Year in Reviews 2012: Movie Edition - Part 3

Blogger's Note:  Be sure to check out parts One and Two, if you missed  them.  You know you want to.

In our last installment we recapped Tree of Life, The Old Man and the Sea, Gone with the Wind, The Dust Bowl, and Red Tails.  What wonders will this edition bestow!

Midnight In Paris (2011 - Woody Allen) - Other than this one, I think I've only seen two other Woody Allen movies from start to finish, the mildly amusing Small Time Crooks, which I don't remember that much about except that I found it mildly amusing.  The other is Bananas, which I remember was actually pretty funny (that's about three steps ahead of mildly amusing).  I enjoyed Midnight in Paris.  Owen Wilson stars as a hacky screenwriter looking for inspiration to write a novel while in Paris with his neurotic fiance and her kooky rich parents.  On a late night walk he stumbles into an alternate universe where he is in 1920's Paris, rubbing elbows with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemmingway, Salvador Dali, and a few other notable artists and authors of the era.  It's a lighthearted fantastic sort of movie, with good performances from Wilson, Rachel McAdams, and especially Michael Sheen as an uber-pretentious self-proclaimed expert on all things Paris.  The famous figures of the past are perfectly funny caricatures, particularly the manly man Ernest Hemmingway.  Dos Equis guy has nothing on him.  The dialog is clever and it probably helps that Woody is not actually saying the lines he's written.



Three Kings (1999 - David O. Russell) - A pretty underrated movie and one of Clooney's first meaty movie roles--ie not a cheesy action flick, rom-com, or franchise crushing comicbook movie.  Clooney plays an Army major during the closing days Desert Storm with doubts about the war.  He catches wind of a map a trio of non-coms find in an Iraqi soldier's hindparts that supposedly leads to a cache of Kuwaiti gold stolen by the Iraqis.  Seeking to get something out of his days in the desert, Clooney and his booty map (double-meaning!) finding cohorts, ably played by Mark Walberg, Ice Cube, and Spike Jonze, take off to find the gold and end up in a series of sticky ceasefire situations involving the Iraqi Republican Guard, anti-Saddam partisans, and an exploding cow.  Among other things.  Director David O. Russell, who is getting love recently for his Oscar nominated Silver Linings Playbook, co-wrote the script which is both funny and thought provoking, which really all war movies should be.  Very solid flick.  I hadn't seen it for a long time and had forgotten how much I liked it.

How to Train Your Dragon (2010 - Dave Dubois and Chris Sanders) - I watched about half of Steven Spielberg's War Horse today, which is a similar type of story as How to Train Your Dragon, and I found the latter to be exceedingly more entertaining.  Granted they aren't exactly the same kind of movie, slapstick gags and one-liners may have been a little out of place in the WWI horse tale, but they're both "boy and his dog/horse/dragon" stories, where the lead character forms a bond with a creature and some sort of serration or crisis gets between them and the boy vows to never forget/desert the creature.  I won't be too hard on War Horse since I haven't seen it all the way through, but just as I wouldn't expect it to play for laughs, I would expecte it to go for the heart strings.  From what I've seen thus far Dragon tops Horse even in that respect, on top of being funny and exciting.  Rango was my favorite animated film I saw last year, but Dragon wasn't too far behind and had the added advantage of being something I could watch with my four year old daughter.

Rango (2011 - Gore Verbinski) - And speaking of the animated noir with a chamaleon in the lead role, here is my full-blow review of Rango from a few months back.  I really liked it.

From Here to Eternity (1953 - Fred Zinnermann) - Probably one of the most famous images from classic movies, Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr sucking face on the beach as the tides washes over them, comes from this movie.  Starring Lancaster, Kerr, Frank Sinatra, Donna Reed, Montgomery Clift, and Ernest Borgnine, the melodrama based on the racy novel of the same name, tracks the lives of the characters in and around an Army base at Pearl Harbor in the days before December 7th, 1941.  Honor, duty, infidelity, intimidation, love, scandal, friendship; it's all there.  Good performances all around, particularly Ernest Borgnine as scuzzy Sgt. Fatso Judson.  Legend has it Sinatra secured his role with a little help from his Mafia friends, providing the inspiration for the Johnny Fontane character in The Godfather.  No word on how many horses lost their heads to make it happen.

