Capsules

Wall-E, When Did You Last See Your Father? and Up the Yangtze

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There are two things noticeably missing from Pixar’s latest wonderful flick Wall-E, and they surely wouldn’t be missing were this not Pixar.

One is an opening crawl, introductory montage or disembodied talking head à la Zardoz and Dune­—something that awkwardly and superfluously tries to catch us up with the story so far. Wall-E just drops us into its world sans explanation.

The other is language. Our titular protagonist, a clunky robotic trash collector, speaks only in bleeps and wheezes. Its robotic love interest, a sleeker and more advanced model sent from space, does about the same. (The “voice” work for Wall-E comes courtesy of legendary sound designer Ben Burtt of R2D2 fame.)

So how are we supposed to infer this film is set on a post-human earth 700 years in the future, that Wall-E is the last “living” creature on the planet and other such particulars? I dunno, perhaps by watching?

Save for the occasional cameo from a recorded human voice (our hero’s one videotape is Hello, Dolly!—hell on earth indeed), the first half of the movie is essentially a silent film on the order of F.W. Murnau’s intertitle-free The Last Laugh—pure cinema. Wall-E trusts, perhaps foolhardily, we can pick things up through a combination of visual context clues and good old-fashioned patience. Roughly half of Wall-E’s target audience may be children, but the film doesn’t treat its viewers that way.

As it turns out aggressive societal coddling is an idea that takes up the film’s second half, which sends Wall-E and its beloved across the galaxy to a massive ship carrying humankind. Not to give too much away—the film’s steady doling out of information is one of its chief pleasures—but think Idiocracy meets An Inconvenient Truth by way of a Ralph Nader anticorporation tract.

Wall-E should make Michael Medved hopping mad, and that’s good, but its biggest strengths are its assured visuals and Chaplinesque wit. The images of Earth are impressively, almost disturbingly realistic (famed cinematographer Roger Deakins is credited as a visual consultant), as is Wall-E himself—you can almost smell the rust on his Johnny-5 peepers.

The early section of the film, with Wall-E rummaging through and experimenting with the remains of a deserted planet, is frankly too short—it could be a whole movie on its own—and the ending is unimaginative and message-y. And yet even with such faults Pixar hasn’t been this strong since Toy Story 2.

Director Anand Tucker’s floridly overshot adaptation of Blake Morrison’s best-selling memoir is belatedly turning up in town a couple weeks late for Father’s Day, no doubt saving dozens of well-meaning sons from some awkward postmovie conversations. Colin Firth stars as Morrison, already a successful writer at the film’s start but still bristling with unresolved rage at his old man, played here with the kind of sly charm we can always count on from the great Jim Broadbent.

Drifting in and out of Kennedy-era flashbacks, When Did You Last See Your Father? sketches the elder Morrison as a pushy blowhard philanderer who was a constant source of shame and humiliation for the lad—often inadvertently yet on some occasions acting out with what seems like malicious intent. But once Daddy dearest is diagnosed with terminal cancer, Blake begins to dig his way through repressed family conflicts, a largely internal journey cinematically presented as Colin Firth staring into the mirrors all the time while wearing a constipated expression on his face. Occasionally he masturbates.

Lacking even the mawkish deathbed catharsis one would expect from this sort of male weepie, David Nicholls’ stilted screenplay doesn’t do Blake Morrison many favors. The author comes off as a self-pitying heel, and Firth’s uptight turn doesn’t do much in the way of suggesting the necessary roiling inner torment. He mainly just ignores his family and mopes around his old hometown, even trying to have another go with the sassy Scottish housekeeper (the delightful Elaine Cassidy) who deflowered him so many years ago. Broadbent’s disreputable daddy might be a liar and a cheat, but there’s at least a twinkle in his eye and an easy charisma that’s missing in his dour offspring.

