9/14/12

ParaNorman

Don't use the Z-word!
ParaNorman is the new stop-motion animated movie from Laika, the makers of Coraline. It's a story of Norman Babcock, a kid from New England who can speak to ghosts. When the story starts, this ability is old news to him, and the people around him just shrug his insistence of possessing this trait as him being a pathological liar who wants attention. Norman is a loner, misunderstood by his own family and schoolmates alike, but is forced out of his recluse life when he finds out that the curse of an 18th century witch hanged in his hometown is going to hit the town very soon, and he's the only one who can stop it.

This setup for the story is kinda basic, which undermines the genius of the film. The beginning is rife with really funny and clever gags with the ghost-speaking stuff, the movie knows exactly how to pace itself so the wackiness fades away slowly to make room for the plot, and the eventual story with the witch is really well-written and, dare I say, moving. By far my favourite thing about the movie is its tone; the premise and the characters are treated with a lot more weight and seriousness than what kids' films nowadays tend to. It's not a happy-go-lucky comedy movie with a dark third act, but feels thematically uniform. There's more laughs early on than in the end, but the drama and the humour are balanced and their mixture feels natural.

There is one big story misstep about the movie, a kind of "wait a minute, what was up with that" element that I only realised two minutes after leaving the cinema. If I had come to think of it in the middle of the movie instead, my opinion would surely be considerably lower, so I have to point it out, just to be fair and make clear that ParaNorman's plot is not without error. Highlight here if you don't care about spoilers: The ghosts that seem to be everywhere around Norman during the early parts of the movie are nowhere to be seen during the climax of the plot. He doesn't run into any random ghosts during late parts of the movie that he could ask for help. Spoilers end.

The animation is fantastic. There's just some things that work so well in this form of stop-motion, and Laika went out of their way to put in things that are normally really hard as well, and it all blends together perfectly. It's a shame this stuff takes forever to film, though on the other hand, that means the directors (Sam Fell, Chris Butler) have to take their sweet time planning everything out. They can't half-ass anything, and they have all the time in the world to plan every shot out perfectly while the others are being filmed. Maybe that's why pretty much every camera angle and every shot fits together in a harmonious, beautiful cinematography.

In addition to how it looks, ParaNorman has a surprising strength in characters. Norman is a surprisingly flexible kid whose social issues ring very true to me at points, and the four elements of his appearance, animation, vocal performance (by Kodi Smit-McPhee) and writing fit together perfectly. He's a good kid, and even when he's doing something dumb or inconsiderate, you cheer for him, because you can totally see how the situation he lives in has given him the flaws he possesses. The supporting cast are great as well. I'd give short descriptions, except that I think it would do a disservice to the movie to try to sum up the characters with a few adjectives. Besides, some of the character traits are really surprising, and played laughs, so I don't wanna spoil anything. The standout vocal performance (standout as in it stands out - not necessarily in a bad way - while Smit-McPhee's blends in) comes from John Goodman as the town bum.

Aside from the afore-mentioned story hiccup, the movie works damn well overall. Its gags are really good, and there are some really funny background jokes as well. It's a treat to watch, and a definite must-see for animation fans. I don't think it's quite as good as Coraline, but I liked it more than Brave, if that's any kind of measurement.

9/6/12

Total Recall (2012)

Please don't remake Scanners, though.
The Total Recall remake it out now. A Robocop remake is going to be released next year. All we need is a reboot of Starship Troopers and the Paul Verhoeven Sci-fi Trilogy will be all ruined!

Nah, just kidding. I actually liked this Total Recall about as much as I liked the original. The original had decent action scenes, really cool set designs and costumes, and some interesting sci-fi concepts. The new one matches those strengths beat-for-beat, and aside from trying to be a bit too serious, measures up to the original.

For those not in the know, Total Recall is the story of Douglas Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger/Colin Farrell), a lowly labourer having a boring life with his absurdly hot wife. For some reason, he is not satisfied in his life and finds himself drawn to news about the conflict between the evil authority and the rebels of the colony. He sees news for a company called Rekall, which sells virtual vacations in the form of lifelike memories inserted right into the mind of the customer, and decides to try it out. However, in the aftermath of the procedure, he finds out that in truth he is a secret agent gone rogue who has been captured and fed with false memories of being a labourer to keep him down. He embarks on a quest to find the truth about himself, and save the colony from its evil oppressors.

The major story differences between the versions are the following: in the original, the colony is in Mars, while in the remake it's in Australia (connected via an elevator that passes straight through the core of the Earth); in the original, the bad guys are an evil corporation, while in the remake they're the government; in the original, the added intrigue of the plot comes from secret Martian technology and mutants, while in the remake it comes from the evil government having robot soldiers and the politics of the situation; the original has the villain's right hand man Richter (Michael Ironside) as the secondary bad guy, while the remake promotes Quaid's fake wife Lori (Sharon Stone/Kate Beckingsale) to fill this role.

The remake puts a lot of effort right from the start into making the viewer believe Quaid is unsatisfied with his life on some strange level he's not able to explain. I really like that, though what I don't like is the fact that instead of having really vague dreams about being in the colony, he has really specific dreams about the exact circumstances of being captured by the state, which removes all ambiguity about whether or not the whole movie is just a dream.

Another thing they do their damn best to sell is the world. The opening info dump is a bit ham-handed, but makes sense (aside from a later, really weird scene that implies that London is an irradiated wasteland, even though Britain is among the only places in the world that's habitable), and then there's the set design. The establishing shots of the Colony and Britain look too similar for my tastes, but the actual streets of the countries look so radically different, with the hovercar highways and the floating buildings and whatnot. The roofs and back-alleys of the Colony serve as the locales of some really intense chase scenes that make great use of sets for scripting.

Overall, the first half of the movie has really good action, while the ending falls short on this. The previously-mentioned chases at the Colony and a fantastically tense extended action scene involving futuristic elevators were my definite favourites. The movie's advertising focused a lot on hovercar-chases, but they put all the hovercar-stuff worth seeing into the trailers, so... pointless.

The movie's main problem is its tone. It tries a bit too hard to go for deep emotional drama, which causes its shortcomings on the narrative side to be all the more visible. The girlfriend character is sorta one-note, the evil scheme of the villain makes little sense and the rebels are left really vaguely defined in regards to what they actually do to accomplish their goals. All this would be easily overlookable if the tone was campy and bright.

It's a fine movie, and a worthy remake. The references toward the original were a bit too on-the-nose at times, it's too serious for its own good and it's more straightforward, but other than that, I liked it. Go see it to get your action fill, if you're short on running and gunning right now.

(PS. Throughout this review, I have referred to the 1990 film as "the original". I know both movies are adaptations of a novel.)

(PPS. There is a three-breasted woman in the remake. So if you only want to see an update on that, good for you.)