Burton Returns

 

Batman Returns

1992

D: Tim Burton

**********

Pros: Visual Style, Music, Acting, Some Great Characters, Witty Dialogue

Cons: The Penguin, Batman’s Killing Moments

      What better movie to review this Christmas season than Batman Returns?  I was once harsher on this movie for its departures from the source material, but recently I've given it more credit for its strengths.  It begins with the wealthy Tucker Cobblepot (Paul Reubens) and his wife Esther (Diane Salinger) delivering a deformed infant, Oswald/The Penguin.  They decide to dump their baby into the Gotham sewer system and leave it for dead, a very dark way to start a film (unless you’re in the Singer household, then it’s just good, wholesome Holiday spirit!)  33 years later during Christmastime, millionaire businessman Max Shreck (Christopher Walken) is pestering Gotham’s put-upon mayor (Michael Murphy) into approving a new power plant while acting patronizing toward his even more put-upon secretary Selina Kyle (Michelle Pfieffer).  Shreck and his guests leave Kyle in embarrassment to deliver a public speech, which is interrupted by an attack by the Red Circle Gang.  The group includes an Organ Grinder (Vincent Schiavelli), a Poodle Lady (Anna Katarina), a strongman (Rick Zumwalt) and Doug Jones.  Most of the members seem to be reflections of Burton’s apparent coulrophobia.  Luckily, Batman (Michael Keaton) is contacted by the otherwise ineffectual Commissioner Gordon (Pat Hingle) and stops the madness, but Shreck has gone missing in the confusion.

      Shreck awakens to find himself in a sewer surrounded by gang members and The Penguin (Danny DeVito), who successfully blackmails him into striking a deal.  Schreck agrees to engineer a scenario which introduces the Penguin to Gotham as a hero.  After being allowed to leave, he visits his office, where he finds Selina rifling through it in preparation for an upcoming meeting with Bruce Wayne.  For some reason, she has accessed his secret files and has found out that the planned power plant is a fraud.  In one of the most well-timed double fake-outs I’ve seen in a movie, he shoves her out of a window to her supposed death.

Granted, you know you're done when Christopher Walken is approaching you with this expression.

      Selina survives, her fall partially broken by a series of canopies.  You’d think Shreck would notice this and take appropriate action, but this movie doesn’t sweat the logistics.  She is approached by a group of cats, who lick some of the blood off of her supine body.  The scene has an air of mysticism to it, and Selina’s drying blood and convulsions add to sense of discomfort.  It’s a well-shot and effective scene.  After arriving at her apartment in a daze, the full impact of the event hits her and she trashes it.  This is actually one of the best room trashings I’ve ever seen in a movie.  Kyle furiously destroys every symbol of feminine innocence in her home while her effectively poignant leitmotif plays.  The emotionality of this scene was so well done that it wasn’t lost on me even when I was a small child and did not fully understand its significance.  She cannibalizes a vinyl coat to make her distinctively dark costume.  Catwoman is born.

Catwoman is not nearly as careful about her secret identity as Batman is.

       Catwoman is a rather good villainess.  I’ve noticed that the Tim Burton Batmans are better than the Nolan ones when it comes to female characters with independent story arcs.  Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman has her moments, but she mostly seems to be there as a foil for Batman or as a strawman who sees the light.  We relate to Selina from the beginning of the movie and we see her suffer to the point where she snaps and becomes the famous anti-villain.  Despite her self-avowed confidence, she’s still filled with self-doubt and insecurity.  This is much like how our own coping actions often fall short of providing their intended solace.  Her actions are highly questionable, reflecting how many people motivated by a sense of victimhood may not always be in the right, even if their victimhood is very real.  The feminist angle is sullied a bit by the fact that Pfeiffer’s costume was so tight she literally couldn’t breathe in it.  I’m also wondering where all her gymnastics came from, aside from one passing line suggesting that she’s pretty good at racquetball.  Overall, Pfeiffer is excellent in this role and she gives a very complex performance.  Her sultry voice as Catwoman is arguably overdone, but justified in-universe for the same reason as Christian Bale’s Batman voice is.

