{"id":474,"date":"2012-12-18T16:19:12","date_gmt":"2012-12-18T16:19:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?p=474"},"modified":"2023-08-30T10:35:42","modified_gmt":"2023-08-30T18:35:42","slug":"seymour-movies-winter-fantasy-clearance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?p=474","title":{"rendered":"Seymour Movies: Winter Fantasy Clearance"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is what I have instead of a Top-Ten (or Not Top-Ten): A handful of oddities that I’d wanted to bring up sooner rather than now. Chances are that, except for number two on this list, none of them will be in play during awards season. (And I’m already getting fed up with awards season even though it’s barely started.) So before this year ends (and it turned out to be a better overall year for movies than I thought it would be at midpoint, though still not as great as fifty years ago<\/a>), here’s some\u00a0surplus babble about stuff you’ve already forgotten about.<\/p>\n

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Moonrise Kingdom<\/strong> <\/em>\u2013 Full disclosure: I was, as is the hero of this movie, 12-going-on-13-years old in the summer of 1965. I was so hopeless at making and keeping friends that I was bullied by boys even geekier than me. This may partly explain why I was drawn to this Wes Anderson movie more intimately than any of his others. I didn\u2019t have an off-shore island at the edges of northern New England to escape to, except for whatever zone of solitude I was able to create for myself in the middle of southern New England. And I didn\u2019t know then that what I really needed to deliver me from my pre-adolescent miseries was a gangly, brooding girl my own age with a violent temper, a yen for Benjamin Britten\u00a0and a protective instinct towards fellow outcasts. It wouldn\u2019t be the first time I\u2019ve felt nostalgic for a past I never had. It is however the first time I\u2019ve been genuinely touched by a Wes Anderson movie with real people (as opposed to the animated Fabulous Mr. Fox<\/em>, which I also liked a lot despite the perpetually grandstanding, self-aggrandizing hero-figure all too typical of the Anderson c.v.) The guess here is that Anderson\u2019s experience with making Mr. Fox<\/em> helped tighten his narrative flow and keep his own gangly-ness under control. There\u2019s a generosity-of-spirit towards his characters here that one associates more with Renoir or even Preston Sturges than with Wes Anderson; even the mean kids don\u2019t seem so bad once you know them a little better. It doesn\u2019t exactly make me want to go back to Rushmore<\/em> or The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou<\/em> for a visit. But I might give The Royal Tenenbaums<\/em> or Darjeeling Limited<\/em> another try after the New Year.<\/p>\n

Beasts of the Southern Wild<\/strong> <\/em>\u2013 This one still gives me trouble and I\u2019ll try to keep the reason why as simple as I can: As much as I wanted \u2013 and waited \u2013 to be transported by this movie, I wasn\u2019t. I keep wondering if this was my fault since Beasts<\/em> has landed on the Top-Ten lists of critics I respect (and a few more of those I don\u2019t). Yes I am as captivated as the rest of civilization by Quvenzhane Wallis and I believe Dwight Henry\u2019s performance as her tormented, but ferociously loving father was itself a masterwork of empathy \u2013 and not bad at all for a man whose day job is baking. I also am all in with anybody\u2019s efforts to coax magical realism from beneath the topsoil of American folklore using recent trauma (e.g. Katrina) and potential catastrophe (e,g. global warming) as psychic sources. But all the while I watching it, I felt as though I were willing the movie to become what it was trying to be instead of being drawn into its dreamy phantasmagoria. And just so you know, I hold no brief with those who find the movie in any way condescending towards its characters, especially when they\u2019re as doughty as Wallis\u2019 Hushpuppy or as complicated as Henry\u2019s Wink. I suppose that even in a dreamland such as this, you can\u2019t afford to find yourself drifting along for as many stretches as you do here. By the time the Aurochs finally got to the Bathtub, or vice-versa (go ask somebody else), I felt more detached from the dream than I should have been. The father and daughter were the only reasons I still cared. And that might have been enough in other movies. But not for one as ambitious as this.<\/p>\n

