I’ve been neglecting movie Monday for a couple weeks, so I’m going to split it up into 4 or 5 parts.
1. Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009, dir. Wes Anderson) - It’s obviously very difficult to make a stop-motion animation film. I think it’s even more difficult to make one this engaging. The point at which I fell in love with this film came early. The titular fox speaks and acts with grace and dignity…until he eats. His wife hands him a plate of breakfast food and instead of politely eating the meal like we all expect our anthropomorphic animals to do, Fox snarls and gobbles the food up with the abandon of a wild animal. This is startling and funny. The film has more moments like this, but I’ll let you discover them. In the midst of all this humor lies the heart at the center of all Wes Anderson movies. This is absolutely one of the year’s best. Grade: A-
2. Taking Woodstock (2009, dir. Ang Lee) – This is one huge mess of a film. Is it a sexual coming-of-age story? Is it an examination of 1960s suburbia and the various tensions the come with living in a place where there is nothing to do? There’s one thing for sure: nobody ever takes Woodstock. Ang Lee forgets to put any kind of concert footage in there and all but ignores the musical side of the concert. It could have been a pretty fine film if the script moved more toward…you know…taking Woodstock than veering toward multiple storylines simultaneously. Grade: D
3. Nicholas Nickelby (2002, dir. Douglas McGrath )- First off…how is it that Charlie Hunnam, star of Lords of Anarchy and Undeclared, have such an awful British accent and still be British? When I first saw him on Undeclared, I thought that Judd Apatow did an awful job hiring an American actor who couldn’t do British. Turns out Charlie Hunnam is as British as Fish n’ Chips. His horrendous accent aside, this film is fantastic. McGrath never falls into the typical trap in which most fall when adapting canonical literature into film. He never treats Dickens’ dialogue as sacrosanct so the humor and humanity come through loud and clear. This film whizzes by and succeeds in reintroducing Dickens to a generation who must think of his work as stale and boring. Grade: B