      Shreck is also a memorable villain.  Christopher Walken is very creepy in this role, and his charisma is enhanced with snappy dialogue and snazzy coiffure.  I think the reason why the character hasn’t been embraced in the comic continuity is because the appeal was so dependent on Walken’s performance.  Shreck seems to have the air of a nouveau-riche judging from his contempt for “blue bloods” and the occasional malapropism.  He’s had to gain his wealth himself and he will resort to any sort of skullduggery to keep it for himself and his son Chip (Andrew Bryniarski).  While Chip may seem like a spoiled trust fund kid at first glance, he keeps gangsters at bay to protect his father at one point.  He’s also privy to Max’s attempted murder of Selina, and I can think of few pragmatic reasons to share such information.  Max seems to care for his family, and he may have loved his late wife, stating that she’s the only person who ever surprised him.  Still, he’s mostly a corrupt businessman, complete with the 90’s style environmentalist jabs at his pollution.  I begrudgingly point out how refreshingly smart Batman & Robin, of all movies, was on this subject.

     The development of Bruce Wayne/Batman is also very enjoyable.  Michael Keaton continues to play the role with a lovable awkwardness that suggests that Batman is uncomfortable in the guise of Bruce Wayne.  He even occasionally forgets that he’s not supposed to be Batman a couple times.  Most notable is when he begins to correctly deduce that The Penguin is leading the Red Circle Gang.  He makes a total asshole out of himself by openly accusing him in front of Shreck as Wayne.

That's proof enough for Tumblr, though.

While Batman may be the character’s true identity, this version of that identity still has its lovable and quirky charm.  I for one definitely prefer him over Christian Bale.  My one problem with Batman in this movie is that he needlessly kills two thugs.  Violation of the character’s strict no-kill policy was forgivable in the first movie when he had to kill an escaping Joker (which he should have done in that one scene in Dark Knight), but here it seemed unnecessary and out-of-character.  Batman has great chemistry with Catwoman, and the relationship is executed with humor and even has the occasional poetic feel.  They are two dark souls produced by tragedy who have found themselves by lucky coincidence.  Even when they first meet, when Batman is in costume and Selina has yet to become Catwoman, there is a vague connection.   When they first meet formally as Bruce and Selina (post transformation), that connection is now substantial.  The movie effectively shows a force of destiny in this relationship.  Still it's somewhat out-of-character for the master thief from the comics to be turned into a frustrated feminist for whom robbery is a small part of lashing out. 

     Less enjoyable is The Penguin, who is currently being groomed by Shreck into being a puppet mayor.  While I like the design, I really disagree with the characterization.  The Penguin is supposed to be a patrician (which might have made for some good chemistry with Shreck, by the way), not a savage man-animal raised by zoo penguins that were left there for no reason when the zoo closed (this movie does not sweat the logistics).  He is also confused about his status as a human.  I think this movie had Oswald Cobblepot confused with another Batman villain.  His deformity was a good idea, but it would have worked better if he had been raised by elitists whose disapproval formed his motivations.  Instead we have a horndog running around in a onesie.  It’s too bad, because the character design is great when he’s in full dress.  In those precious few moments, he looks like a Gothic interpretation of what the character should look like.  While most of the dialogue in this movie is very witty, The Penguin’s lines are almost consistently painful.  I realize that being raised in a sewer by penguins is not conducive to dry wit, but must every other line from Oswald’s mouth be a horny furry comment?  Still the character works on his own merits, and he makes the movie more of a Christmas movie than Die Hard by presenting a character who is a sort of Anti-Baby Christ.
      The wake of the 2017 Sexual Harassment scandals have made me realize a prescient aspect of the relationship between The Penguin and Catwoman.  Catwoman has thrown in with an obviously predatory man because her radical feminism dedicates her to a questionable agenda she thinks he'll deliver one.  Unsurprisingly The Penguin betrays her when she doesn't put out enough for him.

      While we are supposed to empathize with the character’s tragic backstory and vulnerability, he is simply too evil to be truly sympathetic on any level.  This is odd because in the comics he’s one of the more restrained villains.  His need to be loved and accepted is less understandable when his primary motivation for accepting Shreck’s proposal for him to run for office is “unlimited poontang.”  His mayoral sex drive is the only thing distracting him from his ultimate goal of kidnapping Gotham’s firstborn infants and murdering them.  See, he was victimized as an infant, so he’s getting revenge by…victimizing other infants.  Not the most logical motivation for a villain out there.  I will note that after Batman overcomes the Batmobile’s sabotage (which was not the Penguin’s idea, mind you), he thwarts all of the villain’s plans with next to no effort.  Danny DeVito does a great job in the role that was written for him, but I simply can’t picture him playing the Penguin in-character.

