Review: Tangled

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May 012011
 

Tangled tells a re-envisioned version of Rapunzel, in which a magical plant that falls from the sky is found and coveted by a woman who uses its powers to stay perpetually young. However one day in a nearby kingdom, the pregnant queen is having a difficult birth, and the royal guards are sent to find the miracle plant. They do, and take the magic to the queen, who uses it to give birth to a cute baby princess named Rapunzel. The peasant woman who had previously used the magic is not happy about this, and somehow figures out that the infant princess’s hair can be used to keep her young. She then steals Rapunzel and places her in a tower all alone and adopts her as her own, visiting her periodically to rejuvenate.

Fast-forward nearly two decades. Rapunzel, on the verge of her eighteenth birthday, trailing a mile of golden locks, and apparently showing no signs of psychological trauma from having spent all of her life alone and imprisoned, remains unaware that she is in fact a stolen princess from a nearby kingdom. She pines away in boredom and loneliness—until a handsome rogue thief appears in her tower and, after a series of misadventures, captures her heart. He agrees to take her to the kingdom if she will return a crown he’s stolen and let him get away.

The film is in 3D, as is all the rage these days, and the scenes are nice to look at. The scenes really show depth, though I wish the plot had as much depth. It’s kind of a non-sensical story, with strange plot holes galore. I guess I should know better than to challenge logic in fairy tales, but the movie never explains how Rapunzel realizes that she’s the missing princess (which is after all key to the whole story). Furthermore, it’s not clear why the queen’s life is any more valuable than the peasant woman’s. After all, even though Rapunzel’s “mother” is clearly evil and manipulated Rapunzel for her own purposes, the queen had no more right to use the magic for herself than she did. And later when Rapunzel enters the kingdom—knowing that she has the magical ability to cure illness and injury, you might think that this kind-hearted soul might head directly to the hospital to heal the sick and injured. Instead she keeps the power a secret; perhaps she should take a lesson from Spider-Man: With great power comes great responsibility. Ah, the selective morality of fairy tales!

I was looking forward to Tangled. Fractured fairly tales are of course nothing new; they’ve been around since at least the 1960s (in the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show). But there’s little new in this mediocre fairy tale retelling. The songs—about a dozen in all—are annoying and forgettable, though kids might like them. Tangled is passable entertainment for undemanding teens and pre-teens, though adults may find it lacking.

Two Stars

Stars: Mandy Moore and Zachary Levy

Director: Nathan Greno and Byron Howard

Plugs: None

Review: 127 Hours

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May 012011
 

127 Hours is how long hiker Aron Ralston spent trapped in a Utah canyon in 2003 before he cut off his arm to get free and hike to safety. It’s a true story, adapted for film by Danny Boyle (best known for Slumdog Millionaire) and starring James Franco as Ralston.

This film—indeed, any film—is only as good as its source material, and that’s where the limitations of 127 Hours become apparent. If you’re going to stick to the true story, then there’s only so much you can do with the plot: Guy goes hiking, gets his hand stuck, cuts it off, and lives to tell the tale. You can toss in some hallucinations to vary the scenes a bit, but ultimately the story is what it is.

We can’t fault the screenwriters (director Boyle and Simon Beaufoy) for that, nor, I suppose, even Ralston, who fleshed out his experience into a 354-page book. The scenes of him hiking in the desert before his accident are not terribly interesting, and nor are the scenes after he frees himself. This leaves the middle third as the meat of the film, after he’s got his hand stuck and after he steels himself enough to hack it off.

Ralston spends the time trying to make the best of his situation, trying to survive, and hallucinating. Ralston survived partly due to his wits and bravery, but Ralston is no hero; he’s an arrogant idiot who not only hiked alone but didn’t bother to tell anyone where he was going, thus preventing a search. Sure, cutting off your own arm takes more balls than most people have, but it’s also not as if he had much of a choice: It was do-or-die, and Ralston decided to do. It was the only decision he could make after having made a series of bad decisions.

Three Stars

Stars: James Franco and Amber Tamblyn

Director: Danny Boyle

Plugs: Coca-Cola products

Review: True Grit (2011)

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May 012011
 

The new film True Grit, like the 1969 Western starring John Wayne, tells the story of a precious and precocious 14-year-old girl named Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld), who hires crusty, one-eyed lawman Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) to help her hunt down Tom Chaney, the man who killed her father. They are soon joined by a Texas Ranger named LeBeauf (Matt Damon), who is already on Chaney’s trail.

Much of the dialogue came from the novel by Charles Portis—an unfortunate screenwriting decision by the writer/directors. The Coen brothers can write good dialogue; no one who has seen No Country For Old Men can deny that. But they are a little too in love with their (and Portis’s) words, much as Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith—bless their awesome indie hearts—often sacrifice credibility for literal showmanship.

