File "Pan" under biggest flops of the year that deserved much better. This delightful, rousing adventure is the Peter Pan origin story, how a spirited English orphan first found his way to Neverland and learned how to never grow up.
Levi Miller plays Peter, who gets kidnapped from his London orphanage by some henchmen of the dread pirate Blackbeard (Hugh Jackman) to slave away in his mines, searching for lost fits of faerie dust. It seems Blackbeard, who looks like he was dug up out of the ground 10 minutes ago, defeated Tinkerbell & Co. and is now ruling Neverland as a semi-sane despot.
With the help of an incorrigible rogue names James Hook (!), Peter manages to escape from the pirate's clutches and falls in with Princess Tiger Lily (Rooney Mara) and the Indians, leading to yet more adventures.
It's a mishmash of wildly disparate story elements -- part J.M. Barrie, part Indiana Jones, and even something of a musical with a couple of interludes put to modern tunes like "Blitzkrieg Bop" and "Smells Like Teen Spirit."
If all this sounds loopy and unhinged, that's because it is. Director Joe Wright ("Atonement") and script man Jason Fuchs have essentially used Barrie's novels as a mere jumping-off point for their own industrious imaginations. They've essentially "retconned" one of the most enduring fantasy tales of all time, stealing inspiration and turning it to their own purposes.
Somehow, I think Peter Pan's rascally heart would approve of the appropriation. This is one flight of fancy worth booking.
Bonus features are decent, though not expansive. The DVD comes with only one making of featurette, "The Boy Who Would Be Pan."
Upgrade to the Blu-ray combo pack and you add three more featurettes: "Wondrous Realms," "The Scoundrels of Neverland" and "Never Grow Up: The Legend of Pan." Director Wright also provides a feature-length commentary track.
The latest big-screen iteration of the Peter Pan legend is rather a mess, but it’s an exhilarating mess. “Pan” mixes astonishing CG action, plucky kids, goofy musical interludes with modern pop songs, and Hugh Jackman as a fey villain who looks like he got kicked out of a “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” audition.
The result is a thrill ride of a movie by parts giddy and scary, a joyful exercise in prodigious imagineering. It’s the rare kids’ movie that parents may actually prefer.
The story – screenplay by Jason Fuchs, based on the J.M. Barrie characters -- is essentially a prequel/retcon of the Peter Pan mythology. We’re pre-Wendy & Co. here, focusing instead on how a cheeky British orphan first became the tights-wearing, flying, smirking never-grow-upper.
Most of the familiar gang is here: Smee, Tinkerbell, Lost Boys, Princess Tiger Lily, etc. But they’re living in a despoiled Neverland much grimmer than what we’re used to. The biggest curveball is James Hook, still young and unhooked, who throws off the shackles of his innate cynicism to become Peter’s ally and best friend.
(No hint as to how their relationship and his hand came to be, uh, detached.)
It’s a corker of a performance by Garrett Hedlund, who manages to suggest some of the verbal idiosyncrasies and vanity of Captain Hook, but with a cowboy American bent. He wears a long duster coat and an Indiana Jones hat, flirts shamelessly with Tiger Lily (Rooney Mara) and regards Peter as a wayward kid brother.
Levi Miller plays Peter, and he’s solid in the role, blue eyes perpetually wide, though the character as written is a bit generic and bland. He’s the window through which we experience this fantastical world, and -- as is so often the case with this kind of moviemaking -- the frame is not meant to draw the eye.
The real head-turner – and scratcher, as some will see it – is Jackman’s pirate Blackbeard. He’s just… well, his own thing. He wears extravagant Renaissance-style costumes, has a ghostly pallor and feral teeth, and the dark circles around his eyes are so deep it seems like he’s staring at you from out of a graveyard hole. He’s part tyrant, part fop, all wicked.
Blackbeard, having defeated the faeries of Neverland in a war, is mining every speck of the island for remnants of their dust, or pixin, which he uses for his secret and nefarious purposes. He dispatches his flying pirate ships into the “real world” – England during WWII – to nab orphan boys to be used as laborers in his mines. Peter, who was left as a babe on the steps of the Lambeth Home for Boys by his mum along with a pan flute locket, is one such snatchee.
His introduction to Neverland is ostentatious, and odd. In a vast mining pit where boys toil with pickaxes, they pause in their labors to exalt Blackbeard with an a capella rendition of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” with the great pirate joining in himself. The Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop” gets similar use for a battle scene.
Usually in movie musical scenes people sing to address somebody else, or narrate their own actions, but here Blackbeard and crew are essentially serenading themselves for its own sake. Maybe it would’ve worked better if it was more consistent, but just those two tunes are employed.
To paraphrase Robert Downey Jr.’s character in “Tropic Thunder,” you should either go full musical, or not bother.
Peter bumps into James, who possibly has been mining there since he was a boy himself, and is rather sour about it. They soon bust out together, with perennial sidekick Smee (Adeel Akhtar) tagging along, fall in with Tiger Lily and the Indians, who here are a full multicultural gamut of castoffs. Peter, who has demonstrated nascent flying abilities, is embraced as their Chosen One who will free the banished faeries from the secret hidey place.