      After the Penguin and Catwoman, who has been embarrassed by a lost fight with Batman, plan to frame the Caped Crusader for the murder of the Ice Princess (Cristi Conaway), she rejects a sexual advance from him.  He angrily calls her a tease like any jackass who uses that term and unsuccessfully attempts to murder her.  Batman promptly clears his own name while outing The Penguin as a fraud, forcing the latter to flee back to the sewer and revisit his infanticidal Plan A, as well as kidnapping Shreck.  Batman very easily and instantly stops the plan, which had been built up as a major threat throughout the entire movie.  Batman is a very efficient hero.  What follows is the most ridiculous scene in the entire movie.  The Penguin arms his army of penguins with missiles and sends them forth to annihilate Gotham, but not before giving them a peptalk.  Anyone who acts like the Bat Credit Card is the worst thing to happen in the series has not seen Danny DeVito's giving a motivational speech, complete with snare drums in the score, to an army of penguins while literally dressed like a baby. 

      Batman once again foils the Penguin’s plan by redirecting the attack to his evil lair.  Shreck figures out how to escape from his cage by tricking the monkey who has been entrusted with the keys for some reason.  The look of utter shock and surprise on the monkey’s face when the keys are snatched from his hand is priceless.

This is anyone's reaction to being confronted by Christopher Walken.

Unfortunately for him, Catwoman shows up to exact her revenge.  Batman pleads with her to spare Shreck’s life while pulling off his mask, which appears to be made out of some sort of licorice candy (make your own vore joke).  Ignoring him, Catwoman kills Shreck and disappears.  A dying Penguin emerges trying to kill our hero, but collapses before he could.  In a truly absurd scene, his body is reverently carried out to Burial at Sewer by penguins while an inappropriately heartbreaking music plays.  The villain's last words are a refreshing aversion of meaningful dying dialogue.

All while Michael Keaton looks on in bafflement.

The movie concludes with Bruce Wayne being chauffeured by Alfred (Michael Gough), when he spots what he thinks may be Selina.  Instead he sees her black cat, and decideds to take the animal in.  As they drive off, Catwoman observes the Bat Signal in the winter sky. 

      Batman Returns is not perfect, but there is so much I love about this movie, particularly the writing.  The dialogue is snappy and organic, and there are far too many good lines in this movie to list below.  Alfred is particularly deadpan in his wit, a trait faithfully lifted from the comic.  The characters talk like real people, and they’re not giving rehearsed speeches most of the time.  Characterization is shown through action rather than explained through exposition.  If you watch the first scene, you might notice the rubber ducky outside the Penguins baby cage, which explains his amphibious duck vehicle.  While I love the Nolan films, the Burton movies have this advantage.  I’ve heard complaints that this movie is “confusing” for not explaining enough and not adhering to formulas, but this only helps my appreciation of the movie’s strengths. 

      Recently, I've been more charitable toward the movie's creative license.  After all, I've been more forgiving when other inaccurate adaptations, such as V for Vendetta and Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) have succeeded in their own right.  Even the first Batman got the Joker's backstory fundamentally wron.g  I think my double standard in regards to Batman stems from nostalgia.  Batman: The Animated Series struck a rare balance of creativity and faithfulness to the point where many people my age were well-versed in the franchise's lore from childhood.  

      The movie’s visual style is excellent.  Burton, with the help of production designer Bo Welch, produced a Gotham City even more beautifully stylized than that of the first movie.   Batman Returns surpasses many genuine Christmas movies in yuletide atmosphere.  The late, great Stan Winston also deserves credit for the Penguin’s makeup.  The movie’s beauty makes me nostalgic for the days of practical effects.  Unfortunately the difficulty some of this movie's sets presented probably helped motivated Burton to turn to generic CGI.  Danny Elfman really pulls it out for the movie’s score.  In addition to the classic Batman theme, he adds excellent leitmotifs for the movie’s villains that capture the tragedy of their situations.  I’m coming to the conclusion that the quality of a male Batman movie villain is inversely proportional to the quality of his leitmotif.  Elfman also adds a caroling element to the score to complement the Christmas feel, though he recycled this trick from his work for Scrooged.   

      Batman Returns is highly recommended for holiday viewing for its yuletide atmosphere.  A beautifully dark fairy tale about two broken people connecting in a world gone wrong was partially sullied by a horny buffoon in a baby suit.  But even then that wouldn't have been truly a flaw if the movie wasn't an adaptation.  

