a slightly dorky girl who secretly adores Lucas. She does everything she can to make this clear to him, short of actually telling him so. But the fear of rejection is not limited to just boys, so Rina is just constantly there, circling in Lucas' orbit and hoping for a collision.
So all this amore flying around sets up something I don't believe I've ever seen in a film before: A love pentagon. There's a great, dialogue-free scene where everyone is singing in choir class, and the camera slowly tracks from Rina watching Lucas, who's watching Maggie, who's staring at Cappie, who returns her gaze with a smile, to Alise witnessing the blooming connection.
It would be interesting to see a movie made with all the same characters but from Rina or Alise's perspective. Think about Alise: She's been dating Cappie since the start of high school, and here comes some other girl making moony eyes at her guy, tagging along on trips to the movies, and otherwise horning in on her social life. No fool or sucker, Alise dumps Cappie before he does it to her.
Plot-wise, there really isn't much going on in "Lucas." The last 30 minutes or so is taken up with Lucas trying to get onto the football team to impress Maggie, culminating with him talking his way onto the field during a big game. Lucas breaks away from the scrimmage, waiting near the end zone for a pass, which Cappie finally provides.
In every other teen movie, Lucas would catch the ball and become the hero. Instead he bobbles and drops it. Of course he would -- this is probably the first time he's ever touched a football, let alone tried to catch a 60-yard pass. The other team picks up the fumble, and Lucas bravely tries to stop the runner, holding on like a scarecrow as he's carried downfield. In the ensuing pileup he's knocked cold. Not that it would have mattered even if he'd caught it: They were down 24-zip.
"Lucas" would stand out as an ambitious teen movie, even if no one in it had gone on to any sort of notoriety. The fact that so many did makes it a minor classic.
This line, delivered in the opening moments of "The Dilemma," is used to describe Vince Vaughn's character -- which is pretty much the same as every other Vince Vaughn character.
Vaughn's become a bankable star employing the same charming motormouth routine over and over. His signature move is to get rolling on a verbal treadmill from which he cannot easily climb off. We've seen it so many times ("Couples Retreat," "Wedding Crashers") that we've come to understand that what he says isn't important -- it's the feat itself, keeping the words coming faster and faster as he bounces around from one thought to the next.
The standout example of this in "The Dilemma" is when his character, Ronny, is giving a toast at his girlfriend Beth's (Jennifer Connelly) parents' 40th wedding anniversary. Ronny has recently learned that his best friend Nick's (Kevin James) wife Geneva (Winona Ryder) has been playing around on him.
He tries to use the toast to talk about the importance of honesty in marriage, as a way of shaming Geneva into confessing her affair to Nick so Ronny won't have to spill the beans himself. But he gets off on a tangent about temptation, imagining scenarios of Beth's mother dallying with the pool boy, and it's all downhill from there -- zigging and zagging all the way.
"The Dilemma" bounces around a lot, too. The movie can't quite decide what it wants to be when it grows up.
Ostensibly it's a comedy about Ronny's predicament -- whether to tell the man he loves like a brother about his wife's infidelity. The movie simply forgets to be funny for long stretches, as in one sequence where Ronny prays to God for guidance. "I know I'm supposed to give you things, but I'm scared to give you this," he tells the Almighty.
The biggest thing that's missing from the story (screenplay by Allan Loeb) is a sense of how important these relationships really are. Ronny's supposed to cherish his friendship with Nick so much that the prospect of telling him about Geneva tears him up inside. But we never see them doing much more than normal buddy-buddy stuff.
Ronny's relationship with Beth is off-kilter, too. He's a 40-year-old commitment-phobe, and can't bring himself to ask her to marry him. But what she gets out of this pairing is rather murky.
Geneva doesn't make a lick of sense, either. For awhile it's suggested she might actually be nutso, as demonstrated in a scene where Ronny confronts her and she cows him by threatening to claim he's made advances toward her.
Even Ronny and Nick's business partnership is goofy. Nick is supposed to be a brilliant engineer, but their dream is rather mundane: To make electric vehicles that look and sound like muscle cars. So basically they're just installing speakers under the hood to simulate the rumble of a gasoline engine.
(The movie has caused some controversy for a scene where they're pitching some General Motors executives, and Ronny calls electric cars "gay." I'll decline to enter the fray other than saying I think "South Park" already covered this topic sufficiently.)
Queen Latifah pops up as Susan, the liaison between the car company and our boys, who has a tendency to talk in inappropriate, hyper-sexualized terms. The joke is supposed to be that usually it's the guys in movies like this who speak that way. But she just comes across as another unexplained weird quirk of the movie.
The strangest thing about "The Dilemma" is that it was directed by Ron Howard, and has to be the most un-Ron-Howard-like film he's ever made.
The depressing part is not that it's not very good, or that a guy who's mostly done serious Oscar-bait movies has returned to his comedy roots. It's that this movie could have been directed by anyone.
Desperately desiring to be profound but often profoundly silly, "Black Swan" takes high-minded American cinema down a notch or three. This unrelentingly serious drama about a ballerina's psychotic breakdown while preparing for the lead in "Swan Lake" is swamped by a hip-deep layer of theatricality and artifice.
Director Darren Aronofsky ("The Wrestler") and a trio of screenwriters present us with a trio of main characters, and one or two tertiary ones, who we do not for a second believe could exist in the real world. As Nina Sayers, the ingenue tapped to be the ballet company's new leading light, Natalie Portman draws a character so repressed and fearful, it's like she stopped growing at the age of 8.
Perpetually tremulous and paranoid, Nina makes for one pitiable protagonist.
After the aging star -- played by Winona Ryder, and doesn't that make us all feel old -- is given the boot, egomaniacal director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) taps Nina to play the Swan Queen, even though he has doubts about her ability to tackle the darker twin role of the Black Swan.
Lastly, and least credibly, is Mila Kunis as Lily, the new dancer who becomes Nina's understudy/doppelganger. With her imprecise but vibrant dancing style, Lily was born to play the temptress Black Swan, just as Nina was meant to be the pure, virginal Queen.
Kunis has the face of an angel and the voice of a Valley Girl (a perfect fit for her day job, voicing a TV cartoon character). Lily is carefree and flirtatious, and keeps seeking out the clearly unreceptive Nina for friendship, even after their encounters become progressively confrontational.
Barbara Hershey plays Nina's fantastically over-protective mother, who makes Mommie Dearest resemble June Cleaver. A former dancer herself, mother crushes her daughter with infantilizing TLC as if to prevent her from ever growing into something other than a "frightened little girl."
As if mother's projection of her failed aspirations onto her daughter wasn't obvious enough, Aronofsky and company hammer it home in one groan-inducing scene where she drops a mention to her own career: "The one I gave up to have you."
As opening night draws closer, Nina grows more and more anxious about her ability to perform -- and her mental state becomes more and more unhinged. After Lily is named her understudy, she becomes convinced the interloper is out to sabotage her career and take Nina's place at center stage.
The result is a lot of computer-generated imagery of Lily's face morphing into Nina's and back again. She even starts to develop a rash on her shoulder that matches the winged tattoo Lily just happens to have on her back.
And Portman and Kunis share a supposedly scorching bedroom scene in which the actresses elevate coyness into comedy.
Is Lily really just Nina's repressed sexuality bursting to get free? Are they disparate souls blending into one? Splintered fragments of Aronofsky's high-speed blender puree of Tchaikovsky's ballet?
Who knows? And, in the end, really cares?
This mush-brained psychological thriller is basically Ingmar Bergman's "Persona" as interpreted via "Fight Club," pressed through the sieve of a high school drama class festering with personality conflicts.