Throughout the film, Mattie’s dialogue is jarringly out of character. Could a fourteen-year-old girl speak the way Mattie does? Certainly, it’s possible. By the same token, the Black adolescent stableboy she takes a horse from could possibly speak in Shakespearean Early Modern English, as could the clerk at your local gas station. (For the record, the film Juno annoyed me for much the same reason.) Those who saw the HBO series Deadwood heard very different (and, experts stated, much more realistic) dialogue from around the same milieu.

The plot didn’t hold much sway for me either. I never thought the original True Grit was that great, and this remake didn’t improve the plot. It’s all tired retread: a gruff loner on a mission is befriended by a determined, sweet-tempered younger sidekick who eventually worms his or her way into our hearts. Yep, it’s Shrek and a billion other films. Just because True Grit is packed to the gills with clichés doesn’t make it a bad film. Lots of fine films contain threadbare clichés, but the best ones rise above them. True Grit relies heavily on Bridges’ prodigious talent, but even that isn’t enough to save the film from mediocrity.

Just as Mattie’s dialogue rings false, much of the plot does as well. Before Mattie selects Cogburn, she is offered her choice of three trackers to help find her father’s killer, whose death she keeps reminding us motivates her. Mattie is depicted and played as sharp and savvy, yet she inexplicably does not choose the man suggested as the best tracker. This is of course necessary to launch the plot, but it does raise the puzzling question of why, if finding her father’s killer is her life’s burning mission, she doesn’t choose the best person for the job. One wonders, if she and Cogburn hadn’t found him at the end of the film, if she would have regretted not hiring the best tracker. There’s various other plot silliness, such as both Cogburn and LeBeauf stating that they think Chaney is long gone and will never be found, yet conveniently (and coincidentally) Mattie stumbles across him the very next morning at a stream only a few yards from their camp. This is a world in where the bad guys are knocked unconscious from the slightest blow (or killed by a single shot), while the heroes shoot straight and feel fine despite mortal bullet wounds.

Technically, True Grit is a fine Western. The cinematography is excellent, the scenery drips with desolation and death, the direction is assured, and the period detail is excellent. The acting by Bridges and the rest is uniformly excellent, and Steinfeld’s would be great if she wasn’t hampered by a script that has her saying lines that would better fit a middle-aged college professor.

Three Stars

Stars: Jeff Bridges and Hailee Steinfeld

Director: Ethan and Joel Coen

Plugs: None

Review: The Fighter

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May 012011
 

The Fighter tells the true-life story of welterweight boxer Micky Ward and his rise to fame from hardscrabble roots. As a general rule, I rarely like sports movies. Though there are many good ones, they usually fall into the same boring, formulaic plots. The Fighter gets around this problem by barely being a sports movie at all; in fact it has surprisingly few boxing scenes for a film about a boxer. For as much ready-made drama as there is to be found inside the ring, director David Russell and the screenwriters recognize that Ward’s real dramas occurred in his everyday life.

It is precisely because The Fighter focuses on Ward’s family that the characters are fleshed out, and the actors are allowed to do their stuff. The titular character refers to Micky Ward, but in reality everyone in the film is fighting for something. Micky’s half-brother Dicky (Christian Bale), himself a former boxer whose claim to fame is knocking Sugar Ray Leonard to the mat (Leonard may have tripped), dreams of a comeback but his life has been derailed by crack cocaine addiction. Micky needs Dicky to train him, but it’s not going well. That changes when Micky meets Charlene (Amy Adams), a scrappy barmaid who recognizes that his family’s drugs and dysfunction are keeping Micky from developing his true ability. Micky wants to remain loyal to Dicky and his family, but knows that his career is doomed if they manage him.

The three leads are excellent, and there’s not a false note in the bunch. Mark Wahlberg previously worked with director Russell on the 1999 war comedy-drama Three Kings, and gives a surprisingly understated performance as Ward. Christian Bale is brilliant as Micky’s wrangly, twitchy, drug-addicted half-brother Dicky, the one-time pride of blue-collar Lowell, Massachusetts.

Though I rarely watch boxing, Micky Ward was one of the few boxers I remember, and he was a fascinating athlete to watch. He was perhaps best known for his devastating body blows. Ward salvaged more than a few of his losing fights with a punch to his opponent’s kidney, dropping the other boxer like a sack of potatoes.

The Fighter, like Million Dollar Baby, has some unavoidable sports movie clichés but sidesteps many others. It’s much more than a boxing movie; it’s about family, potential squandered by drugs, and redemption.