It Could Be Better.

 

Drag Me to Hell

2009

D: Sam Raimi

**********

Pros: One slightly funny moment, Good score

Cons: Horribly depressing, No good characters, Racism, Story does not support its awful moral, Not that funny

     

      I admit that my opinion of movies can sometimes be influenced by other peoples’ responses to them.  This is partially the case for Drag Me to Hell.  I first watched this movie expecting something fun from a former master of campy horror-comedy and honestly mistook it for a serious (if slightly campy) horror movie with a tragically depressing ending.  It essentially revolved around a woman (as well as a young child) getting undeservedly doomed to eternal fire of Hell without chance of redemption.  My initial reaction was more of the subjective disappointment that the movie wasn’t what I expected it to be, rather than genuine active hatred.  It wasn’t until later that people told me that this movie was, in fact, “funny.”  Oddly enough, this was supposed to improve my opinion on an inherently tragic event, but it reinforced my dislike of this film.  It was like my reaction when people justify their love of AVP: Requiem by saying, “I don’t think it’s a serious horror film, I just think it’s funny because I have a sick, disgusting sadistic tendency to laugh at watching small children and pregnant women killed by chestbursting aliens,” like that somehow saves face.  It makes me wonder why AVP:R trails this movie by 80% on Rotten Tomatoes even though their main appeal is that they're amusing to people who need to have their basements checked by the FBI.  Drag Me to Hell is seen by its fans to be a return to form by a once-great director.  If that’s what it was supposed to be, then it makes Prometheus and the Star Wars prequels look like resounding triumphs in that field.  If this is supposed to be Sam Raimi’s trying to be classic Sam Raimi, then it’s little wonder he gave up and made Oz: The Great and Powerful.  

        The movie opens 40 years in the past with a family taking their son to see medium Shaun San Dena (Flor de Maria Chahua) to exorcise him.  The child has been cursed by Gypsies after committing an act of theft against them, but due to some unexplained pettiness, they refused to lift the spell even after the family tried to return their possession.  San Dena’s séance fails, and the child is immediately dragged to Hell by demons in a rather terrifying scene.  It’s not funny cartoon Hell, either, just Hell.  The unparalleled agony of being burned alive for all eternity.  Let that sink in: forever.  For.  Ever.  And it happened to a child.  Amazingly, I have to explain why I’m offended by the very suggestion that this movie is supposed to be funny.

Above: humor, apparently.

The movie then takes us to present-day Los Angeles, where bank loan officer Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) is competing with her completely unlikable coworker Stu (Reggie Lee) for a promotion when she is asked for a third mortgage extension by an old Romani named Mrs. Ganush (Lorna Raver).  There is one scene, however, in which Christine is tasked with training Stu on something, raising the question of why he's competing with her for this position.  Hoping to impress her boss (David Paymer), she denies the loan and Ganush responds by placing a curse on her, or more specifically on a button from her coat.  Worried, she turns to fortune teller Rham Jas (Dileep Rao, the only person in this movie who gets a happy ending), who informs her and her boyfriend Clay (Justin Long) that she is haunted by a demon.  It is the Lamia (v. Art Kimbro), which will haunt the owner of the button for three days until eventually dragging the poor soul into Hell.  Hijinks ensue.  At work, Christine projectile nosebleeds on her boss, who asks if any of the blood got into his mouth (his legitimate fear of catching a horrible disease is funny!).  Christine attempts to apologize to Mrs. Ganush, only to find out that the latter is dead.  Ganush’s granddaughter (Bojana Novakovic) callously tells her that she’s getting what she deserves (Gypsies are wonderful people!)   The soul of Mrs. Ganush haunts Christine, and the Lamia beats her up a few times. Fortunately, Bruce Campbell shows up with a shotgun, says an amusing one-liner and blows away the Lamia, who flies back with a few cartoonish backflips.  Oh, I’m sorry.  That’s what would have happened if the claim that this was “a classic Sam Raimi movie” wasn’t pure, unadulterated shit that had passed through the colons of a thousand bulls.  Instead, Christine attempts to appease the Lamia by stabbing her kitten to death.  Hilarity.