Tucker overcompensates for the tale’s lack of forward motion with wildly ostentatious camera movements, shooting every possible scene through so many mirrors and reflective surfaces that any possible thematic points he might be trying to make are upstaged by their sheer self-consciousness. Even Tucker’s attempt at a three-hanky finale—an internalized, largely unmotivated change of heart from our protagonist—is laughably literal, complete with swirling 360-degree crane shots and bombastic, heavenly music cues. It all comes off as so silly and self-regarding, it’s no wonder this dude’s old man used to rib him so mercilessly.

A project as massive as China’s Three Gorges dam—a 17-year hydroelectric undertaking so enormous that it’s reshaping the landscape of a nation, leaving some scientists worried that the end result might perhaps muck with the earth’s rotational axis—is probably just too damn big for a single movie. Some 2 million people have already been displaced, and as the Yangtze River continues to rise, flooding countless farms all along the countryside, credit director Yung Chang for thinking small.

After a bit of wannabe early-Werner Herzog fumbling with ominous music and a bit too much coffee-table-book photography, Chang locates the meat of his story in a bizarre side industry. Luxury tourist cruises—nicknamed “farewell tours” by the locals—offer one last chance to glimpse rural Chinese villages before the dammed-up Yangtze swallows them all forever. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these trips are going over like gangbusters.

The brutal irony of it all becomes comes clear in the sad tale of Yu Shui, a teenage daughter of illiterate farmers who must leave her squalid riverbank shack and support her family by working on the “Victoria Queen.” Before long she’s called “Cindy,” wears garish eyeshadow and is hustling her way up the service industry ladder. Phony smiles are all-pervasive on deck, as the obsequious staff kowtows to the whims of rich folks enjoying shuffleboard and cheesy lounge acts while paying tons of money for a front-row seat to watch poor folks’ ancestral homelands drown.

One noisy heifer tips 30 American bucks and then thanks her valet for being “less obtrusive than expected.” Meanwhile our Cindy gets a makeover and heads for the shopping mall as her sad-eyed father struggles uphill carrying a wardrobe on his back. His agonized groans pierce both the soundtrack and your heart. The omnipresent lookie-loos just keep snapping photos.

This, the film argues, is the way of the future. One form of poverty-stricken squalor replaced by a tackier, more plasticized life of similarly deadend subservience, all in the guise of economic progress. Even if the lush beauty of Wang Shi Qing’s cinematography and the musical score’s lapses into mythic grandeur occasionally undercut Chang’s central thesis, this movie is still angry as hell.

Not Reviewed

Ongoing

Before the Rains
Produced by Merchant Ivory—still a trademark name apparently despite the 2005 death of Ismail Merchant—Before the Rains works a similar vein as the pair’s Indian-set films. As with Shakespeare Wallah and Bombay Talkie, Santosh Sivan’s film is just as awestruck over the environs as it is keenly alert to the prickly relationship between East and visiting (or in this case, occupying) West. B- (M.P.)

The Children of Huang Shi
The epic true story of some white people (Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Radha Mitchell) saving some Chinese orphans (with help from Chow Yun-Fat) and learning how to love in the process. (Not reviewed.)

The Fall
The Fall finds an injured movie stuntman (Lee Pace), for reasons that eventually become clear, trying to keep the attention of a cute little girl (Catinca Untaru) by pulling an epic directly from his posterior—one concerning the vengeful quest taken by an assortment of badasses. B (M.P.)

Finding Amanda
Matthew Broderick plays a drunk gambler sent to Vegas to reform his slutty niece. (Not reviewed.)

Get Smart
That dude from The Office tries to save the world with that chick from The Princess Diaries. (Not reviewed.)

Gunnin’ for That No. 1 Spot
Essentially Hoop Dreams remade with the same endearingly madcap sensibility that wrought the videos for “Shake Your Rump,” “Body Movin’” and “Ch-Check It Out,” Gunnin’ introduces us to an octet of the country’s premier precollegiate B-ball players en route to a tournament at Harlem’s hallowed Rucker Park. B- (M.P.)

The Happening
M. Night Shyamalan does it again … whatever “it” is. (Not reviewed.)