Director Joe Wright is best known for costume dramas like “Atonement,” “Pride & Prejudice” and “Anna Karenina.” But he seems to have found his inner child with this film, relishing high adventure and fantasy without reservation.
I don’t doubt some will find “Pan” weird and off-putting. But if you’re willing to view Barrie’s writings as inspiration rather than sacred text, you’ll find a delightful spree that captures the quintessence of childlike wonder.
In adapting Leo Tolstoy’s iconic novel “Anna Karenina” for the screen, director Joe Wright (“Atonement”) and screenwriter Tom Stoppard (“Shakespeare in Love”) have gotten too clever by half. The result is a sprawling, overly ornamented mess in which the theatricality of the production overwhelms the storytelling.
I don’t generally get too cynical about the motivations of filmmakers, but this movie seems like it was made with Oscar ambitions in mind. From the classic literary touchstone to the extravagant costumes/sets and high-toned performances, everything has a very self-satisfied pedigreed feel to it. I don’t mind films with ambition and even a little swagger, but in this case the braggadocio is misplaced.
Wright and Stoppard run afoul by adopting the notion of Tolstoy’s novel as a grand stage play in which the characters are both audience members and participants. Many scenes involve Anna and the people around her attending the theater, and then our perspective shifts so now they are performing in front of the lights. Or they go about their daily lives, with stagehands moving the scenery around into place and placing props in the characters’ hands, just in time for them to deliver their dialogue.
This is a bold concept, and one that might have worked better of exercised consistently. But the theme goes away for long stretches at a time, so when we are abruptly reminded of the filmmakers’ conceit – say, when Anna’s husband watches his children frolicking in a field, and then the camera pulls back to reveal the entirety of the theater filled with wildflowers – the effect is more discombobulating than thought-provoking.
Tolstoy’s story is stripped down – how could it not be for the famously long-winded author? – but the bones of the tale remain. Anna (Keira Knightley) is a member of Tsarist Russia’s pampered nobility circa 1874. Married to Alexei Karenin (Jude Law), a rich and powerful senior government official, Anna is seen as an irreproachable woman of high society.
But then she falls for a dashing young cavalry officer named Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and finds her world crumbling around her. Even when faced with social ruin and estrangement from her children, Anna finds herself unable to tear away from her powerful desires.
“You are the murderer of my happiness,” Anna whispers in Vronsky’s ear during their first frenetic, almost violent coupling – which should give you a flavor of the sort of arch dialogue spoken throughout the film.
Knightley tries valiantly, but is not entirely convincing in the role of a woman torn asunder by forbidden love.
Part of that has to do with her androgynous looks -- she's beautiful and alluring, but in a curiously sexless way. It's not necessarily a bad thing for an actress -- Audrey Hepburn possessed the same quality. But it makes roles in which passion is the major dynamic a challenge for her.
Taylor-Johnson primps and smirks, and we never really get to see any layers beneath the superficial one the story presents. Since the audience immediately recognizes Vronsky as a cad, it only diminishes Anna that she falls for him so completely.
Law is terrific as Karenin, a man who gives his wife utter devotion but little in the way of intimacy or emotional connection. It's not that he withholds these qualities, but rather that he simply does not have them in his makeup. He does give Anna all that he does have to offer, and is genuinely crushed when that is not enough for her. Ostensibly the villain of the piece, Karenin ends up being the most identifiable person we encounter.
I respect the cast and crew of "Anna Karenina" for trying to do something different with a classic tale. But even sincere experiments sometimes fail.
I don't usually do this sort of thing. But if you're one of those people who skipped going to see "The Soloist" in theaters -- and judging by its modest box office receipts, that's most of you -- then you owe it to yourself to see this movie on video.
The best drama of the first half of 2009, "The Soloist" is not a crowd-pleasing film that hits the expected inspirational notes in its tale of two fractured souls. It's the story of a pair of men who are each in their own way damaged as humans, and find a bit of solace in their unexpected friendship.
But they do not fundamentally change as people. As the end credits roll, Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr., in a career-capping performance) is still a lonely newspaper columnist cut off from those around him, and Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx) is still suffering from schizophrenia, and playing his music on the streets.
What makes their journey indispensible is the exploration of how their friendship gives them a sense of meaning that allows them to carry on, despite their differing challenges. Lopez writes about Ayers in his column, and Ayers is allowed to deepen his passion for music.
The DVD arrives with a healthy set of extras. There's a 20-minute making-of documentary, five deleted scenes, a short featurette with the real Nathaniel Ayers and Steve Lopez, a look at the dire homeless situation in Los Angeles, and a short animated film about a woman who loses her home.
All of this is somewhat rote, although the commentary track by director Joe Wright is refreshing for his tendency to ramble on amusingly about what inspired him while shooting particular scenes. One interesting revelation is that while Wright encouraged his actors to improvise dialogue, Foxx's disjointed speeches and strange verbal associations were taken directly from Susannah Grant's screenplay.