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Looper<\/strong> <\/em>\u2013 Some of my friends, even those who claim to like science-fiction, contend there wasn\u2019t much more to Rian Johnson\u2019s thriller beyond a premise fitting more comfortably in an hour-long episode of The Outer Limits<\/em>. I\u2019d have watched such an episode several times over and I still wouldn\u2019t have found the cunning verisimilitude Johnson sustains throughout this spirited chase through time. Ideas are what set off a science-fiction story. Plot is how you roll with it. But atmosphere, especially in an SF movie, is what keeps you staring at it. The way telepaths stuck at the bottom of the world off-handedly show off their kinetic skills, either from boredom or for drinks, makes you recognize a future you\u2019re not sure will ever exist \u2013 or, on the other hand, doesn\u2019t exist in some form right now. When an SF movie is really bad, there\u2019s nothing worse. (Ask my old pals, Servo and Crow.) But when it\u2019s as supple and smart as this, few things are better.<\/p>\n

The Avengers<\/strong> <\/em>\u2013I have fonder memories of this comic-book movie than those of The Amazing Spider-Man<\/em> (which had its own arcane charms) and The Dark Knight Rises<\/em> (which had Marion Cotillard). Mostly, I just thought, pound for metallic pound, this had more antic energy being pumped into our collective foreheads. I also think it\u2019s unfortunate that Mark Ruffalo\u2019s shrewd, incisive performance as Bruce Banner, The Hulk\u2019s alter-ego (or, to be more clinically accurate, super-ego), is destined to be overlooked for awards because of all the popcorn butter sticking to its surroundings. His quietly magnetic evocation of a lost intellectual struggling to contain his bone-deep fury stole the movie from all the buff physiques surrounding him. Somehow with all the other super-heroes and double-dealing villains looking either too anachronistic or too sleek, Ruffalo\u2019s tweedy-but-wary reticence seems more above and beyond its immediate environment. He\u2019s almost too good for the movie he\u2019s in \u2013 and yet the movie would be even more disposable without him.<\/p>\n

Robot and Frank<\/strong> <\/em>\u2013 If Looper\u2019<\/em>s science-fictional premise seemed to skeptics custom-made for hour-long television, then Robot and Frank\u2019s<\/em> could fit into an installment of a half-hour series comprising unsold sitcom pilots. (I mean this as a compliment, because I grew up as a fan of those old summer anthologies — or of what Robert Klein once swept beneath the rubric, \u201cFailure Theater.\u201d) It\u2019s a small, decorous movie that maybe needed to sublet some of Looper<\/em>\u2019s or, for that matter, The Avengers\u2019<\/em> insurgent energy so it could leave deeper resonances. Frank Langella plugs up the more fallow aspects of this story with a beautifully enacted portrayal of a retired second-story man with creeping dementia who bonds with a talking appliance. You come away remembering him \u2013 and carrying at least one cutting irony: That an old man with an active grudge against a billionaire seeking to replace the printed page with all-digital texts uses artificial intelligence to carry out his vengeance. Those of us who roughly share a certain age might leave this movie wondering how much time we have left to pull off our own capers against a future we didn\u2019t ask for \u2013 which constitutes as much heft as this lighter-than-air movie can take.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is what I have instead of a Top-Ten (or Not Top-Ten): A handful of oddities that I’d wanted to bring up sooner rather than now. Chances are that, except for number two on this list, none of them will be in play during awards season. (And I’m already getting fed up with awards season […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[124],"tags":[127,133,128,132,126,130,129,131],"class_list":["post-474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-beasts-of-the-southern-wild","tag-frank-langella","tag-looper","tag-mark-ruffalo","tag-moonrise-kingdom","tag-robot-and-frank","tag-the-avengers","tag-wes-anderson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=474"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3726,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474\/revisions\/3726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}