..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..RJ Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

The revenge of Paul-T.David-O.-Wes-Russell-Anderson

Why do so many moviemakers, even ones with not so much talent or taste, want to refashion themselves as Paul-T.David-O.-Wes-Russell-Anderson? As if in response to a younger generation at his back, as well as the megahit status of ex-wife, ex-collaborator Nancy Meyer, who went from the execrable success of What Do Women Want? to the admirable emotion of Something's Gotta Give, director Charles Shyer shoulders on the garb of a flashy, glib cynic with a love for sybaritic design in the wholly dispensable remake of Alfie.

There are many, many missteps, despite brightly colored production design (substituting London for Manhattan in many scenes), good actors (Jude Law, Siena Miller - Law's now-girlfriend - Nia Long, Susan Sarandon) and an OK, if slightly arthritic song score by Mick Jagger and Dave Stewart. Marisa Tomei seems cast merely as a riposte to Meyer casting her as a severe harpie in What Do Women Want? She has several sweet moments, but she's almost as wasted here as a single mom Law's Alfie two-times.

Alfie explains almost everything in the movie directly to camera, even while other actors are in scenes, and it's a device that makes the story near impossible to care about. Even Ferris Bueller was a more polite young man.

Even worse than Alfie's flat, shallow declarations about his delusional notions of love, are paraphrases of earlier jokes, such as the appropriation of Bill Maher's notorious gag that goes something like this: Show me a beautiful woman, and I'll show you a man who's tired of screwing her. (Alfie goes for "shagging.") Graydon Carter and his funny upswept gray hair have bizarre cameos. The end credits, a self-congratulatory montage of black-and-white stills of the above-the-line crew-director, writers, producers-resembles 1950s-era work by the great photographer William Klein as well as representing an icky feat of monumental self-love.

The Indelibles

It's hard to talk about the CGI-animated movies made by Pixar: they're such exemplars of what Hollywood's industrial craft system supposedly is capable of, that I don't find myself judging them against other word. They're just gratifying, unsurprisingly, unsparingly… what's the word? Ah! They're just… Good.

With The Incredibles, writer-director Brad Bird, also responsible for Iron Giant as well as consultant work on The Simpsons and King of the Hill, has produced the kind of seamless, heartfelt, boisterous, buoyant, downright funny movie that will make a well-deserved mint in the next few weeks. It's also the kind of movie that shouldn't get into the Academy Award race for Best Picture: mere humans are no match for the flawed superhumans in this sweet treat.

Bird has made the distinction in interviews that animation is a medium, not a genre. (Even if animation does belong in a very particular genre: that of art forms be beloved by perfectionists.) And Pixar is less a brand name than a sequence of design identities, much as with Steven Jobs' other enterprise, a small company known as Apple.

The Clark Kent-meets-James Bond conceit of The Incredibles has all sorts of iconic (if not ironic) fun with genre elements, but from the world of movies with "real" two-dimensional people in them. Like other Pixar pictures such as Finding Nemo - and the preview for 2005's Cars is promising - The Incredibles is something that would be so easy to undervalue, like a transparent, translucent feat of user-friendly, user-wants-to-fondle industrial design.

The Parrs are a nice, normal suburban family: dad Bob punches the clock as an insurance adjuster; mom Helen (honey-voiced Holly Hunter) has her hands full with infant Jack Jack, hyper boy Dashiell and hair-in-her-eyes teen Violet (an unlikely Sarah Vowell, swallowing her words with adroit precision). Bob's big figure's comically cramped into a squat yet sleek motor-box when he putts off to work, like my grade school teacher who had a yardful of Studebakers he collected, Larks, Hawks, Avantis. Bob's as confined in life as in that car, his middle-age crisis is acute. (He'll work his way up to that shiny black gull-wing Corvette.) As his belly grows, so does his nostalgia for the old days, before the family was forced into the "superhero relocation program." He was the flesh-suited Mr. Incredible, and Botero-bottomed Helen was Elastigirl; young Dash is a little too speedy and Violet can put up a force field as forcefully as any solitary teenager. Mom? Why can't we be a normal family?

The reason is that society looks down on "supers" after a rash of lawsuits that left the government liable for collateral damage. It's more frustrating than it was for Mr. Incredible at the start of the movie, when he gruffed that once the world is saved, you just "want it to stay saved." But when old friends are suddenly dying across the globe, Mr. Incredible finds that old grudges die hard, in the form of Syndrome (Jason Lee), an inspired, flame-topped "biggest fan" who's like Ain't-it-Cool-News' notorious homebody Harry Knowles on spiteful steroids with Jay Leno's pointy spade of a chin.

Of course, you know that the most powerful weapon's the nuclear family, but the small, happy ways their need for each other detonate is the true joy of the movie, one I'll leave to others to synopsize. There's eye candy in the corners of every frame, and what a first look can catch is all in service of story, theme, or jokes, such as Bob's employer, Insuricare, having No. 2 pencils inscribed, "Your life is in our hands."

Bird saves the loopiest side character for himself, a gleeful, sawed-off fashion designer named Edna Mode who designs superhero garb, lecturing on the fearful dangers of capes. (She even outdoes a lanky goofball character voiced by Samuel L. Jackson.) Bird gives Edna a funny funny voice. But he also needles the self-satisfied artistic temperament, while giving her fortress the contours of Capri's Villa Malaparte (as seen in Godard's Contempt), a horizontal haven of juts and zigs.

But many hands make the villa, and all concerned reflect a world of wracked but loving families and a world of design that is there for the exploitation and enjoyment of all. While Bird's film is invested in pop and pulp, it has a beauty all its own. Dragoons of clever, happy, innovating artist-workers put this thing together, and while there are no utopias, a movie like The Incredibles is an indelible marvel of cooperation, content and comedy.

Enduring craft

Obsession endures, obsession is its own encouragement, obsession is some scary, scary shit. The enduring image from Enduring Love, Ian McEwan's memorable 1997 novel about the vagaries of what's in a stalker's mind is its terrifying opening passage, wherein several strangers are brought together by an unexpected tragedy involving a hot air balloon in a bucolic Oxford countryside setting. In Roger Michell's movie of McEwan's book, from a rangy adaptation by well-regarded English playwright Joe Penhall ("Blue/Orange"), it offers an opportunity for heart-stopping filmmaking, a remarkable five minutes of cinematography by Haris Zambarloukos and editing by Nicolas Gaster that is only prelude to the subtle, graceful, even minimalist storytelling to come. "Razory" applies to more than one aspect to their craft: it's quick and it cuts.

Two of the men who meet on that terrible sunlit day are Joe (Daniel Craig) and Jed (Rhys Ifans); returning to the interior-driven warrens of contemporary London, university teacher Joe, whose sculptor girlfriend Claire (Samantha Morton) had been there as well, is increasingly shaken by Jed's attentions. He's developed an almost religious belief that he and Joe were meant to meet, that there is love, love between them to the exclusion of all others, and Joe is only teasing him with the particulars of his daily life. Craig's slow-burn performance is fastidious, yet quicksilver; Morton's is more reserved, eyes not quite comprehending how the events lead to a fearful transformation in Jed. How devoted can she remain to a man who is startled to rattle like an old car on bad country road? Ifans is the puppiest of puppy-dogs, so needy you ache for him, you ache from him.

The vivid chill of Enduring Love has stayed with me for weeks and weeks; its creepiness rests within a most human level of horror. Jeremy Sams' music scores; the production design by John Paul Kelly is as restrained and keenly observant as the rest of the movie's many striking details.

 

November 8 , 2004

- Email Ray Pride