      Christine then employs an older Shaun San Dena (Adriana Barraza) to expel the demon.  Since her encounter in the first scene, San Dena knew that she would face off against the Lamia again, and this is her opportunity to make good after her initial failure.  She charges Christine $10,000 anyway.  In the resultant séance, San Dena manages to entrap the Lamia into the body of a goat, but he bites the hand of an assistant and possesses him before the goat can be stabbed.  The Lamia is temporarily rebuffed, but the exorcism was a failure and San Dena was killed during the events.  What a disappointing character arc.  This scene is cited by fans to be one of the funnier ones, due to the possessed goats’ speaking in the same stock dialogue spoken by every demon in every exorcism movie ever and the presence of a dancing demon.  I was a little too distracted by the inherent suspense of the situation to notice.  I know, I’m fucking insane, right?

      After this setback, Rham Jas tells Christine that she can make a gift of the button and transfer the curse onto someone else.  At first she considers giving the button to Stu, but changes her mind upon seeing how pathetic he is.  She briefly considers other random people, like a sickly old man (as if being ill indicates that he won’t mind eternal damnation).  She decides to give the button to the body of Mrs. Ganush, and succeeds in willing the envelope with the button to her.  She believes she is out of the woods and things are looking up for her.  While at a train station with Clay, she finds out over the phone that she has gotten the promotion because Stu confessed to stealing her work.  Clay tells her that he couldn’t find the collector’s coin he kept in an envelope (which was mentioned earlier in the movie), saying that it must have gotten mixed up with her envelope.  On cue, Christine is dragged into Hell by demons, leaving Clay with the button, which suggests that the curse will eventually damn him.  It’s an ending that’s almost as predictable as it is depressing.

       Watching this movie was like reading a Chick Tract.  Both depict afterlife is horribly unjust and cruel, doling out eternal damnation to poor, undeserving souls.  Unlike most people, I am far too put off by such subject matter to enjoy some cheese on the side.  Sprinkle some sugar on shit, and it still smells like shit.  I find it disgusting and unfair that someone would be sent to Hell just because of the whims of a Gypsie.  I know some people might tell me that “it’s just a movie,” but what is a movie supposed to do?  It’s a work of art that is supposed to provoke an emotion from its viewer, and sometimes have a message.  Considering that the central theme that the movie’s entire plot revolves around is inherently tragic and depressing, then why should I find it funny because of some intentional or unintentional comic relief?  This is why I don’t find Chick Tracts ironically amusing as many apparently do.  I might say that this is because I’m religious, but I don’t see how one has to believe in the afterlife to be shocked by the situation.  I would like to say that, unlike a Chick Tract, Drag Me to Hell is just a lark and does not reflect any twisted beliefs on its creator’s part, but apparently I cannot.  I love how the interview contains the classic "Your calling me bullshit on my bullshit just proves I'm right" logic.

        With this movie, Raimi was apparently trying to make the type of morality tale in which you relate to the character making the wrong choice, even though he arguably succeeded at making one already.  Stories that make sin relatable in order to provide a caveat against it are important, but it only works when the sin is really that bad.  Sam Rami really wants us to believe that Christine deserved eternal damnation for not giving a third extension on a mortgage to someone who gave no indication that she was going to pay it on time.  Such an action is extremely rare in this business, and anyone who signs off on such a deal arguably agrees to the realities of the banking world.  The movie conveniently ignores this, disingenuously framing it Christine’s decision as nothing more than “this old lady’s way of life vs. my promotion.”  Even if one were to consider this internal logic, would Christine’s conceding her promotion to Stu, who would almost certainly abuse his post and make the lives of her and her coworkers a living hell, be the right thing just because one person could not take responsibility for her delinquent mortgage payments and move in with her family?  Ganush clearly has a large family that is perfectly capable of taking care of her.  If they don’t feel like doing that, then they would be the bad guys in the situation and would have no right to judge the bank loan officer for doing her job.  Even if one were to concede Christine’s sin, she does not deserve the punishment.  And where the hell does the fate of that poor child at the beginning of the movie factor into this morality tale?  What about the properties of the curse that are decided by the one who cast it?  Christine is framed as the villain for trying to save her soul by resorting to measures based on rules that were imposed upon her.  The curse forces her to compromise her morals (sacrificing her kitten in spite of her vegetarianism, attempting to pawn the button off on someone else), to the point where her culpability is almost moot.  There is no provision for saving your soul through a selfless deed, as seen in All Dogs Go to Heaven or Bedazzled.  I'm pretty sure Christine's decision to not condemn Stu despite the latter's unlikeability qualifies.  Also,Ganush didn’t just curse Christine to Hell, she also cursed any poor soul who happened to end up owning it.  Ganush also seems not to care so much for the inherent wrongness of Christine’s act so much as the effect it had on her own self.  Also, if the movie's "humor" derives from our laughing at this poor woman's doom because she "deserves" it, then that not only makes the movie even more contemptible, it adds a level of hypocrisy to Raimi's supposed encouragement of self-aware soul-searching on the audience's part. 

       Amazingly, Raimi tries to pass off Ganush as the “victim,” ignoring the fact that a sense of victimhood, whether it be real or perceived, is a classic motivation for villainy.  Some of the most vicious and bloodthirsty people are such because they identify themselves as victims.  The disproportionate way in which she retaliates against Christine is more than enough to qualify her as the villain.  Raimi uses his claim to justify the potentially offensive depiction of the Romani people.  This is a highly dubious assertion on Rami’s part because only a crazy person would argue that Romani are depicted in a sympathetic light.  They are depicted as the worst people ever.  In this movie, they are evil sorcerers who use an inflated sense of victimhood to lash out against others for minor slights by cursing them with the literal worst conceivable thing that can happen to anyone.  It’s all just campy fun because it’s not like Romani still face prejudice nowadays.  I can’t help but think that Raimi is just saying Ganush is a victim as an afterthought to cover his ass on his terrible and offensive writing. 

       Another way in which this movie fails as a morality tale is its rejection of the very idea of redemption.  As long as someone lives, they have the opportunity to redeem themselves.  Yet Christine has no such recourse.  She’s given a scant three days to make good.  Her only conceivable chance at true redemption is destroyed when Mrs. Ganush dies shortly after the curse is set upon her, robbing her of a chance to apologize.  Instead, her salvation is dependent on digging her hole deeper.  Even making her do things that would logically send her to hell anyway.  Christine is literally damned if she does and damned if she doesn’t.  This is disappointing when you consider the importance Raimi placed on redemption in Spider-Man 3.  Even Chick Tracts recognize the legitimacy of a deathbed recantation (at the expense of any other form of morality, though).  It’s not every day when a movie is so wrong that it inspires me to say something good about Spider-Man 3 and Jack Chick.  The absurd perversion of morality in Drag Me to Hell is enough to discredit any attempt to pass it off as an intelligent and well-written horror movie, and Raimi tends to Kafkatrap anyone who questions it.  To the credit of most of the movie’s fans, I hardly hear any of them backing Sam Raimi up on any of this crap.  They mostly seem to think it’s funny.            

      That being said, the movie isn’t really that funny.  I wanted to watch a classic Sam Raimi horror-comedy, and I simply didn’t get that.  It would take a lot of very strong humor to compensate for such a depressing plot, and the comic relief in this movie is disappointingly restrained.  I only remember one part in this movie that made me chuckle.  In the first scene you can hear the invisible Lamia bitchslap a random guy while trashing the room during the séance.  Hell, I think A Simple Plan is funnier movie simply because, in spite of the movie’s uncharacteristically serious tone, Raimi could not resist having one person blown into the air by a shotgun blast.  There are some cheesy elements and director trademarks, but they mostly serve as style rather than humor.  There are gross-out visuals and some intentional camp.  Not enough to work, but enough to spoil any serious tone the movie could have had.  The Classic appears as Mrs. Ganush's car.  However, the movie’s atmosphere is Sam Raimi-lite, as evidenced by the presence of bad CGI.  Nothing like the glory days of the Evil Dead series.  This movie fails not only as a movie, it fails as a Sam Raimi movie.  This is why I find it so baffling that it’s been embraced by the his fans.  You’d think that with such misplaced praise for one fallen creator, fanboys would have at least recognized that Titan A.E. was the first decent movie that Don Bluth had made in a decade.  Then again, what are humans if not collections of logical discrepancies held together by complex hydrocarbon molecules? 

      Camp and humor might not have been the right path anyway for such a depressing story.  While the Coens’ Fargo and Serious Man are ostentatiously dark comedies, I find their tragedy far outweighing their humor, much like in this movie.  Unlike this movie, the Coens depend on genuinely good, serious filmmaking to make intelligent movies.  You can’t just dress up the logical fallacies and depressing consequences of Drag Me to Hell’s story with camp and call it funny.  In effect, Drag Me to Hell is no jollier than Se7en, and I'd be willing to bet Se7en has stronger comic relief.  Perhaps if the consequences had been trivialized this might have worked.  Oddly enough, Raimi’s A Simple Plan demonstrated that he once realized this in a time before Quentin Tarantino used that voodoo curse to steal his powers a decade ago.  This is why Tarantino has basically been making Sam Raimi movies with better dialogue lately and why Sam Raimi hasn’t made a decent movie since Spider-Man 2.                    

     Long story short, I hate this movie.  The one good thing I can say about it (aside from its very rare humor) is that it has an excellent score by Christopher Young.  It’s also frustrating that I seem to be relatively alone in my opinion.  Even people who hated this movie seem to ignore its obvious flaws and dislike it for the wrong reasons (I noticed a similar trend with Shoot’em Up).  Many of them expected a serious horror film and found it too cheesy, while others clearly never liked Raimi’s movies to begin with.  I think it goes to show that Drag Me to Hell fails at both horror and comedy.  The only way Raimi could salvage this mistake is to admit it and maybe do a more genuinely light-hearted sequel to the movie, something along the lines of what he hinted at in the above interview.  After all, I believe in redemption.   

BONUS: My video review with Zucca for its 10th Anniversary 

Wolf Awareness Week II: Day 7

 

Alpha and Omega 2: A Howl-iday Adventure

2013

D: Richard Rich

**********

Pros: Some slight emotionality, Improved plot structure

Cons: Bad Animation, Flat characterization, Some crude humor

      Richard Rich has not had the most auspicious career in animation.  He started out decently by helping direct The Fox and the Hound, but he seemed to lose his way after co-directing on the financially disastrous Black Cauldron.   He spent the 90’s making middling third-party cartoons like The Swan Princess and now he specializes in 3D Direct-to-Video features.  If there’s one thing that demonstrates the wrongfulness of the death of 2D, it’s the animation quality of cheap computer-animated features.  3D animation requires a lot of work and money to look presentable, and some art styles don’t translate well into 3D environments.  The result is that many characters in these works will look very off-putting.  The movies themselves will often illustrate this point by showing 2D conceptual art in their credits, and that will look fine.  In the good old days, cheap ghetto cartoons at least possessed decent artwork, even if it might have had stilted animation sometimes.  This problem applies to Rich’s recent sequel to Alpha and Omega (which he produced).  The animation of Alpha and Omega 2: A Howl-iday Adventure is not only bad, but the rest of the movie is not too much to be proud of (despite the potential), and I say this despite being one of the few people who actually liked the first movie. 

       The movie establishes that Humphrey (Ben Diskin) and Kate (Kate Higgins) have had three poorly-named pups: Stinky (Kate Higgins), Claudette (Lindsay Torrance) and Runt (Liza West).  While the three pups are out playing, and Runt uses a unique ability to climb trees to spot a few rogue wolves.  Claudette and Stinky are separated from Runt when they are attacked by a bear (Frank Welker).   Unfortunately, the rogue wolves have taken the other pup, and it’s up to the protagonists to reclaim him.

In the wild, only the fittest get the hair gel required to survive.

       The rogue wolves are of a pack that runs on a policy of Alpha supremacy.  Their leader King (Blackie Rose) intends to use Runt to lure Humphrey’s pack so that he can destroy it and he tasks his daughter Princess (Meryl Leigh) with taking care of him until then.  I ended up liking Princess in this movie.  She clearly has misgivings about King’s anti-Omega bigotry, and her voice actress gives a good performance.  Perhaps she ended up having an Omega pup that suffered from the pack’s policy (a line seems to suggest this to me), which is why her personality is such.  Either that or she’s just angry that she’s been saddled with such a humiliating name.

      As Kate and Humphrey go to rescue their cubs, they experience the usual distractions in the tradition of the last movie.  They rescue a bear cub (despite Humphrey’s reluctance based on a bad experience in their first adventure) whose family ends up helping them in the final battle with the rogues at the end of the movie.  I will say one thing for this sequel: it does a better job of integrating side events into the main plot than the previous film.  The bear subplot is not only relevant to this movie’s story, it even seems to justify a bear encounter from the original that was so pointless that I didn’t even mention it in that review.  They also enlist the help of Marcel (Chris Smith) and Paddy (Eric Price).  I must say that Marcel’s character design is rather off-putting.  He looks like a middle-aged man who got stuck halfway while transforming into a goose (I’m not putting an image up on this page).  I guess that’s another reason why I didn’t like the birds in the first movie.  They help the wolves fight the rogues with a flyby poo-bombing, because every 3D anthropomorphic movie is apparently required by law to have at least one fart or potty joke.  I blame George W. Bush.  If not for this scene, I would have let this movie get away at least a 4-star rating.  In fact, I’d say that Alpha and Omega 2 would have been a perfectly presentable family movie if it weren’t for the terrible animation and the graphic moment of bird defecation.  At least Equestria Girls rescued it from being my least favorite movie of 2013.

      Despite their initial reluctance in doing so, Winston (Danny Glover) and Tony (Bill Lader, who does a terrible impression of the late Dennis Hopper) bring their packs to help.  They also bring Garth (Chris Carmack) and Lilly (Kate Higgins), who have spent most of their time living in the grasslands, which I guess makes them the lupine equivalent of hipsters.  There is an admittedly funny scene in which they fool the rogues into thinking they are “Super-Alphas” by having one wolf standing on top of another one who is walking in tall grass.  It’s an amusing image that’s particularly humorous because former enemies Winston and Tony are paired off with each other.  They fight the rogues and win with the help of the bears.  Princess abandons her pack to King’s shock.  I will note that the wolf characters in the Eastern/Western packs do not seem as well-developed as they were in the previous movie.  Though there was some decent chemistry between Humphrey and Kate, a lot of the things I liked from the first film were not developed further or even shown.   The characters didn’t show as much personality.  The idea of her grandchild being in mortal danger does not inspire any half-psychotic rants from Eve (Vicki Lewis), and I don’t think Lilly mentions turtles once.

        At this point you’re probably wondering what any of this has to do with the howl-idays.  Well, after the main conflict of the movie is solved, we get an epilogue in which Humphrey, Kate and the pups are traveling back home and have somehow gotten lost.  How they got separated from their pack and got in danger of freezing or starving is not explained.  It’s a complete non sequitur, and its only connection to the plot is that Runt uses his foreshadowed climbing ability to spot a potential place to rest.  It’s like they decided to make the movie holiday-themed at the last second.  They find the same gas station from the previous movie (which I also don’t think I mentioned).  Max, a worker who mistook Humphrey for rabid in the previous film, sees the wolves and, being reminded of his own family, decides to leave the house open and with food waiting for them because it’s Christmas.  The scene has a lot of heart, but I’m not sure why he didn’t call animal control or someone who would have known what to do.

      Alpha and Omega 2 had good potential and a promising plot, but some things brought movie down: the crude scatological humor, the tacked-on ending and, most of all, the animation.  It’s  a remarkably ugly movie in a visual sense.  Like many cheap third-party 3D movies, the imagery lacks a crucial amount of detail, the movement has an awkward feel to it and it’s clear that many of the designs didn’t translate well into a three-dimensional environment.  The color palette of the movie has an unintentional weird, low-saturation look to it, and the shading is terrible.  Particularly bad are the wolf pups, whose cuteness the artists went a little overboard with. 

There's no room for their brains.

Voice acting isn’t as good either, as very few of the original cast returned to reprise their roles.  The most noticeable exception is Danny Glover.  Perhaps this is the best he could get because people might be realizing that Glover is so blandly wooden an actor that he makes Russell look like Jim Carrey.  He does have a distinctive voice which arguably makes phoned-in voice acting his ideal niche.  The one most noticeable advantage this movie has over its predecessor is that it makes far better use of its scenes.  If feels like it has more substance in its scant 45 minutes than Alpha and Omega had in twice that time.  It might have even been an improvement if not for its fatal flaws.  This movie wasn’t much to review, but I guess that’s what I get when I commit myself to a gimmick like this. 

           

 QUOTES

KATE: Okay, parents’ first dinner.  Let's get this place in order. Oh Humphrey, can you move the logboard to the wall?

HUMPHREY: This is where we fell in love.

KATE: I know.  Against the wall. [Humphrey pushes log slightly] Completely against the wall.

HUMPHREY:  I don’t know, honey.  I think the angle makes it a little less…[Kate pushes log against the wall]…militant?

PRINCESS: Why aren’t you eating the rest?  Don’t you know how scarce meat is?

RUNT: I was leaving the other half for you.  You know, like sharing.  Nah, I guess it’s an Omega thing. 

PRINCESS: When we have a kill, those who eat are those who fight for it. 

RUNT: I’m sure the pups do really well under that scenario.

PRINCESS: [growls] The Alpha pups do.