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Crystal Skull turns out to be a serviceable little nostalgia piece. I’m not sure there’s any compelling reason for it to exist, but nowadays the summer movie landscape has grown so cluttered with gargantuan, visually incoherent behemoths, Indy’s relative modesty is disarming. It’s a fun night out at the movies, no more than that—but certainly no less. B (S.B.)

The Love Guru
Another Mike Myers movie with weird accents and Verne Troyer. (Not reviewed.)

Mister Lonely
Basically a kinder, gentler, less shocking Gummo, Mister Lonely takes on the traits of its subjects: irksome, yes, but ultimately sweet and at times moving. C+ (M.P.)

Mongol
Running only two transparently edited-down hours, Mongol has seemingly been gutted of psychology or anything but ’Scope shots of open spaces, languorous shots of a quiet man’s man in deep brood and enough bloody violence to bring in the gorehounds. C (M.P.)

Mother of Tears
Mother of Tears, Dario Argento’s first film with Asia in the lead since she began associating with the likes of Vin Diesel and sham memoirist J.T. LeRoy, feels like a bald-faced attention-grabber, even if most of the attention it’s received has been not exactly kind. C+ (M.P.)

My Winnipeg
Via his usual blend of silent era-style filmmaking and obtuse wackiness, Guy Maddin summons up the oft-snowy Winnipeg of his childhood. B+ (M.P.)

Refusenik
A retrospective documentary about the grassroots movement to free Soviet Jews during the Cold War. (Not reviewed.)

Roman de Gare
Roman de Gare opens with novelist Fanny Ardant, seen talking about her latest tome—a rollicking thriller filled with twists and death. Before we have a chance to definitively realize she’s essentially talking about the film we’re watching, director Claude Lelouch drags our attention over to a mysterious loner (rubber-mouthed Jean-Pierre Jeunet regular Dominique Pinon) and a harried woman (Audrey Dana) whose irate fiance has just left her at a gas station. B- (M.P.)

Savage Grace
Icky and incoherent but luridly compelling all the same, director Tom Kalin’s long-awaited follow-up to his 1992 New Queer Cinema landmark Swoon is another creepily sexualized true-crime saga. This time Kalin takes on the 1972 murder of Barbara Daly Baekeland, an astoundingly unpleasant socialite who married an effete heir to the Bakelite plastics fortune (played with a whimper and a mustache by Stephen Dillane) and promptly lost her mind. C+ (S.B.)

Stuck
Stuck, a rock-solid indie from Stuart Gordon, is based on the true story of Texas woman Chante Mallard, who struck and killed a homeless man with her car. B (M.P.)

Standard Operating Procedure
Renowned documentarian and master of shiny affectation Errol Morris has turned his attention to Abu Ghraib. Following Mr. Death and The Fog of War as the third in what’s been nicknamed Morris’ “atrocity trilogy,” Standard Operating Procedure once again finds the director far more interested in summoning ominous portent and experimenting with distracting film techniques than in any old-fashioned nonsense like conveying information. C- (S.B.)

The Strangers
The Strangers is a grim and depressingly hollow technical exercise from first-time writer/director Bryan Bertino. Reworking last year’s equally empty French/Romanian thriller Them into a slightly more Hollywood-friendly pattern, this nasty little number is a grab-bag of nifty widescreen compositions and sound design stingers, with nothing on its mind besides its own virtuosity. C- (S.B.)

Surfwise
Surfwise has nothing much to do with surfing. The subject is one Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz, father of the much-reported “first family of surfing.” When he was young he pulled an Albert Brooks in Lost in America and left his lucrative profession, deciding on a life lived out of a Winnebago. B (M.P.)

You Don’t Mess With the Zohan
Klutzily lurching between inspiration and inanity, Zohan stars Adam Sandler as a supernaturally skilled Mossad agent bored by the cycle of Middle Eastern strife. He fights with an unfunny double-jointed dexterity. Tired of capturing and recapturing his arch-nemesis the Phantom (played with the usual reckless abandon by John Turturro), Sandler’s Zohan fakes his own death and heads for America. C (M.P.)