Stay tuned for Part 4.

Rango

Imagine for a minute that the Coen Brothers joined forces with Sergio Leone to create an animated version of Chinatown in a western motif with a lizard as the protagonist.  It's a western!  It's noir!  It's a cartoon!  It's Rango!

Rango tells the tale of a domesticated chameleon that has no doubt been living the life of easy luxury in his aloha shirt and spacious terrarium.  But through circumstances beyond a lizards control Rango finds himself stranded in the dry Mojave desert and stumbles upon the dusty hamlet of Dirt.  Dirt is inhabited by an array of crusty, hardscrabble desert varmints, most resembling characters straight out of Hollywood Western central casting.  Some may see them as cliches', I prefer to see them as homages.  Due to the previously mentioned uncontrollable circumstances that led him to Dirt, Rango finds himself hailed as a hero by the townsfolk and is made the Sheriff of the town by the mayor, an ancient tortoise who wears a white cowboy hat and vest and rides in a motorized wheel chair.

Despite being way out of his element--and not brave or heroic by nature--Rango takes to his new role and struts around town, not exactly discouraging the rumors of his supposed exploits.  And perhaps blinded by their need for something positive to cling to, the denizens of Dirt look to Rango as their savior.  See, things have been tough in Dirt lately.  Water is scarce.  The water used to flow every Wednesday and the Dirtians would gather their buckets, jars, and pales to gather what they could.  But now the water has dried up and no one seems to know why.

Rango meets a young female lizard or gecko or something that owns a ranch near Dirt and thinks something nefarious is afoot and that the mayor is behind it.  Rango thinks she may be on to something and wrangles up a posse--which includes a one eared rabbit doctor, a chicken with conjunctivitis, and a Native American crow, among other things--to track down the cause of Dirt's mysterious drought.  All the while, the adventure is accompanied by a Mariachi band of small owls in sombreros.

If this all sounds like some one's acid trip, well, I wouldn't be surprised.  But I liked it!  The above described story is really just window dressing for a pretty straight forward unsuspecting hero narrative.  Will Rango fulfill his destiny as the hero, or will his seemingly natural instincts cause him to let the townsfolk down?  We already know the answer of course.

The movie is actually a lot of fun and looks incredible.  They used motion capture for most of the animation (using the motions of live actors captured and gussied up by computers) and the characters move fluidly and look natural, not like early motion capture attempts like Polar Express.  The cinematography is terrific, and I wasn't surprised to see Roger Deakins name in the credits as a consultant.  Deakins has been the director of photography for most of the recent amazing looking westerns like True Grit, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and 3:10 to Yuma.  The soundtrack by Hans Zimmer and Los Lobos is great as well, sort of a hybrid of Morricone and Dick Dale.

Besides Johnny Depp as the voice of Rango, the voice talents of Bill Nighy, Alfred Molina, Stephen Root, Harry Dean Stanton, Ned Beatty, and Abigail Breslin are also featured.  Timothy Olyphant also delivers a spot on riff as The Spirit of the West, which bears a striking resemblance to Cli...oh, I don't want to give it away.  Let's just say as a character prominently featured in many a Leone spaghetti western.

All told, I really enjoyed Rango and all it's weirdness.  Director Gore Verbinski (who directed the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies) has made a witty, quirky gem that has some great action sequences.  Be warned, however, despite being animated and distributed by Nickelodeon, this isn't exactly a movie for kids.  At least not small ones.  Most of the jokes would be lost on them, and it is considerably darker than your standard kid fare.

Here's a trailer: